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Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 1) 123

What AI can't do is to take a whole feature off the backlog and implement it. Yet.

It can in some cases, depending on various factors like the codebase it's working with, the nature of the feature and how well you describe it.

You will often need to refine the prompts, or prompt it further to address bugs or things it decided to implement in a strange way. It also tends to work better with code bases that are smaller or more modular, and with code that was developed using an ai assistant rather than existing code bases.

You're right about it being like junior developers, it's good for getting mundane things done but does often need a lot of guidance.

Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 1) 123

A current generation LLM is not perfect and cannot replace a skilled employee, at best it can assist a skilled employee to do their work more efficiently.
If you understand this and have appropriate use cases, then it can absolutely be useful.

If you're trying to use it for something it's not suited for then it's going to be useless or even detrimental.

Comment They have a monopoly (Score 3, Funny) 8

So the backlash is basically irrelevant. Even if valve can get some Linux hardware into people's hands the majority of operating system purchases for computer desktop and laptop hardware or for corporations and business and Linux does not have anything approaching active directory.

So they can ignore any complaints. Because realistically the average user can't do anything about it..

Meanwhile AI has the potential to replace hundreds of billions if not trillions of worth of wage labor. Remember AI is not a product for you. It's not even a product for your boss or your boss's boss. It's a product for the 8,000 billionaires on this planet who are sick and tired of the answer to the question "who's going to buy their products"?

Nobody. Nobody's going to buy their products because they're not going to have products. The goal is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism.

Comment Re:How did they lose a slam dunk? (Score 1) 13

I'll go one further, Disney trying to cram ESPN into every streaming and cable package is just wrong. I have noticed that any package that includes ESPN is almost automatically 4 times more expensive than any package without it. ESPN is way over-priced.

That's not just an "I don't like sportsball" rant. I do like baseball. I *DO NOT* like ESPN's coverage of baseball. I have seen games where the announcers don't seem to know anything about baseball. I have seen "coverage" where 3 announcers talk about basketball while a baseball game plays in the background. I hate when ESPN grabs a game played by a team I follow. I hate when ESPN grabs a game on a get away day and forces it to be moved from afternoon to prime time. Simply put, ESPN's coverage isn't worth a premium price.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that many sports fans would be happy if ESPN stopped grabbing games played by teams they follow so they could just watch the game on whatever more specialized package they got to follow their team. But then I guess ESPN would be relegated to covering the national tiddlywinks championship.

Comment A Colleges Job. (Score 1) 137

1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them. 2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.

It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.

As we assume to tell a college their job now, lets remember one thing. Those aren’t students anymore. They’re high-paying customers.

A colleges job as a capitalist for-profit institution in America, is to make money. They could honestly give a flying fuck if every graduate took eight years to complete a four year degree. As long as the checks are clearing, they ARE doing their job. If middle-school remedial math courses are what’s needed to lower the bar of high profitability, so be it.

At some point society chose to Leave No Child Behind. We should have been smart enough to grasp that included the really stupid ones too. Now the bar gets lowered at every level in a failing society. See Seattles new mayor for proof.

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 137

The one thing education can do for the talented people is quit bogging them down for 12 years in whatever the latest educational flavor of the day is. They don't need the kooky way math is approached now, they need the basics. Teach them addition, subtraction,multiplication, and division the way it was taught in the '70s, then point out a couple mental tricks. They'll then develop their own set of tricks that work for them doing math in their head.

The less talented will at least come out of it knowing how to add a column of numbers and figure out how much 5 apples will cost given the cost of one, which is more than they come out with now.

They claim they want parents to work with their children on homework, but then make it impossible by expecting the kids to do arithmatic in such an odd way that parents who are scientists or engineers can't make heads or tails of it. I see the confusion on reddit from time to time. Kid is asked to use repeated addition to solve 5x3. Kid writes 5+5+5=15. Teacher marks it wrong. No explanation. Turns out she wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15.

So now Dad, an engineer, can't help with 2nd grade math and kid learns he is "bad at math" even though he got the right answer on every question.

Comment It doesn't really work (Score 1) 123

Not unless you give it absurd amounts of computer power that is incredibly expensive.

AI is worth the money when you're replacing workers with it. But unless it can cut your headcount the cost of the competing resources exceeds regular computer software.

Right now I see it being used a lot to do reports nobody reads. The kind that used to be done by hand or if somebody's clever with a script. But if you have that kind of job you have it because you are somebody's head count.

I've said this before but conservatives are about to get a taste of all the efficiencies they keep clamoring for and they are not going to like it. The real thing AI is doing is letting every CEO know that there might be stuff in their organization they can automate.

And they're firing a lot of essential staff too. Really doesn't matter how important you are. It took me months to sort out a prescription because the company that makes it fired all their staff and replaced them with nothing.

