LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Intel banks on Apple publicly saving an American trainwreck to butter up the orange utan for favors.

That's it. It's the only strategy here. None of this would happen absent Trump.

I've never seen a cookie banner ask for consent to collect and store my IP address. If that is their reason, they completely failed to obtain consent in a manner that meets the law.

The reason for the banners are simple - a court case ruled that cookies are covered by GDRP, but they haven't explicitly ruled on other tracking mechanisms. So ad companies pushed the minimum and most annoying method of conforming with that ruling without changing their practices, and continue to ignore the fact that all the other tracking they are doing without consent is blatantly illegal.

And it naturally won't allow ad blocking to be installed. That's one of the main end goals.

The point is that people are investing vast sums of money to create elaborately-packaged boxed sets that are simply too vast to be actually enjoyed (apparently, the new boxed set Thunderbirds will include heavily restored footage that simply wasn't capable of being included in earlier releases), and upscaling a puppet show to 4K and still have it watchable is far from trivial -- those puppets were never made to be seen on such large screens at such high resolution. The scale of investment into making this publicity stunt and boxed set is incredible, the cost of the set isn't low, and the value of the material that's in the set - even to die-hard fans - isn't nearly as great.

Goblin/Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is an even more extreme example and includes 270 minutes of backstage footage, a large pack of publicity photos, scripts, and a tacky plastic sword. It's an extremely limited edition special collector's edition and the resale market is pricing it as though it includes a couple of solid gold ingots. People will certainly binge-watch the episodes once or twice, which will undoubtedly be in much higher resolution than the rare streamed versions, but not even the afficados will be watching all the making-of footage and the scripts will doubtless be on the Internet somewhere. Unlike high-end sci-fi, though, the storyline is simple so the difference between the scripts and fan-produced transcripts won't be vast. (It was a very good storyline, I was impressed, but it was hardly a case where the tiny nuances matter.) But K-Drama is milled in unimaginable quantities, so much so that many series just can't pick up any kind of audience and are abandoned. It's not produced for repeated watching and the odds of any show, however good, being repeatedly watched (the way fans repeatedly watch LoTR or SW) is essentially zero. But someone had to trawl through all the footage to put together the set, make the booklets, etc, and that wasn't cheap. The boxing is elaborate.

The importance of storytelling is high, but none of these are sophisticated stories. They're all pretty much on-par with Smith of Wooton Major - a great little read, but not one I'd pay £500 for, even if they did throw in a plastic sword. I'm not convinced anyone is buying these sets for the content, even though the content is enjoyable.

The degree of investment is phenomenal, the sophistication of presentation is exceptional, and the fans are buying in quantity. I'm just not sure what the benefit is, on either side.

Can other people be proud of their former empires? British Empire, Holy Roman Empire, etc?

I think the technical term is "Spam in a can".

Rusticles can't imagine that there are any vulnerability problems other than memory safety.

Rust will NOT save you from SQL injections or bad passwords.

And there is little point to it, because every freshman can identify as member of the university with their e-mail address

And yet Google Scholar won't allow me to verify my profile with my e-mail address from my university's alumni domain, because obviously freshers might do research but graduates can't.

Americans especially never go to Iran, how could they, and have never been exposed to this culture outside of Iranians in the USA who are typically fully embracing american culture.

Don't believe the implication of TFS (and probably TFA, but of course I haven't read it) that this is a specifically Persian or Iranian thing. It's far more widespread than that. At the very least you'll find it across the Middle East and northern Africa; but also in Brazil (earlier this year I read an account by a Brit in Brazil of how they'd learnt to practise it), and I'm sure many parts of Asia too.

There is a way to us DNN/LLM "AI"s correctly; use them like a search engine.

Ask a hyper specific question, and scrutinize the answer given thoroughly.

In the same way that crowdsourced intelligence made google a useful tool for search, and social media created a great pool of questions and answers for that search to run over, DNN's are just an extension of search.

They are a wonderful improvement in the areas of (1) parsing the query and (2) re-jiggering the resultant hits.

(1) They can decode the user's question more accurately, and get a more searchable rewording of what the user is really looking for. Previous incarnations of search really needed you to find a magic word that matched perfectly to get the hits, and when you were using common words it became near impossible. But large language models seem able to do that with a much higher accuracy rate, and dont get hung up without magic keywords or magic phrases.

(2) Instead of merely presenting a raw list of sources, the LLM's actually read the pages, and try to parse out the specific bits you are searching for and ignore the rest of the page. They can also, to a limited extant, specialize the answer to match the query, based on interpolation of the page content. Again this is something that was previously impossible, and saves human time.

I would say, with judicious use of a search-engine DNN/LLM, any programmer should expect perhaps a 1% to 2% productivity increase on average.

Any programmer who tries to ask it to write code or solve problems will likely eat the worm, and suffer a 20%-50% decline in real productivity. Hopefully, any programmer caught doing this would face some kind of disciplinary action.

Israel used the F-35 it when striking back at Iran just recently.

What do you mean by "striking back"? Israel shot first, justifying its actions not on the basis of a putative Iranian strike but on the resumption of its nuclear programme.

This site. Became a left wing echo chamber long ago. Remember all the complaining about politics infecting our technology discussions? We were rudely told off that the personal is the political and there can be no neutrality in the age of King George W., the president who was literally Hitler. Remember when we used to have actual NASA scientists comment on space articles? Drove them all off, with the rest of the dotcom era crowd. And I've been reading this site since it was a web log called Chips N Bits. I've been nodded into the dirt by a behind the scenes cabal who silence anyone to the right of Mao. If you wonder why there aren't 500 comments, a decade of far left politics replacing tech topics is the reason. I think I'm about done, too. I eventually left EFnet IRC and I'll leave Slashdot too. A relic of a bygone age. This entire comment thread is the hard Left whining they don't get their way. Politics instead of tech.You killed Charlie Kirk and it's OVER. Americans are sick of your shit. Go find another country, you can't stay here with us, that much is clear. Go now and lick the hand that feeds ye, and may history forget ye were oura countrymen.

I, for one, am glad SOMEONE has stepped in to defend the evil megabillion dollar corporation and tell off the little guy. But you go! Speak truth to the powerless!