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Comment Good luck (Score 1) 176

Starting your career as a barely literate dumb ass isn't going to be stacking the deck in your favor.
I managed to get pretty far in life that way, but I have spent years playing catch-up and reading like a fiend because everyone around me is better educated, more knowledgeable, and often smarter than me.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 289

The quote you provided didn't say LLM, it said neural network. Neural networks, like any model, can interpolate or extrapolate, depending on whether the inference is between training samples or not.

LLMs are neural networks. You seem to be referring to a particular method of producing output where they predict the next token based on their conditioning and their previously generated text. It's true in the simplest sense that they're extrapolating, and reasonable for pure LLMs, but probably not really true for the larger models that use LLMs as their inputs and outputs. The models have complex states that have been shown to represent concepts larger than just the next token.

Comment Used car salesman (Score 1) 35

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

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 2) 19

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.

Comment Re:So... (Score 2) 34

Whatever happened to IPv6 ?

I didn't do anything crazy like actually read the article, but I did go as far as to read the third sentence of the summary, which began like this:

[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex [...]

.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.

Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 1) 176

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 2) 74

Stop chasing these false "scarcities" that continue to crop up from time to time. Build your systems with used or NOS parts that are 3 or more generations back.

That's good advice for individuals building a home system for personal use. It's not really applicable for businesses and companies, though, since they likely don't have the expertise or the man-hours required to cobble together their business-critical systems from used parts. They're going to want to buy new, from a company that give them good support if/when anything goes wrong.

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