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Comment I wonder how this will harm customers (Score 3, Insightful) 56

Orders will be fucked up on a random basis. At some point a person with allergies will get sick.

Does that happen already? Of course it does, but there are people in the immediate loop who can act and are accountable. This is about reducing staff to as near zero as possible, so when things go bad there will be no reliable human backup.

Welcome to the future where your well being is now 100% disposable.

Submission + - DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts

Required Snark writes: According to ProPublica

As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

The programmer who wrote the code had 15 years of experience with no formal AI training. He had previously automated manual processes at his own almost failed startup. The review tool code is posted here. The contracts selected were labeled "MUNCHABLE." It does not appear that anyone in DOGE checked his code or how the results were used. He was terminated after he was interviewed by Fast Company.

Comment Just like Trump promised! (Score 0) 31

All the jobs are coming back to the USA! Threats to foreign sovereign states, along with tariffs that change on a whim are bringing high tech jobs and spending back home.

All those EU citizens, German chartered corporations, and office/infrastructure will make an economic contribution to, well I guess not the American economy after all. Chalk up another win for the big fat corrupt orange bully.

Comment Risc-V will upset everything (Score 1) 91

x86 and ARM will both face fierce pressure from Risc-V. It will start dominating at the low end and displace existing architectures like Atmel, PIC and even the very old 8051. That's because both the low end CPU design and tool chain are free. The Raspberry Pi RP2040 has extra Risc-V cores because why not? They aren't being used right now, but they will be accessible at some point. Very simple Risc-V chips can be had for $0.10 (US) right now in small quantities.

At higher end performance there are lots of players who can enter the marketplace because of the open nature of Risc-V. Some of them are IP vendors who would like to sell specific capabilities like super-scalar and vector extensions. For high performance/throughput it could be advantageous to integrate interconnect silicon right on the CPU chip. Risc-V will eventually come to the supercomputer space.

And don't forget about China, who has strong economic and political reasons to be free from foreign control of such critical technology. Even if they can't keep up with TMSC they have a vast domestic market and could compete in the international market by being cost effective, even if they aren't the fastest.

Weirdly enough Microsoft is in a similar position. They might like to have the option of competing with the Apple M CPU series with a chip of their own.

Comment Re: Hallucinations? (Score 1) 47

In this context "hallucination" is a valid term to use. AI/LLM is being promoted and used as a replacement for thinking, so using human-centric terminology is appropriate. The disclaimers that it's just assisting and augmenting human intelligence are patently false, and primarily exist to sooth users and give cover to investors who plan on making vast profits by replacing much of the work force. (There are some exceptions, for example the Google research team what won the Nobel Prize for Alpha-Fold, but those examples are one in a billion compared all to the other real world use cases.)

A equally appropriate term would be "lying" or "incompetent", but that would upset investors, egomaniac tech-bro founders and users who want to avoid thinking or learning and just reap rewards with no effort.

Comment Assume they're lying (Score 1) 141

It a business, so the most likely case is they are lying on purpose. They made a conscious decision to screw the customer base because they though they would come out ahead even if they get sued. Assuming that corruption for profit is the normal behavior for business means you'll be right over 90% of the time.

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