I use Outlook on the web at a large university. Emails come in and DON'T SHOW. If I know they are there, I can search for them. This isn;t new; everything Microsoft does is shit. It doesn't work. To be fair, they obviously put more work in the native platform. But my experience with Microsoft, whether from a 200 page thesis in word that crashed every 5 minutes because there were equations and diagrams in it, to Word currently not formatting the same on Mac, Windows and Office 365, subtly corrupting papers when we try to collaborate online, to this web problem is always the same. My conclusion is that it's the company not the product. Microsoft has, from the earliest days with Bill Gates, been focused on first screwing partners, then screwing users. The idea of actually making high quality products would never even occur to management. Promising lifetime licenses, then cancelling them. That's Microsoft's expertise.

Anyone complaining about the AI ruining their ability to write PHP code is not very high on the food chain. Somewhere between clams and crabs. Seriously, while AI is not good at writing difficult, new data structures code, it is very good at writing GUI code, API calls, and with suitable prompting, I can control it very well. I think this article is alarmist, silly, and the people being interviewed seem to be on a par with completion 2 in terms of IQ.

I don't know how to edit posts. I can only upvote/downvote and comment. But in this case, you should get the name Penzias. He's a Nobel Laureate.

"We're not making this decision because we're in trouble," Dorsey says. "We're doing it because I'm a complete asshole. A greedy asshole."

Next there will be plastic surgery to add wings to their penises,

Why not just take a viagra?

This is typical Musk braggabulls**t. What's the weight of all the solar panels? It's not cheaper to load them into orbit than to just deploy them on the ground. Instead of building spaceships you build batteries. The economics isn't there. Then as someone else pointed out, the heat rejection. That has a mass too. It might eventually be possible, and even desirable, but it certainly isn't something he's going to do in 5 years.

As a Linux user, all microsoft products are crap. Teams is just another example. In theory, they ported it everywhere, and it's not much better on Windows, but the most basic things about their systems are completely disfunctional, particularly on Linux. People continually send me teams invites and there are problems with authentication, it asks me to log in and then i have to go out and click in again. Sharing documents, well of course that's word, and office 365 isn't the same as office on Windows, which isn't the same as Office on mac. Microsoft can't even make their flagship components work seamlessly for paying customers across platforms, so aside from political issues, I just don't understand why anyone enjoys using their garbage. I know that for a single user, Word was better than Libreoffice, and certainly has more features than Google docs. But we have other needs now, like editing in a team, and their advantages in formatting are nothing compared to their inability to just create a single coherent, compatible product that interoperates with itself. I know I wrote more in this post about office, because I've had such horrible recent dealings with it, I just have blanked out the memory of my problem with teams, but it definitely sucks. I think the only way it will ever get better is if they start to lose the monopoly and are forced to actually deliver value. But since Microsoft culture has never been about that, they simply bought companies who had developed Word, Excel, etc. the question is, can they develop a culture of fixing their broken garbage? I don't think so. They are too big and too dysfunctional. They just want to keep adding paperclips, AI advisors, and focus on stealing my data rather than providing a decent tool to work with.

I watched some of Steven Bartlett's podcasts. He never misses an opportunity to drag out an interview for 3x longer than necessary. The information content of the podcast can often fit on a single sheet of paper, less if you ignore bullshit. While the personalities are sometimes interesting, he will equally bring on nutrition bros and pitch them softball questions, All he cares about is getting revenue, and his content already was AI slop before AI was a thing.I suppose that means it was NI slop.

My semicolon usage generally seems to vary with the language I am writing in. In C++, there seem to be quite a few. In python, very few. In Rust, somewhere in between. English is just a python-derived language.

Ho hum. Another article in a newspaper. Yes, at least the New York Times quotes some people who might know something. But this is not peer reviewed, rehashed garbage, and there appears to be nothing that has not been said in the last year. Of course the other comments I am reading are along the lines of "LLMs aren't AI, they never will be." Though most people were good enough to not say "never." I think this is both silly and probably wrong. We don't know when GAI will come, but just like with chess and go, it appears like a computer can "never" do something until suddenly, it can. There is no discussion here of why a neural network is any different than a physical neuron. I don't see why an "artificial" neuron is different than a wet one. Right now, the number of inputs is typically up to 1024, while physical neurons have more like 100k in our cerebral cortex. So there is a scaling issue. I think that as soon as we scale up neural network another couple of orders of magnitude, we will see further emergent behavior. It might take an improvement in training algorithms, but maybe not. Exactly when this happens is hard to predict, but anywhere from 10 to 50 years seems like the outer limit. Anyone saying it can't happen simply lacks imagination. This is not a linear process.

I used to ask lots of questions on stackoverflow. I answered quite a number at first also, but then the topics I knew were mined out. Even so, I was in the top 4% by asking great questions that would over time, get voted up. Today, I can get a lot of simpler questions answered faster with chatgpt, but when I am stuck, when I really want a human, they are always way more interested in playing gotcha and downgrading my question. They have such a narrow idea of what constitutes a valid question, and even when some people are willing to answer, I have had people delete their answers (fortunately I saw one first). The site is dominated by assholes trying to prove how smart they are. And the people running the site think they are absolutely right, so when I complained on meta, they basically agree with the way it is. This is exactly analogous to a restaurant which hires servers who are nasty and sarcastic, then acts surprised when people stop coming.

In some ways I like Duolingo. It is a great platform for drill and I have tested it on a range of languages. I definitely improved my French. But quality is already pretty low even before this announcement. They make mistakes, they create ridiculous, annoying sentences (that may be deliberate, since it garners publicity and some people like it). I don't mind being taught (Portuguese) how to say "My elephant drinks milk" but once you have it down, you really, really don't need to go back to it quite so much. Similarly in French the nonsense phrases about Bozo the clown are really annoying. There is no real way to complain, they aren't going to fix their bugs, everything is automated. Duolingo could be a lot better, and I don't understand how they can't review their materials with humans to fix the stupidity, it just isn't that expensive. It's ok to generate course materials with AI. But having no human editor, at this stage, generates an inferior product.

More efficient than traditional construction by hand, sure. But why on earth would you use a 3d printer to print individual houses when you can just fabricate pieces and lift them in place with a crane? If there is an advantage to building on site, then a mobile fab in a trailer, but molds, prefab walls, are much, much better. I am much more excited by panels being produced in a factory with a waterproof/fireproof layer, insulation, structures, these are fundamentally better than just squirting out concrete. You can see demos of houses that fold out, or just panels that are assembled onsite. Either way, I don't see that the printer is all that efficient. Yes, it prints fairly fast but you have to move it to each new house. Whereas if you have a factory, you can crank out modular panels 24 hours a day and ship them. It doesn't seem to make sense to build entire modules though, unless they are all identical, like on a ship or prison. Because the modules are typically big and bulky to transport. And the form factor means you have to limit the size of rooms according to the geometry of the container. But mass production of standard units that are assembled like Lego, that seems way, way better. My favorite is when the article talks about a chinese printer bragging that it is using industrial waste in the concrete -- just what people want to live in close proximity to...

Microsoft has always had code generators, wizards, etc. because the underlying code is poorly structured, inefficient, wildly complex. And Microsoft has orphaned many of their APIs over time, which is another reason to never invest in learning anything they do. So aside from general lack of quality of Microsoft software, it isn't a surprise there was a code generator that would generate some cases, but that's not even close to general programming. I'm sure if you asked it to do something it wasn't programmed to do, it would do nothing.