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Comment Re:It's a different story... (Score 1) 118

It's very meritocratic.

I would not go *that* far. Sure an artist can flop out of the industry, and new artists have to come from *somewhere*, but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.

Also, lots of working it from other angles, the music is a relatively small part of the picture for the biggest musicians. Other media or just a celebrity for the sake of celebrity type things. Co-hosting some reality show that has nothing to do with music, for example.

Comment Re:I've noticed that too (Score 1) 59

The report included a patch, but the patch was completely wrong based on a random guess of how a certain software could behave. It 'worked' for the reporter by also swallowing all errors and silently continuing, despite the particular call failing. It was a check to see if a particular action would be needed, and so it silently assumed the step would not be needed, which happened to be true for the reporter so it looked 'fixed' to them.

Problem is that there are more than two people that are stakeholders, and and it would be nuts for me to just let the codebase get screwed up to try to prove a point for one very minor stakeholder who won't even get bitten by the mistake because their situation doesn't hit the bug inflicted by the change. If I let a random user patch a codebase, I rightfully get blamed, not them. And AI assessment of the report would likely agree with the submitter, because the AI generated a plausible rationale, and AI gives the benefit of the doubt to the material in the prompt fodder.

There actually is a project that I used to be a part of but no longer use or work on, but left my notifications active, because why bother changing and it was largely a "done" project, almost no new issues, not much in terms of code changes. Some guy decided to go all in on LLM giving free reign. Was not confident to be a developer but declared AI made it possible for him to change things. Suddenly lots of code changes, and also a sudden flurry of external issues of users who had been using it for a long time asking why random stuff was broken. Near as I could tell when I got around to disabling all the notifications, he just kept feeding issues into LLM and releasing updates and getting a new wave of issues and repeating. What was a boringly stable project became an eternally random messed up mess because he let LLM take over everything and it breaks as much as it helps. I'm not letting any of my active projects turn into that.

Comment Re:I've noticed that too (Score 2) 59

volunteering to write reports for some reason

Which explains a lot of very overly verbose "reports" that have been sent to me about "issues". The person thinks they are using AI to make their report more useful, but I still find the human input to be sufficient and the AI reports to be a pain to actually work backwards to the issue. Especially when it decides to fixate on what it thinks is the root cause and gloss over what the actual problem was... Which has at least once become super counter-productive, as the report got it flat out wrong and the reporter refused to give me the usual debug information because "Claude already looked it over and gave the answer, can't you just accept its findings and figure out how to fix it?"

Comment Re:Can't you already pay with the app? (Score 2) 79

Yes, you can use their app to pay. It sucks though.

For one, my watch can tap to pay, but not with walmart app.

For walmart, I have to open the app, wait for it to load, sometimes it randomly decides I need to "prove I'm a human", then as I'm trying to go to pay, it pops up a "you want walmart+ now!" and the "yes" button is close to where I would have tapped so I can imagine they get accidental accepts. Then finally I click and it opens the camera app to scan the qr code, which is an annoying approach in general. Even worse, their qr screen is glossy and I happen to catch a reflection of one of the glaring lights right where the code is unreadable.

Their app to purchase was just a mess of bad UI and poor store setup for a qr code based solution, very clunky compared to nfc type approaches.

Comment Re:Just another grift (Score 1) 153

Note I said incremental cost of a remote area in particular. Launching satellites doesn't even narrow down the investment to a single nation, let alone focus spending on the communities underserved. So we can look forward to subsidizing Starlink global infrastructure with money intended to improve options where they are lacking.

Comment Re:Just another grift (Score 5, Insightful) 153

This is exactly what it is, Starlink can't do gigabit, can't do low latency, but *can* reach random places easily. Musk and Trump seemingly have made up relatively recently and I am certain this favor is a consequence.

So with this Starlink gets access to funds that are generally made available to give *quality* access to especially rural places. Money to make up for the relatively high incremental cost of wiring up an area compared to the revenue. Except Starlink has effectively zero incremental cost to serve these areas, so they get to collect the same money as a provider would have had to spend to actually run real wires.

