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Comment Perspective probably dooms him. (Score 1) 74

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

Comment Re:What is the number of processes... (Score 1) 72

Most people cannot make any of the following at home:

Meat (beef, chicken, pork, etc)

Farming is not making in common parlance. And people have been farming livestock at home for thousands of years, clearly it ain't that hard. A few people round my way have a few chickens and I live in London.

Butter

Yeah you can. You can churn it by hand with a whisk and a lot of effort. If you've ever tried to make whipped cream at home with an electric whisk (this is incredibly easy and common) you should know to not over beat it otherwise it starts to separate into butter and buttermilk.

Cheese

I got a cheese making a while ago. There's not much to it, really. People have been making cheese for millennia. Not ultra processed american cheese of course...

Vegetables

You can grow tiny amounts of vegetables as a houseplant what the fuck are you even talking about.

Fruits

My comment about farming not being making in common parlance still stands. And my comment about being able to grow tiny amounts at home as a houseplant still stands.

Flour

Chuck some grains in a coffee grinder or pound them in a pestle and mortar. Job done. It won't be great, uniform flour. But it will be flour.


Spices
Tea
Coffee

Farming ain't making. You can grow some herbs spices at home easily enough. In fact I've been doing that with herbs (like English Mace) which are not widely sold. If you had fruits straight off a coffee tree you could make coffee, it would just be rather involved

Sugar

https://www.instructables.com/...

You didn't just pwn the scientists with your "common sense" that ultra processed foods don't exist because most people don't have a small holding. Farming isn't processing. Most people can do most of those things with a bit of land or labour.

Comment Re:not a shock (Score 1) 25

Yeah, that was a big goof, thanks for understanding.

Apple is capable of hiring talented people and creating a useful product. They just don't seem to be capable of being user-friendly in the ways that matter to me. TBH they were never great at it, and MUGs did the heavy lifting in the customer relations department for them for free. Anyway I'm totally capable of believing their performance claims, to a reasonable point, especially when the results aren't putting them first.

I wish they were friendlier, because their hardware is reasonably impressive. I'm also just not in their target demographic apparently because I'd rather have a slightly thicker device with better cooling and battery capacity.

Comment Re: How dense can they be? (Score 1) 45

It's not impossible, but the switch would be expensive. It's probably easier and just as effective just to shield them, and tie the shield to the chassis ground.

Another option would be to switch power to the radio chip, if it's in a package which makes that convenient. This might also disable bluetooth if you do it to the infotainment system, or cause a code to be set...

Comment Re: Mom's of the world will prevent it. (Score 1) 13

Antibacterial soap doesn't use antibiotics, it uses chemicals known to destroy antibiotics directly and physically. It's usually done with compounds they can't reasonably develop resistance to. This is easier than in antibiotics because they don't have to be safe to put in your body.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 229

Is it more likely that the Mennonite population found some measles lying around, or that the immigrant/refugee population of Alberta might have brought it from somewhere else?

It does not matter even slightly where it comes from. It's coming in all the time. What matters is what percentage are vaccinated, which determines whether a population has effective herd immunity. The immigrants aren't moving the needle on that, but the religious are.

Comment Re:Applause please (Score 3, Interesting) 229

It is not the same to say a brand-new vaccine for a never seen disease that affects the entire planet has the same safety.

So what? Is there a point here or are you just wildly offtopic? Because that brand-new vaccine DID go through some testing, albeit much abbreviated from the usual, and it was already clear that it was safer than the disease. There was also less need for testing because due to its nature it was LESS hazardous than traditional vaccines. We already knew this because we had been doing mRNA vaccine research for years.

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