That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That's what I just said.

I believe this is what they call "dummy bidding".

They don't care which way the issue goes, they just want there to be a way for money in on both sides, so that no side gets its way too cheaply.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Ah, for the days before we discovered that Adams always intended for Pointy Haired Boss to be the hero of the cartoon.

Yeah but radio ads are generic and not 2 way conversations. They are not an asking what you are saying and twisting it towards explaining why you need product X.

It will be as reliable as asking a used car salesman for advice. Somehow it's gonna be advice about how a car would for me

It seems reasonable; but also like something that should really spook the customers.

It seems to be generally accepted that junior devs start out as more of an investment than a genuine aid to productivity; so you try to pick the ones that seem sharp and with it, put some time into them, and treat them OK enough that they at least stick around long enough to become valuable and do some work for you.

If that dynamic is now being played out with someone else's bots, you are now making that investment in something that is less likely to leave, whatever as-a-service you are paying for will continue to take your money; but which is much more likely to have a price regularly and aggressively adjusted based on its perceived capabilities; and have whatever it learned from you immediately cloned out to every other customer.

Sort of a hybrid of the 'cloud' we-abstract-the-details arrangement and the 'body shop' we-provision-fungible-labor-units arrangement.

Some customers presumably won't care much; sort of the way people who use Wix because it's more professional than only having your business on Facebook don't exactly consider web design or site reliability to be relevant competencies; their choice is mostly going to be between pure off the shelf software and maybe-the-vibe-coded-stuff-is-good-enough; but if your operation depends in any way on your comparative ability to build software Amazon is basically telling you that any of the commercial offerings are actively process-mining you out of that advantage as fast as the wobbly state of the tech allows.

If the litigation is anything to go by; their "Suicide Solution" nostalgia callback colab with Sony Music Entertainment should be a hit!

From what little we get to see of their books; I full expect them to continue as an aggressively nonprofit org; for a while.

I further expect them to do so in a spirit of arrogant, rapacious, desperation that will just keep getting more intense until that while is up.

If you are interested learning about actual science you can read the actual paper. It is not paywalled. Look up "speleothem isotopes" to learn about specific climatologic techniques for this study.

We do have records. We just can't read them. The Harappan language has never been deciphered. There are about 5000 inscriptions known.

That droughts led to the end of Indus Valley Civilization has been surmised for decades, this study provided a much more detailed account of the process.

For people to settle in "untouched tracts of land" you need to have water to irrigate it. Large empty areas on Earth require water for them to be "tamed".

So the 'hyperloop' people have a cool website; while the 'train' people are just plain getting on with building stuff; whether conventional or the now-quarter-century-ish old maglev option.

Looks like someone signed up for another round of 'faff with apps vs. offshoring our entire high tech supply chain' and hoped it would work better this time.

And some dumbass 'managing director' is telling us that a gigantic safety-critical vacuum system is 'not effected by strikes'; more or less because he has no idea what the maintenance and operations would involve? Truly a joke telling itself.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.