Submission + - U.S. employee well-being hit new low in 2024, survey reveals (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: The latest research confirms a decline in general employee well-being since 2020. In 2024, employees reported the lowest well-being scores on record, as opposed to 2020, when employees reported the highest well-being scores.

"In some cases, the lower scores represent a reduction in employee flexibility for either flexible hours or remote work," the latest research states. "In other cases, these scores could be related to challenges associated with greater economic shifts related to inflation or productivity needs."

"What we're seeing is a growing gap between how leaders and their teams experience the workplace," said Smith. "Managers may feel a return to normalcy, but that doesn't mean their employees do. Leaders must be cautious not to assume their own well-being reflects the broader workforce at their organization. The data shows a potential disconnect, and that's a signal for action."

Comment Nature versus nurture (Score 1) 137

We have hard evidence for the improvements to grades you get when you have free school lunch and breakfast. But we can't do that because the Christians won't let us. Specifically the evangelicals.

We could give parents actual support in raising their kids but every time anyone suggests that it gets shut down. Always by the think of the children crowd too.

Doesn't matter if you have the potential to be a useful genius if your parents are both working three jobs leaving you with a television set and no books and your classroom has 45 students in it 10 of which in the back have to stand because there aren't enough chairs and you had sleep for dinner last night and nothing for breakfast.

For about 30% of the country cruelty is the point and for the other 70% we're too busy fighting back against the damage done by that 30%.

Comment Oh for fucks sake (Score -1, Troll) 137

This is some absolute drivel of an article.

The problem isn't that we aren't penalizing children enough. Anyone making that claim is just using cruelty for cruelty sake.

When my kid was in high school they had 45 kids in their class and 10 of them had to stand in the back.

We know exactly why kids are struggling. We are actively sabotaging public education in the hopes of privatizing it for profit and so they handful of religious extremists can indoctrinate children in private schools and a handful of racists are hoping they can sneak segregation back in using private schools.

On top of that we still have some leftovers from covid and the chaos caused from that time.

Oh and of course we don't feed hungry children because... I don't give a fuck what you're at reason is if you don't feed hungry children you're a fucking son of a bitch and you're going to hell. Repent already.

Everybody's about America first until it's time to actually put up some money and stop sucking billionaire cock. Honestly it's pretty fucking obvious that America first is just a code word for I don't want to look at brown people when I go to McDonald's. Because I have never once seen a person talk about America first and support free school lunches or probably funding public education or giving healthcare to disadvantaged children.

If anything they seem to get off on the suffering. Like that bitch Teresa used to.

Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 2) 123

Because you had a specific goal in mind, knew what you were doing, knew about the different heatmap implementations available and gave precise instructions. You could probably have written this by hand yourself and it just would have taken a bit longer to do.

Problems come up when you have people who don't know what they're doing giving vague instructions to the LLM, and then blindly trusting the output. For instance if you said "draw a heatmap of $DATA" who knows what it would have come back with? it may well have tried to use the deprecated google api because there are likely a lot of examples online and in the LLM's training data.

LLMs are great when they're used to augment people who are already skilled in the art, and can generally help them save time doing a lot of the repetitive stuff. They're not some magic wand allowing someone with zero experience to achieve great results.

Submission + - Moss spores survive 9 months outside International Space Station (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: To find out, Fujita's team subjected Physcomitrium patens, a well-studied moss commonly known as spreading earthmoss, to a simulated a space environment, including high levels of UV radiation, extreme high and low temperatures, and vacuum conditions.

They tested three different structures from the moss—protenemata, or juvenile moss; brood cells, or specialized stem cells that emerge under stress conditions; and sporophytes, or encapsulated spores—to find out which had the best chance of surviving in space.

The researchers found that UV radiation was the toughest element to survive, and the sporophytes were by far the most resilient of the three moss parts. None of the juvenile moss survived high UV levels or extreme temperatures. The brood cells had a higher rate of survival, but the encased spores exhibited ~1,000x more tolerance to UV radiation. The spores were also able to survive and germinate after being exposed to 196C for over a week, as well as after living in 55C heat for a month.

Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 1) 123

People are often wrong too...
The problem is that we are used to machines being used to do things that machines are good at - eg for predefined math calculations a computer is expected to reliably and quickly get the correct answer every time.

The problems being targeted by LLMs are not so well defined, so errors can be made wether its done by a human or an LLM. But people are used to the traditional problems solved by computers and expect everything to be the same.

Instead of assuming an LLM is a reliable machine that follows a rigid process and produces reliable output every time, treat it like a human employee and subject its results to the same processes - ie review, quality control etc. Of course then you won't get the massive cost savings that you imagined by replacing employees with machines.

Good use of LLM will typically augment existing skilled employees, not replace them.

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