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Comment Re:Confused (Score 1) 38

Make piracy the better alternative in every way and people will pirate.

Make a legal transaction the better alternative in every way (ok, except money) and people will use that.

It really is so simple, even an executive should be able to understand it.

Comment does it, though? (Score 1) 63

"We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof"

While that might be an interesting technical challenge, one has to wonder why. Just because something is "culture" doesn't mean it should be copied. Slavery was part of human culture for countless millenia. To the point where we haven't even gotten around to updating our "holy books" that all treat it as something perfectly normal. That's how normal slavery used to be.

(for the braindead: No, I'm not comparing Taarof to slavery. I'm just making a point with an extreme example.)

The thing is something called unintended consequences. So in order to teach an LLM Taarof you have to teach it to lie, to say things that don't mean what the words mean. And to hear something different from what the user says. Our current level of AI already has enough problems as it is. Do we really want to teach it to lie and to misread? Just because some people made that part of their culture?

Instead of treating LLMs like humans, how about just treating them as the machines they are? I'm pretty sure the Persians don't expect their light switches to haggle over whether to turn on the light or not, right? I stand corrected if light switches in Iran only turn on after toggling them at least three times, but I don't think so. In other words: This cultural expectation only extends to humans. Maybe just let the people complaining know that AIs are not actually human?

Comment Re:So they don't need revenue (Score 1) 43

Even if AI saves a lot of labor the people developing the AI have to find a way to monetize it.

For example a mechanical engineer making $150 K / year it's not uncommon to pay maybe $7500 for CATIA.

For a stock trader it's about $30K / year for a Bloomberg terminal.

Or maybe it will be like operating an MRI scanner which is $5 million to buy, and the MRI technologist who operates it makes $88K / year.

Or a mining dumptruck that costs $7M and the driver is paid $80K.

Nobody knows where this ratio will end up for any number of jobs to be impacted by AI.

Comment Re:Can the F-35 do anything on time and budget? (Score 2, Informative) 56

I don't know it's anything with the plane, the F35-C first launched from the land-based testing version of the electric catapult back in 2011:

http://defensetech.org/2011/11...

and has been taking off from carriers with steam catapults for over a decade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Hmmm (Score 3, Insightful) 51

I currently work hybrid. It reduces my effective pay by around 10%, which is a hell of a cut. It gains me nothing, since all meetings - even when we're all in the same room - are via teams, because company policy.

I see no added value from visiting the office.

Comment Re:Overwrought (Score 2) 63

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) 63

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.

Submission + - LibreOffice Needs a Bullt-in Non-AI Adulterated Grammar Checker 1

BrendaEM writes: LibreOffice writer is a great word processor. Its menus are coherent. It suffer from suffers from less inline style-corruption than Word. Its files are lossless compressed to save on disk space--allowing you to save more often, but as download and installed, there seems to be no functioning grammar checker. I will not write for all writers, but I have no trust for anything touched by unchecked AI. I just want things like double space checking, punctuation, and that kind of thing, grammar checking before large companies lined up to steal your content. While grammar checking extensions are available, most are touched by AI, or require additional Java. So, why is no included grammar checking in LibreOffice?

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 86

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

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