Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:My CORRECTED link to his 2004 article, post-cof (Score 4, Interesting) 20

I meet Jerry at a computer show I was covering. I saw him in the press room, introduced myself, said I really like his style and said I copied it for my column. He looked at me and said steal, only amateurs copy, we professionals steal. Had an interesting conversation. Great guy who will be missed.

Comment Re:Documentation (Score 1) 59

not to review techical documentation to identify design issues

But this is exactly where AI can actually be useful — so long as you don't depend on it to identify all of the design issues. It can review mountains of information and find things in it you might not have caught. You just can't assume that it will catch everything it "should" — that is, what it should be capable of catching is not necessarily what you are capable of catching.

Yes, and it requires a multi-layerd approach to how they system raises issues. One simple prompt pass is not enough, however a multi-tiered approach can increase teh success rate. It'll never catch everything, and neither will a human, the tool is merely a way to remove much of the grunt work searching though documents so teh analyst can focus on what is important and make it easier ot find where things are referenced.

Meanwhile, that periodic report has requirements, so you're going to have to ask it to write the report, then to review it to see if it met the requirements, then to review its own statements about whether it successfully met each requirement, because it won't do any of that sanity checking without being told to do so.

There are two different types of reports to develop - one that validates meeting requirements and one that is merely reporting results or periodic required reporting. The former is challenging, the later a lot less so, and reducing the time spent on the later frees up time for the former. Of course, many such reports do not need AI since they merely compile data, and that is easy to program in any of a number of tools. AI just adds hype and market cap...

Comment Re:I'm sure AI is great (Score 2) 100

Exactly this. I have experimented with using AI, but absolutely forbid it to actually check in code. I just let it show me it's proposal. It can be useful at that, but often needs to be prodded about criteria it left out and frequently the final result needs a re-write for maintainability at least. It has a tendency to use really convoluted logic which can be greatly simplified without changing the result.

It does much better as a search tool. It's pretty good at finding exactly where some feature is implemented in a large codebase.

Comment Re:Documentation (Score 1) 59

While I agree that AI is not truly deterministic, that doesn't mean you will get widely divergent results from teh same data.

Widely? No. Divergent? Yes. Run the same query multiple times and you'll get different answers. The more input you give, the more subtle the differences are likely to be, but there's always a chance it will go completely off its nut and follow some line of "reasoning" that goes someplace utterly unrelated to what you asked for. This is less likely in special-purpose models, but never impossible.

Of course, which is why for special purpose models this can work; especially since you can train it to be more accurate once you have enough real life data. This tool is not likely using the commercial ChatGpt but a bespoke setup.

Comment Re:Documentation (Score 1) 59

Tailoring the LLM to taht can save a lot of time for an analyst/engineer/operator by identifying and collecting teh information needed for analysis and reporting

It can't, though, and for two reasons. One, a person is required to check off on the data. Two, LLMs don't faithfully represent data. They ingest it as tokens and then what they crap out is influenced by random numbers produced internally as part of the token selection process. That means a person cannot certify that the data was faithfully reproduced without checking literally every value, because that's simply not how LLMs work.

You can potentially address this with a hybrid approach, where the LLM uses a tool to collect and manipulate the data, but this is shifting the problem to whether the LLM used the tool correctly. It might be more obvious when it doesn't, though, so it might still be a win.

What LLMs seem best at when it comes to text processing, and they are still not infallible, is summarization. But you can't trust its negatives, so it's only useful for identifying other possible positives. That's not worthless, it can help you catch things, but you can't trust it to do the parts you'd most want it to do.

While I agree that AI is not truly deterministic, that doesn't mean you will get widely divergent results from teh same data. There is some run to run variant, but in my experience, working with very specific criteria, it tends to be in the ranking order and not a failure to identify relationships. That can be addressed in a number of ways. While positive hits are easier, negative ones can be checked in a number of ways to increase the confidence level that they truly are negative, in the sense they are not relevant to the tested data set. To me, one of teh keys is to work with a well defined set of criteria, something I think is possible with tehy type of information they are dealing with, especially since much of the input data will be well structured and in a consistent format.

A human must always be the final arbitrator, and needs to realize the AI is not fool proof and you can't accept everything at face value.

Comment Re:Documentation (Score 1) 59

I wouldn't want them to be relying on AI to do reviews though. Maybe two AI, looking only for issues and reporting them back, like you can have AI look for security issues with computer code. And a proper review done by a human.

I was think more along the lines of "Here is the periodic report on X" or "Here all the similar events and corrective actions..." to basically act like a research librarian; not to review techical documentation to identify design issues.

Comment Documentation (Score 2) 59

Nuke plants, st tFA points out, are massive generators of paper. A lot of times spent reviewing past documentation for relevance, trends, etc. That is actually an area where Ai can be useful, especially since you are working with a narrow and reasonable well defined data set and requirements. Tailoring the LLM to taht can save a lot of time for an analyst/engineer/operator by identifying and collecting teh information needed for analysis and reporting. It's not like they're giving it access to the reactor control system and telling it to pull rods or increase steam flow, per TFA.

Comment Re:The company refused?! (Score 1) 114

I remember listening in on a great phone call to a network provider about sending someone to pick up their expensive Cisco router. It ended with "in 30 days, it's going in the dumpster.

I personally 'uninstalled' another router by disconnecting the fiber cables...with side cutters. 2 months later, they actually tried to bill us for bandwidth we supposedly used from the completely disconnected router. We sent them a picture.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT

Working...