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Comment Re:As long as it's just an option (Score 1) 33

I think it's for a certain kind of workflow. If you want to watch YouTube videos it kind of does nothing useful. If you want to swap between documents and reference materials a lot, much more helpful. I think the answer is "It sucks because it's for multitasking, not because it is a bad idea."

I think it depends less on workflow and more on screen layout. If you run your browser maximized on a landscape-mode display, there's a lot of horizontal real estate that isn't very well-used, while vertical space is at a premium. So it makes sense to move tabs to the side.

On the other hand, if you don't maximize your window but keep it as narrow as possible (so you can see other windows) but just wide enough that sites render well, then you'll probably prefer them on top.

On the gripping hand, if you're like me and run your browser full-screen on a portrait mode screen, then you have gobs of vertical real-estate and tabs on top definitely makes sense.

(I have three monitors, a 32" (landscape) in the center, which is where my IDE, editors, and "focused" work lives, and a 27" portrait orientation monitor on each side. The left one has a full-screen browser window for work stuff and the right one has a full-screen browser window for personal stuff. It's fantastic.)

Comment Re: AI doesn't lie. (Score 1) 73

Says who?

The AI's intent is defined by the way it is trained, and Gemini is trained to emphasize what the google executives want emphasized.

Mmmm.... if anything it's "what the Google engineers want emphasized". Executives at Google have surprisingly little control over technical decisions. For nearly all of Google's existence it's been an almost completely bottom-up driven company and while in the last few years management has been trying to exert more control it's a very, very slow process.

It's actually the engineering-driven culture that produces Google's infamous tendency to abandon products. Stuff gets built because some engineers think it's a good idea and convince their managers to let them run with it. Then eventually it gets boring and engineers tend to wander off to other teams in search of something interesting. If the product has managed to achieve significant userbase and/or revenue stream (and keep in mind that both are measured on Google scales; so anything less than 100M users or $1B/year is "not signficant").

In a top-down company products don't get built until they have significant executive support, which requires a fairly detailed plan, which gets executed and adjusted, and if an exec's project is in trouble it will get support. At Google products kind of wander out the door and into the world and if they happen to be a hit, great, if not, well, unless there are legally-binding contracts obligating the company to support something, it just gets shut down. Even with the projects that the executive leadership are really excited about (like AI!), their influence is mostly limited to shoveling resources at it.

Anyway, the point is that execs likely have little to no influence on Gemini training beyond setting very broad guidelines, and even those might not have much effect.

Comment Re:This is what stochastic parrots do (Score 1) 73

That's not because they're broken -- which is why I put "fix" in quotes in the previous paragraph. It's because that's how they work: it's an intrinsic property of all such models and no amount of computing power and/or model tweaking can change that: all it can do is obfuscate it. And obfuscated problems are far worse than obvious problems.

That's a strong statement. Can you explain why that isn't also true of human brains? What's the intrinsic difference?

Comment Re:Great, more marketing myths (Score 2) 29

Yeah, "LLM's are gods" and "statistical ML networks are good at finding defective code patterns" are extremely different claims.

The people who are True Believers on both extremes look pretty silly.

I appreciate really good closed captioning while having no use for chatbots. Both ends get to call me a heretic!

Comment Re: Anyone got examples (Score 3, Insightful) 29

They have multiple documented patched zero days and provided sha3 verifiable hashes for ones that will be released in the next 135 days. Knowing Anthropic and their track record, it seems highly unlikely they're lying. This is a game changer to the security community. In the long term it should be great, but in the short term it is going to surface hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities.

Comment Great, more marketing myths (Score 0) 29

Seriously, this constant delivery scam has to stop. And, again, because some some people still do not get what is going on: Finding some vulnerabilities is an attacker skill and of relatively low value for defenders. The only thing that really counts for defenders is which vulnerabilities this thing does not find. Quite non-surprisingly, there is no information on that.

Comment Compared to? (Score 1) 73

To be fair I just wasted a week tracking down a radio telemetry problem because of a forum post that many people said worked great but it definitely pulled a pin high that was supposed to be low, which shut off an antenna.

Only diving into the spec sheet and some sample embedded code convinced me that the forum post was exactly wrong and after making a simple change to do the opposite did all the telemetry devices mesh up and start reporting correctly.

So ... how does 90% compare to human content?

A wrinkle is that everybody knows humans are flawed and too many people treaty the LLM as omniscient.

Comment $1000/mo (Score 1) 36

Why should anybody care if this drives electric bills up to $1000/mo for the typical household?

We have unlimited energy, no?

Dipshits aren't creating a global energy crisis right now.

The world economy isn't headed for a global depression.

Natgas should be burned for LLM hallucinations and cats driving motorcycles, not converted into fertilizer to stave off a massive African famine.

Western woke governments haven't spent the past fifty years blocking new energy generation at every opportunity.

Right?

Don't invite the guillotines, dudes.

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