Precisely. LLM systems are, ultimately, auto complete on steroids. That they can present a reasonable simulacrum of intelligence, does not change the fact that there is nothing else intelligence involved. No reasoning, no knowledge. Just probability based word assemblies.

that is why we are not sufficiently impressed for this douche. We see the limitations, and the harms that come from ignoring the limitations, and end up underwhelmed. They are promising something they are not actually delivering.

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.

This.

My take on vibe coding is simple: Don't.

At least not the way most people understand it. I'm totally ok with having an AI do the tedious work. But only do it on stuff you could do yourself (i.e. you're just saving time). Because otherwise, you'll never be able to maintain it.

This, in general, is the whole problem: The entire "vibe coding" movement only worries about CREATING code. But in the real world, maintaining, updating, refactoring, reviewing, testing, bugfixing, etc. etc. are typically more effort than writing it in the first place.

If they plan to actually generate movies in Saudi Arabia, their morality police are going to restrict them heavily. I doubt most of the rest of the world would be interested for long.

If their plan is only to make the software, will those contracts ban anything forbidden by the Saudi morality police? Will the software have hidden restraints? It would be easy to detect forbidden scenes. It might not be so easy to detect more subtle restraints, such as ideological bias.

I'm convinced of it. You'll supply a script, cast, and style and it will generate the movie. At some point, you will also be able to interact with the movie, talking to the characters ("your other left"), talking to the generator ("skip this scene").

Famous actors will sell their personas, famous writers will sell scripts, famous directors and producers will sell styles, but I think most people will pay less for B-list and C-list and Z-list content that they can tweak to get something different every time.

You will also be able to add your overlays to scripts ("more cowbells"), personas ("more witty") and styles ("fewer explosions"), and you will be able to add random variations.

It's going to be fantastic. Hollywood democratization will be like a breath of fresh air.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

Been a while since I've flown a budget airline. On the normal flights I've taken, there's always a few people (usually older people) with paper boarding passes.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

Copper is actually about to become MORE expensive than fiber for a second time - pay attention to the metals market. Copper had a bad dip but it's recovering and will soon once again climb back up into double digits per pound price, at which point fiber is the penny pinching alternative.

Yeah, no doubt. But for all the good they do me, right?

I've been using a TCL NXTPAPER for reading for a couple of years, and haven't used my kindles since. The screen has no glare at all, none. It's night right now, can't tell you about reading in bright sunlight. I haven't found a phone yet which is any fun in bright sun, so this NXTPAPER is probably not great either. But none of my house lights drown it out.

I have one, #11 I believe, which I use instead of Kindles. Zero glare, zero lag while paging. Works OK for general use too, but it beats the pants off Kindles and all other tablets I've tried for readability. Had it for a couple of years now.

I use Bing, and I get Microsoft Rewards points for that. Each month, the points I earn are automatically donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. Just sayin'.