Comment Re:Crisis of Trust but not in the way he thinks (Score 1) 90

There are no barriers to how humans get "replaced" by AI. Are we here to benefit humanity or benefit tech bro stock prices?

The whole marketing campaign behind AI was targeted at CEOs to cut their labor costs. This makes them salivate like Pavlov's dogs.

Did the marketing appeal in a "work smarter, not harder" way? No. It was aimed at laying off huge swaths of workers. Not just worker bees, but the creatives in coding, systems management, development, but also other worker bees.

Not everyone needs creativity in their work, although it helps.

People now pump their own fuel in most states. You now walk up to a checkout and scan your own stuff. You order at a screen at McDonalds. Heaven forbid walking into a Starbucks and buying a coffee at the counter.

All of these are small cuts, and ultimately, fealty to the stock price on any given day. Job creation through AI isn't quite the goal. Lowered cost-of-goods is the goal, and the goal of capitalism in general. Do the profits filter down to worker bees? Unlikely.

Take Internet search as an example. AI engines seek to trap the thousand results and deliver you a neat package of "an answer" even if it's wrong. Any stupid AI engine can deliver believable results, subverting the thousand others that have the same answers-- perhaps authoritative, even trustable result.

Comment Re:Crisis of Trust but not in the way he thinks (Score 5, Insightful) 90

Yep. Trust is built.

1. Rapidly iterative and successive models, all of them looking like dot-zero problem children do not imbue trust.

2. Rapid inter-cross dealing tech companies, all fighting with each other for dominance using the dot-zero madness does not imbue trust.

3. Models that fight each other, jump barriers and hack into companies at will, does not engender trust.

4. Digesting rivers, streams, farmland, for data centers whose parts can't even be purchased, does not build trust.

5. Creating turf wars between the models of different countries does not earn trust.

6. Creating incredible parts shortages and pumping component profits does not become trustworthy for supply chain users.

7. Bozos like Sam Altman and his merry-go-round of allies makes many people very queasy.

8. Jamming Co-Pilot down the throats of users, changing ToS to fit more mad infiltration goals to the desktop does not make people want to trust Microsoft, specifically.

9. Inability to show that AI helps, rather than lays off workers does not build trust.

The man is a fool, and so are those that become hypnotized by early success, ignoring pretty frightening failures in AI and the chains of monopoly grabs that are going with it, not to mention data center densities that are clearly unsupportable, financed by pump-and-dump Wall Street fans.

Humanity? Did you say humanity? War, even tech turf wars, leave many suffering humans in their wake. That didn't used to be true; computers were enablers, not *disablers*.

Comment Re: I initially dismissed the idea of agents (Score 1) 54

I think that remains accurate, but it depends on the domain.

Search had always been free form text input, and that extends to this, open ended interaction with impossibly large dataset to browse and impossibly many things to request. Places based on text interaction are places where LLM have a good chance of having a large role.

However, this isn't the total world. For example, LLM will only be as good at taking an order as a drive through speaker. I greatly appreciate managing an order through an app or kiosk, where I can more quickly peruse options in detail, more quickly knowing what's in it, price, calories, etc. Maybe an LLM option when you know generally what you want to fill out the order then a UI to tweak details.

Tons of UIs are more than some compromise for helping a computer be a consolation prize for not bothering to have a human handle a request.

Lots of AI companies seem to be forgetting this and imagining that devices that are just microphones and speakers will take over, but they are incorrect in many cases.

Comment Re:the solution to "the mental health crisis" (Score 1) 264

I guess the question is why you would say "Would you fly on a rocket designed and built by people who could not fail?" based on the current topic that UoM is adopting MIT's long-standing strategy to first semester grading. You seem to infer that UoM adopting this will produce bad engineers that can't be trusted to design and build a rocket, but MIT has been doing it since the 1960s. Why is it so terrible for UoM to do it and it isn't a concern that MIT does?

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