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Comment Re:Overwrought (Score 2) 62

This does not appear to be holding up in practice, at least not reliably.

It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.

Comment smoke and mirros (Score 4, Interesting) 62

Hey, industry, I've got an idea: If you need specific, recent, skills (especially in the framework-of-the-month class), how about you train people in them?

That used to be the norm. Companies would hire apprentices, train them in the exact skills needed, then at the end hire them as proper employees. These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Universities should not train the flavour of the moment. Because by the time people graduate, that may have already shifted elsewhere. Universities train the basics and the thinking needed to grow into nearby fields. Yes, thinking is a skill that can be trained.

Case in point: When I was in university, there was one short course on cybersecurity. And yet that's been my profession for over two decades now. There were zero courses on AI. And yet there are whitepapers on AI with me as a co-author. And of the seven programming languages I learnt in university, I haven't used even one of them ever professionally and only one privately (C, of course. You can never go wrong learning C. If you have a university diploma in computer science and they didn't teach you C, demand your money back). Ok, if you count SQL as a programming language, it's eight and I did use that professionally a few times. But I consider none of them a waste of time. Ok, Haskell maybe. The actual skill acquired was "programming", not a particular language.

Should universities teach about AI? Yes, I think so. Should they teach how to prompt engineer for ChatGPT 4? Totally not. That'll be obsolete before they even graduate.

So if your company needs people who have a specific AI-related skill (like prompt engineering) and know a specific AI tool or model - find them or train them. Don't demand that other people train them for you.

FFS, we complain about freeloaders everywhere, but the industry has become a cesspool of freeloaders these days.

Comment uh... wrong tree? (Score 1) 75

"When the chef said, 'Hey, Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building,"

The number of people isn't the problem here.

The "started every" is.

How did they not catch that during development and found a solution? I mean, the meme's where a TV ad starts Alexa and orders 10 large pizzas are a decade old now.

Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 57

That has not been my experience, at all. I'm entirely against the concept of what they're doing (giving me a reason not to visit the websites that ultimately pay for the production and publication of information) but the AI summaries and links to related articles tend to be spot on what I'm looking for. Perhaps you can give me a (non-contrived) search to try that demonstrates your claim?

Comment Re:For those getting pitchforks ready (Score 2) 153

The issue with health concerns like this is that it's not like it explodes and kills you - there's really no way to say, "It was the molecule on March 13, 2026 that started cancer in your body"

You can't even do that with cigarettes - you can only make a conclusion on cause that's well supported by circumstantial evidence.

And I'm not saying you're arguing against it, but just broadly speaking ... arguing *against* more information - unless the argument is that the information itself is inaccurate - seems particularly anti free-market to me. (Obviously that's why companies fight against the burden of regulation designed to increase market transparencies.)

Comment Not just vaccination (Score 5, Interesting) 93

While I am from the UK, I do read a variety of publications from the US and the rest of the world.

It would seem that there is a general anti-science movement in place in the US that is becoming stronger, vaccinations is one part of it, attacks on climate science is another. Couple that with the onslaught on education, and universities in particular, and all I can see is a gradual decline in the ability of the US to compete when it comes to science.

Comment Re: Painfully obviously used the firearm charge (Score 4, Informative) 71

a Republican what they posted when paul pelosi was attacked by a maga

The man who targeted and killed Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Minnesota in June was a Trump supporter.

The man charged with the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, in April was a Trump supporter.

The man convicted of orchestrating a series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022 was a Trump supporter.

The man who tried to kidnap then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul, in 2022 was a Trump supporter.

The men who wanted to hang Mike Pence on Jan 6, 2021, were Trump supporters.

The man who killed the son of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas in 2020 was a Trump supporter.

The men who were convicted of trying to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020 were Trump supporters.

The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.

The man who killed left-wing activist Heather Heyer after driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 was a Trump supporter.

Comment innovation is - sadly - dead at Apple (Score 1) 81

the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

Comment Re:Missing the obvious (Score 1) 15

Apple fans already have a heartrate sensor on their wrist, they don't need one from the ear.

That's wrong. I stopped using wrist watches 25 years ago and haven't looked back a single day. I don't want shit on my wrist. Try living without for a year and you'll realize why. It's hard to express in words. It's like having a chain removed.

Headphones, on the other hand, I use occasionally. For phone calls or for music on the train, plane, etc. - and especially for the plane if the noise cancellation comes close to my current over-the-ear Bose I'd take them on the two-day business trips where I travel with hand luggage only and space is a premium.

Do I want a heartbeat sensor? No idea. I don't care. But if there's any use for it than at least for me that's not a replication. I'm pretty sure many, many Apple users don't have a smart watch.

Comment Re:So many things that contribute to this (Score 1) 215

The irony of your sarcasm is it actually *is* horrible.

Water is good - necessary even - but too much water will kill you. Choice is the exact same way - it's entirely possible to have too much of it, as much as that contradicts an ethos buried deeply in the American id.

Comment "fake" - you don't say ! (Score 1) 83

So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?

Man.

Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.

Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media is not fake. Well, maybe your grandmother's photo album because she doesn't know Photoshop exists.

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