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Comment Re:Looks at Windows 8 (Score 5, Interesting) 47

ChromeOS was already "barely enough Linux to run a web browser" with just the most crappy minimalist window management and a concession to let you run Linux applications in a container.

So compared to the typical android experience, you have a lack of Window management (but Android does have a desktop mode with ChromeOS level window management, which isn't much) and container execution (which Google has added to Android in the AVF thing they have been spouting.

This actually makes a ton of sense the only thing that didn't make sense was how long they tried to keep ChromeOS and Android separate.

Comment Re:Performance issues = bad showcase (Score 1) 25

I've seen it a lot in games that aspire to look 2D-ish. They seem to think it looks quaint and human.

You see it in pre-rendered 3D animation content a lot too, which isn't trying to hide bad performance, since the rendering isn't real time either. The spider man movie being a prime example of this "some choppy animation as an artistic choice" sensibility.

Comment Re:Performance issues = bad showcase (Score 1) 25

It's a common style nowadays, like some sort of counter reaction to the change from hand drawn animation to 3D animation, where the software could fill in between keyframes and be effortlessly smooth.

I've seen a fair argument that smooth is not necessarily better, that human choice in the animation allows the animator to decide which frames linger a bit and which frames move on. For example in a fast paced action sequence letting some frames linger to give the viewer a chance to see what happens.

However the response seems to be to just animate at a lower rate all the time, which I personally don't think is better but it is stylistically consistent with a fair amount of modern games and animation.

Comment To get value out of coding assistance.. (Score 2) 57

You have to get a feel for when it's utterly useless and when it's got a good chance of success. You also have to have a different vigilance as the LLM will make mistakes unlike what humans will do. My experience is it can be a modest time save but only because I've learned to ignore it for most of my work. Occasionally neat completion, very very rarely generating useful snippets from prompts, and ability to generate doc strings that no one will probably read anyway. Utterly asinine at trying to write comments, documenting the self evident tediously and skipping commenting anything that actually could use it. One example is if I write a little command line utility using variables that make sense to me it's decent at seeing the uninitialized variables and generating a chunk of argument parsing code including decent staff help text based on the observed variables

When all is said and done, if AI convinces management I don't need the diploma mill outsourced code slinger from the lowest bidder, I come out ahead even if I never even use the AI at all.

Comment Re:Local cloud? (Score 2) 61

An example where the business case is at odds with the best situation for the user.

The ideal would be a local hub that can easily provide local area "app" connectivity, with ability to work with a DNS provider, Let's encrypt, and the relevant firewalls to let it have it's own port. Regrettably every member of the industry has steered explicitly away from making this interoperable. Upnp was designed to faciltate asking for real ports, but generally considered insecure and disabled with no standardized authenticated way to do the same. We basically didn't create an ecosystem capable, because it being anti-revenue.

The money is on the side of client being a dumb slave to vendor curated internet services that happen to also let them hold your device hostage for a subscription fee.

Home Assistant Green is the closest to enable it, but you get to own having to see if the devices are willing to work with it but without cloud and you get to own the task of getting it a port going to it from the internet, it's a piece in an ecosystem that's barely willing to accommodate the use case.

Comment Re:Web connected devices... (Score 1) 61

Just dealt with some nest thermostats. Hate their design.

Much prefer the "Sensi" thermostats, but the ones that still have HomeKit since those can be onboarded onto a LAN without internet (and even without an Apple Device). However they seem to have decided to discontinue HomeKit in their newer models, so I won't touch them either.

Comment Re:It kinda sounds like in the 1990s (Score 1) 117

Part of it though is those sorts of classes were stupid not because those skills were useless, but because you didn't really *need* the classes as the software was easy to use, unless you got into some of the more tricky spreadsheet stuff that looks more like programming than just office stuff.

Similar here, to the extent LLM *can* augment/implement coding, they really don't need a university major to tell them how to use AI... If it can work, it can work easily. You don't need to be *taught* how to use the LLM, it should come relatively naturally.

