The Tigers are on track to outdo the 1995 Angels choke.

Yet another reason for me NOT to use Edge.

Which games did Twilight see?

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.

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?

Advertisers. And they'll include sound.

These products should be forced to have a privacy setup which guarantees that even if Facebook does accidentally get some private data, it goes no further and gets used for nothing. If they aren't safe for use in medical situations, they aren't safe to be released onto the street.

A ha ha ha ha!!! AHH HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

Oh wait, you're serious?

And the converse. The company gains productivity, because instead of staying home and not working when I've got [INSERT-MILD-ILLNESS-HERE], odds are I will be at home working at my job, because while I want to stay out of the office to protect my co-workers, I'm feeling good enough to work.

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.

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.

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.

Max Headroom, anyone? It was illegal to turn off the ads.

I'm just waiting for the Blipverts.

Yeah, I think we hit ultimate Poe's Law there.

My fridge just makes a noise when the door is left open. It's kind of annoying when I'm putting a lot of stuff in.

This is different. It's not financial like Munich was. This is digital sovereignty. You can't buy your way into that.