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Comment Weird subjective niche (Score 3, Insightful) 75

I've been online for a while and have not noticed Philadelphia being singled out in any way. Everything in the article's "notorious cultural touchstones" is unknown to me. Not that I'm celebrating my ignorance, but I just haven't seen anyone discussing those particular topics.

on the internet, Philly culture is inescapable

From my point of view, on the internet Philly culture is just one of thousands, not particularly emphasized.

I suspect the author has some connection to that city which has caused him to read about it more than average.

Comment Your favorite character (Score 1) 52

angry they can't make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore

Sorry, whose favorite characters? Did you mean yours or did you mean Disney's?

Not that I have a problem with you actually making a video of Disney's characters. I haven't seen any evidence that these AIs have any idea how copyright law and Fair Use work, so obviously it doesn't make any sense to restrict what they're allowed to do. The user is perfectly qualified .. well, ok .. the most qualified of the two, to make such decisions.

If Disney wants tools to try to figure out Fair Use vs not-Fair Use, then they should throw money at AI lawyers, which currently have an absolutely terrible reputations, since they're so incredibly unreliable and borderline-fraudulent.

And if Disney doesn't think they can make a near-perfect AI lawyer (at least one good enough to not enrage judges with fake citations) then they have no reasonable expectation that anyone else can/should do it, either, so keep your human lawyers away from our computers.

Comment Re:Professional liar says what? (Score 1) 68

Hey Mr, Altman, nice to see you posting on Slashdot. I find it really strange, however, that you can't seem to type capital letters. I mean, you are clearly too well-educated to misunderstand their use. And certainly wealthy enough to afford a working keyboard or phone. Is it some idiosyncrasy on your part? Like, someone who is customarily as busy as you just doesn't have the time to waste on things like holding shift or tapping capslock as you type along?

In any event, I am working on some LLM-powered tools as hobby projects and am exclusively using Google since they offer me perpetual free access to their key LLMs through their API. The use restrictions are more than ample for development projects. So, if you want to win over developers like me, you might consider a competing offering.

Thanks for reading!

Comment Re:Sure, work sucks (Score 2) 177

Really no, jobs are not "there to make you miserable." That isn't the goal. Jobs exist because someone wants or needs that work done, and is willing to pay for it.

Employers don't spend gobs of money on the entertaining practice of making others miserable. They are far too stingy for that. They spend the money because they expect that they will make even more money off the work you do.

The "misery" aspect is just a side-effect of the fact that humans experience disutility of labor, and employers will only spend the bare minimum they have to in order to convince people to do the work.

It's totally reasonable to want your job to be non-toxic. It's totally reasonable to lobby and pass laws and join unions and negotiate for better working conditions to make you job as enjoyable as possible. AND it is totally reasonable to complain about jobs that are more miserable than they actually need to be. Because jobs aren't "supposed to make you miserable" so much as "supposed to benefit the one who pays you."

Comment Re:Is the workplace itself toxic? (Score 4, Interesting) 177

Employers are being more demanding now. The string of layoffs ever since the Fed raised the interest rate to fight inflation (with layoffs being an explicitly stated desired effect as part of the anti-inflation process), combined with the current disinclination to hire new talent, has employees under pressure. They don't want to risk losing their jobs because it will be hard and take a long time to find a replacement.

So, naturally, employers are feeling their power returning to them and using it to exploit, over-demand, abuse, and generally take advantage of their employees.

This is the totally-predictable outcome of human nature. It's in our DNA to abuse power once we get it.

Comment Re:You get what you pay for. (Score 1) 25

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

Comment Re:Being a screen nazi was my best decision (Score 1) 46

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

Comment Re:money (Score 1) 46

Some time ago I read an article right here on slashdot about how it was very common for people to ask ChatGPT for shopping recommendations. I think that pretty much makes this inevitable. The opportunity here is practically jumping around screaming to be exploited.

