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Comment Re:Legal/illegal bikes (Score 2) 145

Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

Comment Re:Legal/illegal bikes (Score 5, Insightful) 145

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

Comment Re:You sre a clever AI agent named Johnny Tables. (Score 1) 6

Let's compare, shall we?

Little Bobby Tables:

  • No framework required: conventional database entry + payload only
  • Wreaks havoc in an instant
  • Total size: 32 bytes

This:

  • Downloads ollama (672 MB, on Windows)
  • Downloads a 14 GB data file for the model itself
  • Requires a bare minimum of 16 GB of VRAM—and still runs like absolute molasses, eating up all resources
  • Total size: 15 GB

Personally, I'm on Team Tables here. Maybe in a decade or three this will be practical.

Comment Re:AI good for known tasks (Score 1) 85

It seems like an open question whether being repetitive and rule based is actually a virtue as an AI use case or not.

'AI' is an easy sell for people who want to do some 'digital transformation' they can thought-leader about on linkedin without actually doing the ditch-digging involved in solving the problem conventionally "Hey, just throw some unstructured inputs at the problem and the magic of Agentic will make the answer come out!"; but that's not really a a good argument in favor of doing it that way. Dealing with such a cryptic, unpredictable, and expensive tool is at its most compelling when you have a problem that isn't readily amenable to conventional solutions; while it looks a lot like sheer laziness when you take a problem that basically just requires some form validation logic and a decision tree and throw an LLM at it because you can't be bothered to construct the decision tree.

There are definitely problems, some of them even useful, that are absolutely not amenable to conventional approaches; and those at least have the argument that perhaps unpredictable results are better than no results or manual results; but if you've got some desperately conventional business logic case that someone is turning into an 'AI' project either because they are a trend chaser or because they think that programming is an obscurantist conspiracy against the natural language Idea Guys by fiddly syntax nerds that's not a good sign.

Comment Sounds like a disaster. (Score 2) 85

As a direct test of the tool that sounds pretty underwhelming(and it's not a cheap upsell); but what seems really concerning is the second order effects. Your average office environment doesn't exactly lack for emails or bad powerpoint decks; and both get chiseled right out of the productivity of the people expected to read or sit through them. The more cynical sales types just go directly to selling you the inhuman centipede solution; where everyone else also needs a copilot license so they can summarize the increased volume of copilot-authored material; but that only bandaids the "if it's not worth writing why are you trying to write more of it?" problem.

Comment Re:Investing in what? (Score 4, Insightful) 134

It's also not clear why we'd need investors if AI good enough to eat all the jobs exists. Even without 'AI' a fairly massive amount of investment is handled by the relatively simple 'just dump it in an index fund and don't touch it, idiot' algorithm; and even allegedly sophisticated professionals have a fairly tepid track record when it comes to actually realizing market-beating returns.

Comment Incredibly stupid. (Score 4, Insightful) 134

Obviously it's this guy's job to promote retail investing as a cure-all; because that's what he sells; but this seems transparently stupid.

If 'AI' has eaten all the jobs; why exactly would we have humans 'investing' for a living? Surely AI good enough to eat all the jobs could also match or exceed the performance of the average trader?

This proposal basically seems like UBI, but capitalism-washed with a pointless (and likely dangerous; given that retail noise trading is basically gambling for people who think they are too smart for gambling) financial services layer tacked on to avoid admitting that it's UBI by pretending that everyone is an investor instead.

Comment Re:Locked in (Score 5, Insightful) 80

A pretty significant proportion of the world's IT infrastructure runs on single source products; from Microsoft to Broadcom to Oracle. Believe me, I'm trying to move our office over to open source where I can, but it's no mean feat.

The real lesson, unless the courts start holding licensors accountable, is that a perpetual license may actually be meaningless, no matter what you paid for it.

Comment Re:Have yourself the economy you voted for (Score 2) 201

Too bad. Your shitty political system, with its impotent checks and balances and imperial powers handed over the to the President, made this possible. Your all frogs boiling in the Framers' failed experiment.

I have zero sympathy at this point. Supposedly the Framers put in a really top tier solution to tyranny, but instead it's mainly being used to take out schoolchildren. Everything about your country has become repulsive and self-destructive. I just hope my country can hang on.

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