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Comment Good work guys! (Score 1) 32

Normal industry: Your factory has an expensive milling machine and a cheap stamping machine. Thankfully, customers actually seem to prefer stamped parts for most cases and you can produce those quickly; so you keep stamping out parts and rolling in cash.

Tech industry: As above but your entire c-suite believes that the milling machine with turn into mecha-jesus and end history; so you are bulldozing everything you can to build more milling machines.

Comment Re:Pluto is a planet (Score 1) 66

You guys do know that there's a process in motion right now to make this debate meaningless and redefine "planet" again? As it stands, the current definition of planet you're arguing over doesn't include any "exoplants". It's actually weird, solar-system centric definition that clearly has no future. They're looking to define clearing its own orbit as 10^23 kg.

Comment Re:Does anyone like touch screens on a notebook? (Score 1) 65

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) 168

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:From one dev manager to another (Score 1) 89

No actual disagreement with what you're saying there, but a few things about your example. A. You were dealing with at least one competent engineer and B. you're talking about mechanical engineering. We both agree that you need to hammer out the details with the client, but many clients looking for software to be developed are not engineers and frequently not even all that technical plus the ease of rolling out a mockup or prototype is generally a lot easier in a pure software environment. So sometimes hammering out the details can involve a mockup as a version of the specification for them to pore over. Especially for UI and workflow elements. Beyond that, sometimes dealing directly with the engineers whose requirement it is can be a bit of a luxury. Often you're dealing with one or more layers of middlemen. Worst cases can include your salespeople working out the requirement with their salespeople. If you lose the battle to have at least a constructive conversation over their heads, you're generally stuck with the sure and certain knowledge that there's some fundamental misunderstanding in the middle.

So, that's really the comparison I'm making here. In the traditional paradigm, you ideally have competent engineers/developers or even technically inclined end users who can work everything out. This new paradigm threatens to have the "developer" become the one who has no idea about what has been asked for, what it would really be used for, how to ask the right questions to improve the requirements documents, etc. They just become a middleman who feeds that into the AI.

Comment Re:From one dev manager to another (Score 1) 89

Anyone who has enough development experience and dealt with the client facing side of it knows that the client never has a clue about the requirements. An important part of the job is, in polite terms, telling them how stupid their original set of requirements is and hammering out with them exactly what they actually need (that or just ignoring them, intuiting all of that, then just making the specific changes they want after you hand them a prototype). Basically, what we seem to be talking about here is turning the developers/engineers into the clueless clients who have no idea what the requirements should actually be anyway, and using the AI as a developer that just takes the requirements at face value.

Comment Re:From one dev manager to another (Score 3, Insightful) 89

Your process for interviewing should not change. You need engineers that can think well to judge the output of an LLM well.

Quite right. The logic the manager from the article is presenting is incomprehensible. They're arguing what? That you don't need coding problems in interviews because an AI can do them instead. Classically, they have been stock problems that are pretty much just mild variations of standard stuff from textbooks. So if you don't need to bother with them now because AI can do them, then you never should have needed to bother with them because the problems had already been done before, thousands of times, and written down. What does this guy think, that the coding problems in interviews are vital new developments in computer science or something? Now, some companies do actually present those as problems just to see how the interviewee approaches them, and there are also some stories about unethical companies that have used long-form interviews as a way to get programming piecework done for free by suckers, but that's not what's being discussed here. The point is that we're talking about a basic way to make sure that interviewees actually understand the concepts themselves, not asking for the interviewee to demonstrate that they can accomplish some amazing task that no-one else on Earth could perform.

Comment Wrong question. (Score 4, Insightful) 62

It seems likely that the answer to this question is 'yes'; but it seems like a mistake to be distracted by it when we are talking about people who are, busily and intentionally, building 'AI' products against the public.

It's mildly comical when they attempt to emulate humanity; but the important bit isn't the cluelessness; it's the malice.

Comment Re:Oh boy. (Score 1) 65

I suspect that this would be more tedious(and potentially less flattering); but you'd think that the metric you'd really care about for the juche-computer would be component availability.

Going by cost is interesting if you are trying to get the attention of balance-of-trade types and tariffs and dumping hawks; but it's an almost perfectly wrong measure if you are trying to catch any "oops, turns out that only the Chinese vendors so hungry they are considering offshoring to Vietnam still make a random passive or unexciting tolerances switching IC because it's a zero-margin part with no real room for differentiation that everyone who could got out of years ago" type situations.

If it's a real, drop-dead, 'national security' problem some of those are probably less serious, if there's a much fancier TI part that is overkill for the job but could be subbed in for only 3-4 factors of ten more; but if you want to keep economically viable civilian production open or it doesn't have a direct upmarket analog that could get really awkward; even if you've ensured that all the fancy logic ICs, copper, and gold are geopolitically friendly.

That's basically the Nexperia story, slightly simplified. Philips decided to private equity semiconductors generally; NXP decided to shove a bunch of the boring parts out to WingTech; then 'oops' European manufacturers who need diodes and ESD protection parts they thought were cheap jellybean stuff have cars piling up on the line because they can't get them.

Obviously losing a really cutting edge capability isn't preferred; but it's also the sort of thing that people notice because those tend to be pretty valuable; while low and middling capabilities, including ones that are sophisticated enough that you can't just throw money at restoring them fast, are things that are voluntarily surrendered because getting rid of low margin products makes line go up.

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.

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