Problem being that LLM in university is going to be totally different than LLM in real life. LLM in university/school is going to feel a lot more capable than at least some of the professional world. A university curriculum won't ask you to do something that hasn't already been done, because they need precedent to know if they are making an unreasonable assignment or not. In the real world you are potentially going out on a limb. There's of course a lot of work that is well trodden territory that LLMs might just chug away at, but at least some of the market is beyond that.

Comment Re: Good. (Score 2) 117

I've never had particularly compelling results from prompt style interaction, though as a code completion it has been... ocassionally useful, still usually wrong, but it can generate almost-correct code worthy of fixing faster than I can type it 10-20% of the time.

It could just be the area I develop in, which is a bit more niche than maybe what other people are doing, but it seems to struggle a lot with having no clue about the ecosystem I work with day to day.

Comment Re:Who is avoiding computer science now? (Score 1) 117

I hear you, as a member of the first generation to be cluttered with software developers who jumped in for a gold rush, it may be nice, eventually, for things to settle in.

But we still have a great deal of grift from those gold rush people who can convince managers that they are best because they can use Claude to write up whatever the manager wants.

Comment Re:Claim that coding will be done by AI is puzling (Score 1) 117

The problem is that it is incapable of "realizing", so if it's spiraling out, it's really not worth trying to make it correct itself, it's not "learning".

To the extent the chat guides things to a correct path it is by influencing the statistics of the content away from a failing outcome.

It will happily be correct, but admit it is wrong if the human contribution to the text content and then say something wrong, then pivot back if that's what the human says. None of this influences the 'next' person to come along, since that interaction didn't change the model any, unless fed back into the training set later, but that's not necessarily a good way to improve the model.

Comment Re: It's not this is different (Score 2) 117

Maybe a job of nothing but coding would be dead but I don't think such a job should have ever been alive.

I can't imagine anyone who has actually used LLM coding assistance think the skill of being able to read, modify, and write code would be dead anytime soon. It went from complete absurdity to surprisingly capable, but still mostly wrong real quick and has kind of sat there for all but the most brain dead simple projects.

Comment Re:Who wants that... (Score 1) 52

I have one of those knob controls for the phone interface and it's good for most things, but if you want to generally peruse the broader map around your route touching is nicer since you can zoo easily rotate, scroll, and zoom. I frequently do that when I'm setting out, request a route, then fiddle with it a bit to understand the route before actually starting the drive, having it zoom out to show me the big route and then I pinch to zoom in on any interesting looking turns so I know what's coming/decide if I want to do it a slightly different way (google loves to just take an exit and get back on to shave maybe one minute off a traffic jam, and I generally ignore those).

Comment Re:Controls should give tactile feedback (Score 1) 52

Not just tactile feedback, but ability to feel. If they just vibrated the screen a bit, it's an improvement, but doesn't help with navigation.

There was this one car I was in some time ago that did have hard controls, but it was mostly a fairly large sea of nondescript square buttons. Almost as bad as a touch screen.

Having a control surface you can feel with obvious knobs and such with distinct feels for at least the most prominent functions..

Comment Re: Who wants that... (Score 1) 52

That said, we are in the future. We shouldnâ(TM)t be interacting with screens anymore. We should be telling the car what we want and it figures it out.

I'm not so sure about this, this has been one area where the 'natural language' interfaces sometimes lose a lot. For example, if you are trying to review a map on your display, just nothing beats being able to fling it around, twist it, and zoom it with your fingers. For a lot of adjustments, it's nice having the full range so you can zip it straight to where you want without having to audibly describe where you want. And of course hard controls for adjustments and instant reactions, like 'shut the music up, answer/hang up a call, adjust the temperature real quick'. Voice for things like 'navigate to work', maybe, though on the other hand Google already presents a selection of two or three likely destinations, and work or home will be one of those so tapping is quicker, and if it got smarter then sometimes it might catch other destinations too.

In other areas I've seen people champion ditching UIs because natural language is here, but there's a lot of stuff that's harder to do with language than to hit buttons or knobs or such.

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