I've tested a variety of chat bots on a regular basis to see how they perform in terms of coding or suggesting logic solutions. I've tried ChatGPT, Copilot, and Llama. Most of the time they are pretty bad, particularly doing anything above entry-level.

So I could see them being useful for a complete beginner (as long as the beginner checks the results) or as a way to fill in some common boilerplate stuff, but it's not really useful for anything beyond that.

Most of the code LLMs have given me (in Bash, C, Java, and Python) doesn't compile or doesn't run properly or is _close_ but has the logic backwards. It looks okay, but it's not actually functional for the task at hand.

Where I have found LLMs semi-useful is in brainstorming. If I give it a problem I'm working on and ask for a couple of approaches it'll usually give me one way to solve the problem that makes sense. It usually can't actually code the solution properly, but it'll give me some ideas and then I can code the solution myself.

Of course it's not illegal. Anyone can tell another person they don't think they're crazy. I tell my friends they are not crazy on a regular basis.

What would be illegal is pretending to be a doctor and claiming that, in your medical opinion, a person is/isn't crazy. But the AI isn't a person, it can't impersonate a doctor because it's clearly not a person. Much like how Monopoly money isn't counterfeit because no one would believe it was real money.

Or how about go screw yourself and you don't get to decide whether people live or die? How about we leave that up to the person whose life is on the line. Holy crap, the arrogance of some people.

> In Canada the law wasn't supposed to allow MAID for people with only mental health conditions, but an inquiry determined that the system was approving it for practically anyone who asked.

Good! How is that a bad thing? It doesn't matter why someone else wants to end their life. If they are capable of making the choice then let them make the choice. No one else should have the right to interfere or tell them they can't decide when to live and when to die.

How about it's none of your business why someone wants to die and just let them get on with their own affairs that has nothing to do with you.

The problem is the AI bots often get the content wrong and strip away important pieces of context. People might be getting a "nicer" experience, but they are getting a much less accurate one. It's not going to be good for people needing accurate information rather than just mindless entertainment.

I wouldn't expect it to be, but if I were working at Red Hat I'd be pretty embarrassed. The difference is _most_ AI chatbots will talk about anything - any topic, any field, so it make more sense they would make mistakes.

Red Hat's Lightspeed _only_ talks about Red Hat software and related topics and _still_ gets it wrong. It's an almost infinitely smaller scope, but its answers are still terrible.

It should be mentioned that Lightspeed only answers questions about Red Hat products and related topics, like compilers and open source software. It also does not always answer truthfully. For example, I asked Lightspeed about working with boot environments on RHEL and it told me this feature was available by default (false) and provided me with a link to on-line documentation which went to an invalid URL (HTTP error 404). It also gave incorrect instructions for enabling extra repositories like EPEL and RPMFusion, which is pretty basic stuff.

You know there is more than one state and more than one city in Germany, right? They don't all move as one singular unit. Each one makes its own IT decisions. What you're seeing is a dozen different local governments migrating away from Microsoft, one at a time.

Only Apple would create multiple virtual machines and call then Containers. I just know in a few months I've going to hear some Apple fanboi brag that they don't use virtual machines anymore, they use Containers because containers are lightweight and efficient. And the reality distortion field grows stronger.

Weird, I've found it to be the opposite. I haven't encountered Perl at all in embedded space. It's all been Python.

I was not speaking hypothetically. I've done job hunting occasionally over the years to see if I could transition into another "real job". The response was, to put it mildly, crickets.

I can sympathize with the content creators. While I don't have nearly the level of celebrity the ones in the article have, I have been an on-line content creator for most of my working life and it does become a bit of a mixed bag.

I used to have a "real job" up until the 2008 financial crisis and, when I suddenly found myself unemployed, I decided to start making content to share in my spare time. It gradually took off and I realized that it was becoming my "next job". It grew over the following months, it became something I could live off of during a time when there were not many jobs to go around.

And I've been doing it ever since, so for about 16 years now.

In some ways, it is great. I have flexible day-to-day hours, get to work from home, mostly focus on things which interest me. But, on the other hand, it is a steady treadmill that, if you step off of it for more than a few days, your revenue will tank. Like 10% per day, which makes it very difficult to take sick days or a vacation. I've had about three or four weeks off in 15 years.

I'm not complaining, I think I've got a pretty good gig. But it did take some effort to find a balance, to schedule my days between work and life, to carve out time to have a relationship, to see friends. It's not easy being on-line almost 24/7 for months or years at a time, knowing that for everything you do (same or different, interesting or mundane) that a portion of your audience will hate it and yell about it or send threats.

The scary part, for me anyway, is once I had been doing this for a few years, I had been "out of the real job market" for too long and no one wanted to hire me. If I stop doing the on-line content creation gig then there is virtually nothing, outside maybe fast food, which is going to hire me because my resume has a 16 year gap, as far as HR is concerned. In practise I'm a writer, accountant, manager, public-facing worker - but all HR sees is "did not work at any company in over a decade". So it is a mixed experience and something that a person can easily get trapped in. I was lucky (or skilled) enough to find a balance, have supportive friends who encouraged me, to see a therapist to help me navigate it all. Not everyone is as lucky or as able to make it work smoothly.

This morning I saw a cafe advertising that they were offering "working day" promotions. Basically the idea was that the customer could pay a set rate and the cafe would provide coffee, a small lunch, and wifi access for the day.

The timing here seems interesting. While some cafes are chasing away "work from cafe" people because they are "bad for business" another shop sees this as an opportunity and is basically renting people office space at a set rate.

Between search engines offering previews of summaries and social media showing the headlines and the first paragraph of stories, Cloudflare's CEO is about a decade too late to this realization. The content-creation business model of the web has been dying for over a decade. AI summarizes are just one more nail in the coffin.

Konqi the KDE dragon would like a word.