Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 2) 71
Build what, exactly??
What they promised??
Cure cancer. Solve world hunger. Fix climate change. Etc.
They can't even be profitable, whereas my niece can make money from selling lemonade on a hot Saturday.
AI execs are a waste of space.
Comment Coding interviews are a waste. (Score 1) 113
Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.
I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.
The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.
Comment Re:Does anyone like touch screens on a notebook? (Score 1) 71
Does anyone actually have a use case for a touch screen, that can't be better served with a device that prevents it?
Yes, but not for you and me. Graphics designers have been using stylus-displays for years and years, because it's great to draw on the thing you are making instead of drawing on a different surface like a Wacom.
But I'm like you, I don't have a use case for a touchscreen and if you touch my notebook screen I'll be angry because I prefer it without fingerprints, thanks. So my first question is: Do they offer this thing with OLED but without touch? I guess not. Pity.
Comment reason to buy (Score 1) 171
I've been slowly moving towards my dream setup: Solar panels, battery, EV car, island mode capability. This is one thing that'd be a factor in my buying decision. Using your car as a battery or secondary battery is a big plus, and if they built the necessary equipment to run independent of the power grid, it'd come in a neat package.
While power failures are rare where I live, I expect them to become more common with the move to renewable energies. I support that, but it's more fragile than constantly running power stations. So being able to run your home at least for a few hours on your own energy is something that I consider a good idea.
Comment Re:features a light-up Apple logo (Score 1) 71
No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.
No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.
Comment Dwarf planet no more (Score 1) 69
It's planet of short stature now
Comment Warning! (Score 5, Funny) 69
Objects in Mirror Appear Smaller Than They Are (*)
(*) Astronomical telescope joke.
Comment Re:oh dear... (Score 1) 29
You missed the point.
A friend of mine made a tea-timer app for the iPhone. Where you enter what tea you are making and it sets the correct number of minutes. Today, people would ask ChatGPT before they go on the App Store to search for something like that. That's the point. Not what YOU would do, but what the general public does. And for Jane Doe, ChatGPT has replaced a lot of these specialty apps.
Comment Re:oh dear... (Score 1) 29
Skills are great until they aren't. The problem is exactly what you say: You can literally create a skill by telling the LLM to create a skill. Which is... why the f do I need to make a skill if the AI already knows how to do it?
Properly created skills, that include reference material, specific instructions, and expert knowledge the LLM doesn't have or that's buried somewhere under 10 layers of reddit posts is genuinely useful. But most skills aren't. I'm constantly underwhelmed by hyped-up skills that, when I look at them, turn out to be bland, basic instructions.
Comment Re:Resistance is futile (or needless). (Score 1) 146
The market will kill it naturally
Yes there's a mechanism for that. It's called destroying a part of your life. Maybe you lose your job "naturally". Maybe you lose 10-20 years of your wealth growth "naturally". Maybe crime goes up in your neighborhood "naturally".
No. There's nothing "natural" about market repricing mechanisms, they are destructive, and many people get hurt. In the case of the AI bubble, those getting hurt are not the billionaires early investors, unless we actively resist it.
You're either with us or against us, like one of your compatriots used to say.
Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 146
Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!
Comment Not Exactly An Improvement (Score 1) 19
eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [
... ]
...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.
Comment Re:testing the docs (Score 1) 29
But again that's backwards. I let my AI coding assistant write tests exactly so that I have a reproducible, deterministic ground truth that I can inspect for logic errors. If you let the AI do the testing directly, it's a toss-up if today it feels like it or it decides that your desired result is "everything green" so it'll just give you that answer without actually testing anything.
Comment Re:oh dear... (Score 1) 29
LLMs obviously aren't human. But that's not the point. The point is that you don't need to know a programming language to program a computer.
For example: Especially in the early days of smartphones, there were mountains of small tools that did something that's essentially a simple script. Egg timers, remind-me-tomorrow apps, tons of stuff that's basically a wrapper around a web search, and so on. Almost all of those are today something ChatGPT can do, and are easy enough to describe.