Few programs in the world are as exhaustively documented as Excel; there are so many doorstop books cataloguing the use and output of every object, method, and function.

So, that's perfect for reverse-engineering it, as long as you have a lot of programming time - or programming suddenly got almost-free. Just shove all those Excel manuals into your best coding LLM and tell it to clone excel with free code we can all use.

I will finally be impressed with AI-coding; and I will finally be able to leave Microsoft entirely, because the giant mountain of tools that is excel is my one reason I just can't leave; it's too useful.

Oh, clone ODBC while you're at it. Database hits are what Libre Calc particularly sucks at, and for me, database-front-ending and reporting was it's finest feature.

"... to target 87 people -- among them government ministers, senior military officials and journalists."
If the targets had been Average Joe they would still be at it. But hot damn, annoy a politician or journalist and you are done for.

You think they might work on perfecting the smart part, before looking for more places to jam it in...

"Burden Foreign Countries with Slop"

All over the continent, Emergency Rooms are backlogged and overworked. Doctors claim that paperwork steals a lot of their time, drags their efficiency.
And "medical paperwork" isn't about re-inventing a company, or building a new factory, or anything else that requires creativity and New Ideas: it's mostly the same 100-odd tasks over and over, the most, ah 'popular' diseases and injuries.

So doctors should be able to just do their medical treatments in an age of AI, narrate their day into a microphone as they go, and all the paperwork should just be done by itself, freeing up, what, 20-30% of all doctor time in the medical system? As if hundreds of thousands of doctors just popped into existence to clear away all the backlogs, give better treatment?

So: this is just about the easiest paperwork job to automate, and surely the most desperately-needed top priority. If AI doing white collar jobs isn't bullshit, then we should be seeing a major improvment in ER wait times, this year. Next? When? Please be specific.

In "Accidental Empires" pen-name Robert X. Cringely wrote a history of the first wave of microcomputer development - mostly Jobs and Gates and Aldus/Adobe, etc. In the first chapter, he points out that new information technologies

1) take 30 years to sink in: telephone invented 1870, changed lives after 1900; motion pictures invented 1890, big industry by 1920s; television invented 1920s, major industry by 1950s.

2) Rarely do what was envisioned at first. Bell thought phones would be used to broadcast music, and radio pioneers thought it would be used two way; both were opposite to each other. Early phonographs had record heads and they imagined spoken "letters" sent by mail...

Predicting WHAT the LLMs will actually do at this point is asking to be a comedy meme in a few years. People will just have to muck around with the tools for a while before they find out what they will really do for us.

Ironically, Cringely's point in that chapter is that the microcomputer revolution had to be invented by amateurs mucking around, because it takes too long for a new technology to settle in, to be worth the investment. He also notes that aviation was much-invented by the leftover planes and leftover pilots from WW1 just barnstorming and tinkering.

This time, the investors think they CAN stick around until payday comes...but if this one is also still 25 years away (I think we're at year 5 now?), then I don't see the money lasting that long.

Go read some history, you'll find these same articles.

I just completely automated most of our IC2 and IC3 network engineering processes with GPT agents.

Not redid; the AI executes the same workflows and tools better, cheaper, and faster. Compressing months of work to two weeks.

It's real.

Slackware was my first distro. I was working with Solaris and NCR/Unix at the time. I had some issues and a friend who has a 3 digit ID (Hi Matt ) recommended Slashdot as a resource. At that time it was a HUGE technical pool with working admins and engineers abundant. I got what I needed and I've been a LinuxHead ever since. I still have Slack running on a Digital Alpha machine that does nothing...

If you show up at work sick, you do less, and make more mistakes, but mostly you'll give your illness to others. You openly cough in the conference room and you get sent home.
It is a wee bit of an over reaction but following covid nobody wants to take a chance.

Helo

Over-the-air HDTV is still putting out up to 18Mb/s per channel. It's some of the highest-quality streaming that there is, and it's free!

I've been recording it with entirely legal equipment for about five years now, use FFMPEG to crush the huge files down to H265 or H264 for action shows where movement shows some artifacts at H265. But mostly we just watch the shows within a few weeks, lots of room on the SSD of the ultrabook that controls the TV.

http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug

I personally hate discord for other reasons, but there are all kinds of places that refer you to their discord server for help or support. The need for an ID always pissed me off, but now needing a REALID is goning to impact that even more...
I avoid dealing with entities via Discord, that includes buying or supporting.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-...

David Roberts of the Volts podcast asked full-time, full-career China expert Lauri Myllyvirta in April 2024, this exact question and got a clear answer: they're building them because they are forced. To get local permission for other projects, from the local regional boss (think "Duke") whom Xi needs to keep power. They can defy the national direction to some extent.

To build your solar/wind farm in China, you often have to build a coal plant, and buy coal, since the local Duke sells the stuff and hates the whole solar thing. So you get a lot of coal plants. What you don't get is more coal sales than they can get away from. The plants are often at very low capacity factor, sometimes under 20%.

Volts.wtf is strongly recommended for anybody wanting to keep up on the transition, the bad news as well as the good.

Good point. I usually read at 5 pt font which is smaller than the default but your point is very valid. I checked and GR doesn't track anything of real value beyond the number of pages in a printed volume, but many are e-books only so who knows...