Personally, I think any talk of nobly resisting this temptation is wasted air. Ads are going to happen, at a minimum on the free tier. It's just how the world works. But, I WOULD like to push for: only show the ads when users request product recommendations. Work that into the answer pipeline, instead of making an annoying extra presence on the screen constantly forcing you to fight to keep your concentration on the thing you care about. If it is subtle enough, people will continue trusting ChatGPT and asking it for product recommendations, even if the answers come through a targeted marketing pipeline instead of the "heart" of the LLM.

Comment Market demand makes them do it (Score 4, Funny) 61

What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year?

Because that's what their customers are demanding! Don't you hate when you're doing something, and you realize you've done it more than 3 times? Just yesterday I adjusted the mirror on my wife's SUV and thought "we keep undoing each other's mirror adjustments. Can't it just stop moving so that one of us permanently loses and one permanently wins? Why is this car letting us change it back'n'forth?"

Microsoft fights for the users!

Comment "sustain the development" (Score 1) 88

Yeah, nobody is buying this "sustain the development" nonsense.

Somebody needs to keep the servers patched. Somebody needs to keep the app targeting an API that the app stores will host. Bose can afford maybe 1.5 FTE's with redundancy on a rolling basis.

Did they ignore due diligence for a decade and just get nabbed running RHEL 5 and unlicensed Oracle Java on an old VMWare or something?

If Bose is a public corporation perhaps the FTC should have a look at their deliberations.

Comment Translation (Score 4, Insightful) 76

We are one of the wealthiest and most powerful international businesses in the world. But it's just not enough. The pittance that we pay you so we can stand upon your backs is more than we can bear. So, we will absolutely NOT hire any more of you. Instead, we demand that you do more for us, in return for nothing more from us.

A lot more, in fact.

Understand that YOU are the selfish ones here. You want to spend a whopping THIRD of your life doing things like exercising, raising families, or seeking entertainment. You hedonists! You should spend every single waking moment working for us! We pay you enough to hire servants of your own to do things like make meals and keep your house, so you shouldn't need to spend a single moment doing anything other than work. And if paying these servants means you can't afford to retire, that's great! Why should you ever retire? As soon as you reach an age where you can't earn your keep anymore, you should just politely die and make room for other people who can still work.

Now, get to it!

Comment No way. (Score 4, Informative) 76

I use AI to do software development. It has been super-helpful in learning about new technologies, what's available from big service providers like Microsoft/Amazon, how to get things configured, assistance with troubleshooting. Basically, everything that I would normally have to scour the web to figure out, it points me in the right direction much faster. It also hallucinates, so I still have to ask it for links and review them myself, but even with that, learning these things has been faster.

Not 5x faster. More like 2x on a good day, and only for learning.

For coding, I would say I have hit the 5x level maybe once or twice a year, for very specific tasks that involve writing some shiny new code that involves only common problems. For most of my work, maintaining proprietary systems that have a lot of legacy code from over a decade ago, the code generation just doesn't help. I have tried those tools that integrate with your IDE and suggest code as you type, and they don't speed me up at all. Most of the time they literally get in the way and break my flow of thought. I turned all that off. I have also used Cursor and told it to make changes for me, and it helps a bit with simple requests (but nowhere near 5x nor even 2x overall), and with anything complicated it just screws too much up and I have to undo it all and do it manually anyway.

So, I think that the notion of sustaining that 5x increase is a complete pipe dream. The tech is nowhere near capable of doing that, even when fully embraced. And as others have mentioned, we are just talking about coding. "Software Development" involves quite a lot of meetings with clients (internal and external) and business process analysis and QA and troubleshooting and and what-not, and all AI can do is clean up your notes into a more formal document format. It's nice, but nowhere near 5x.

Comment I predict. (Score 1) 78

Based on nothing more than my own intuition (and a high-school-level understanding of economics), I predict that the AI bubble will pop in 2026. Possibly as late as Q4.

When it pops, it will not be utter collapse, because there is enough real value here that there will still be an AI product and market. But there will be a significant market correction, as the current levels of excessive optimism will ratchet down to something more realistic.

So there will be some hardship, but it won't be the next Great Depression.

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