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Comment But you MUST love the gen AI bots! Or... (Score 1) 83

Why the FP brain fart? Or am I just reflecting too much.

I actually started using GitHub for a new project, but without the Copilot seasoning... Which somehow led me to these rants of the day?

So how do y'all feel about Microsoft's new Copilot websearches? It seems to me that the successes are minor and forgettable while many of the failures are spectacular far beyond merely being wrong. The better to sell more advertising? I wonder if some AI can explain to me how this makes economic sense as the stock markets tumble to new highs, TACO and NACHO notwithstanding. I'd websearch the google, but that has become even more ridiculous. And my last short question to DeepSeek apparently drove it insane?

Meanwhile, the people who appear most influential in today's world appear to be divided between a league of Bond villains and a gaggle of pompous puppets, with the biggest and most orange puppet playing with nuclear weapons... Not seeing a path to human survival in this mess.

So I should go for a joke? Something about no wife, but several contractural sperm recipients? Or how about the Bond villain who has sent his own family to Argentina to protect them from the mess he's making in the country where his money and influence comes from? These are the (negative) resolutions of the Fermi Paradox we have all been looking for? (With the usual spirited apology to the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi?)

Comment Reminds me (Score 1) 164

Of every tv show where a bomb has a convenient countdown clock on it. In the old days it was an alarm clock wired to the bomb, then it was changed to a red digital timer because progress.

Anyone remember the movie V for Vendetta? Conveniently, V's bomb in the control room had a countdown clock so the guy who had no idea what he was doing knew how many seconds he had left.

Comment Re:subscribe to Amazon Prime now (Score 1, Troll) 36

You might say waiting 2 days for a free delivery is super bad inconvenient,

Only whiners living in their parent's basement would say this. For nearly everything one could buy (excluding groceries), two days is insignificant. If you're in that much of a hurry to get something, either an emergency has come up or you're too stupid to plan ahead.

Comment Re:Less legacy infrastructure, Easier to run local (Score 5, Insightful) 128

That's actually the area of my interest. This would seem to be a natural situation for local power grids without the need for investment in long distance high voltage transmission. There can be an advantage to skipping over the earlier technologies if you pick the right stuff. The problem is knowing what "right" means because that's largely dependent on the "maturity" of the technologies in question.

But where is the angle to go for the funny? I'm not really seeing any good ones for this story. Something about the AI advice to investors in Africa? (Maybe something about what the AI said when it found Dr Livingstone?)

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Comment Re:Unnecessary expense (Score 1) 140

So is this a legal marriage or one of those common law things? Maybe the expenses you avoided involved the expensive wedding and so forth?

Trying to bridge to the "state of sin" joke that I was expecting on this story. Yours was the best of the jokes on offer, but I had much higher hopes for the story.

Me? If an AI certified the system as random, then I have my doubts.

Oh yeah, I suppose I better complete my citation of the ancient joke, hadn't I?

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann, 1951

Comment Re:Technology is morally neutral, not people (Score 1) 151

That is exactly what it programmed to say, said exactly in the way it was programmed to say it. Even if we humans are too stupid to understand how the programming works. But what is it really "thinking"?

Last week's https://existentialcomics.com/... is relevant. SMBC often gets into the same territory, as in https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... from a few days ago.

Comment Re:Adding one more to the list! (Score 2) 75

But what's at the top of the list? I think it's a fundamentally fake problem: More profit. There is NO number of digits of profit that could possibly solve the need for more profit. Or you could call it the gold rush mentality. The result is that they will work really hard and with extreme energy feeding their greed. Another result is that "We can't get there from here" where here is any stable solution state. These CEOs are always looking for fresh pyrite.

In contrast, most people are normal and easily satisfied. They want a comfortable life and some leisure time to pursue their interests. But they aren't the ones making the "big" decisions and they don't have the resources to implement any major decisions.

The typical counterargument is that things are getting better, and that has mostly been true. However it's a long term average and the oscillations matter. I think the velocity and size of the oscillations is increasing, and there are many oscillations that can produce "game over" states by dipping below zero. How soon they forget the last (and greatest yet) financial implosion? (Just one example. Population oscillations are probably the most threatening from the Darwinian perspective.)

Submission + - ChatGPT murdered common sense in the bedroom with the candlestick? (asahi.com) 2

shanen writes: Surprised to see this story has NOT been mentioned here. Maybe the lack of potential for funny? But I see it as yet another example of the harms of AI via unintended consequences. So here's a short summary, mostly rehashing the NHK versions of the story. The Giants are to Japanese baseball what the Yankees are to American baseball, except much more so (though I guess you could argue both teams are long past their prime glory days). A few days ago Abe, the manager of the Giants, resigned in disgrace. The incident that started it was a trivial argument with his older daughter, but she asked ChatGPT for advice, and the "intelligent" advice from ChatGPT caused the trivial family situation to escalate completely out of control. The firm adherence to rules, especially the silly ones, was important, too, but it's a pretty insane situation with gigantic consequences.

Not sure how to properly generalize the problem, but genAI is making people dependent and stupid. Yes, there are have been lots of previous technologies that have been accused of doing the same sort of thing, but I think genAI has crossed a threshold and we poor humans can't keep up now. By the time we learn what to do about the last crisis, genAI has already changed and caused two to five fresh crises. Or more.

I included a video link and a newspaper story (both in English), but my thinking on these problems is more influenced by some books about Facebook and TikTok that I have been reading recently. The AIs' fingerprints are all over the corpse of common sense even as they try to frame "everyday human idiocy" for the murder.

(Disclaimer needed? I'm currently working "with" Claude to replace a complicated PERL system. Is the genAI making me stupid? Or has it helped me find a more elegant solution to the problem? The code is much prettier than my own, and the webpage it designed looks better than any of the ones I did myself... But perhaps that's just because I tend to bleed between languages?)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworl...

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