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Comment Systems like LLMs are amplifiers (Score 1) 29

I first heard this comparison back when IDEs were young (kudos to Larry Masinter, at Xerox PARC at the time).

Amplifiers don't really know or care what they are amplifying.
If you tell them to create good, bad, immoral, or dangerous code, they'll try to comply.
Laws against bad uses of LLMs just make them illegal - they don't make them impossible.

Mediocre programmers with IDE/LLM support will create reams of mediocre code, at best.

Comment Re:I'm Still Not Seeing It (Score -1) 32

I don't own a computer. I am not a programmer. I do everything from my iPhone.

In the past 10 years, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on human programmers to create 3 web apps. Zero of them ever were finished. ZERO.

I used Grok AI to create 5 web apps. 3 of them were monetized almost immediately and have paying clients. All 5 have passed security checks that look for bugs or hack entry points.

One of the 3 monetized web apps took me all of 30 minutes using Grok, on an airplane, using my iPhone. I was able to download the files and upload them to a web server and the site was live. Literally 30 minutes and that website has created thousands of dollars of passive income.

I use vibe coding DAILY to make spreadsheets better for me and clients (I am not in IT). I use vibe coding DAILY to come up with cool functions for my web apps that people pay me to use.

Comment You pays your $$, you takes your choice (Score 0) 166

I have a paid subscription to the Washington Post (I live in the DC suburbs), so I get their content sans paywall. They let me create a few non-paywall links per month, and I share them when I see something the rest of the net should see without the paywall.

I pay Reddit annually, and I get their content sans ads. Whenever I see Reddit before I log in, I want to go wash my eyes out.

The real problem is I don't want to spend the money for a full subscription to every news source I read occasionally.

If there was a way to pay, say, $10/month to get 30 links from a basket of paywalled news sources, I'd be on it in a heartbeat.

Comment They all suck at some important things (Score 4, Insightful) 100

My wife is a sign language interpreter, and does a lot of remote work, especially since covid.

To handle a meeting on Teams, sign language interpreters need to pin two video streams - the current speaker, and the deaf client(s).

It is essentially impossible to do this in Teams - they routinely open up a separate Zoom session for interpretation.

You'd think the inability to do this would be an ADA violation...

Comment Re:fake news!!! (Score 2) 100

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Comment Re: It's not a decline... (Score 1) 182

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

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