Eh. It’s useful for finding what I want to know. The result to a query which goes like “Based on this paragraph from some documentation written in 2005 (link) the answer is <bunch of generated text rehashing the information I wanted to find in the first place>” is a whole lot more useful than “Here is a list of thousands and thousands of irrelevant and incoherently sorted results, of which one is probably what you were looking for. Good luck.” which was, unfortunately, the state of the art up to this point.

I lived through the dotcom hype cycle, the 5G cycle, the crypto cycle, etc. The useful (boring!) bits of technology remain and something new and shiny becomes the target of hype and speculation a few years later. Nothing new really.

Yeah the AI hype levels are insane, but at the same time I think there is some interesting and actually useful technology there. That’s my 2c anyway.

The search thing is specific to internal data sets btw. Anyone who has used intranet search engines at large companies would probably relate just how terrible they are. Much worse than Google is at searching the internet.

Sure, you can’t trust LLMs and just copy-paste whatever comes out of it. But it’s very effective as a way to find something in very large mixed datasets when you may not know which exact keywords to use for a traditional search engine.

Perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology. But being able to ask in natural language “why is something the way it is” and it returns references to code, bugs, and documentation along with a small summary is pretty cool. It works better than any of the half-baked corporate search engines I’ve used before. Is this not “knowledge retrieval”? In any case I can see the utility.

AI can be a useful tool and I think it will slowly become more common in the workplace, for example it can be very convenient for knowledge retrieval, but it’s laughable to think that it can replace humans. I’d wager any time “AI” can replace a human the job could’ve already been automated through other means.

I’ve been looking at possible phone options too. There are several degoogled Android options but it’s still Android of course. And switching to a Linux phone seems like it would be really limiting without access to Android/iOS apps. Do Linux phone users just use the browser to replace all those apps? I guess it could work, though it seems less ergonomic.

I don’t have an Android phone currently but I thought I’d check on iOS and, yep, Google Drive has access to all files. Well that’s a bit hypocritical.

Fascism will surely be defeated by “slowing the nomination process”. Well, I guess it’s something. Sigh.

The children yearn for the minesfactories.

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“We are not monsters,” the officer told her, according to the statement. “We do what the government tells us.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see the Nuremberg defense being thrown around already.

That’s probably just mail that lands in your spam folder without being entirely blocked. According to Microsoft and Google approximately 99% of incoming spam (of the ~160 billion spam emails sent per day) never even reaches their users mailboxes. I assume that’s roughly standard across email providers. I am concerned comparably sophisticated filtering may become necessary on the Fediverse eventually.

I’ve been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I’ve been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it’s been around for 40 years and they’ve developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations for it.

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”

A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.

I recently switched to Linux and the latest KDE surprised me with how powerful it is. Scaling works. Fonts are rendered nicely. It’s just easy to use. Most of the time I don’t even think about the fact that I’m running Linux anymore.

I visited Europe recently and used a rideshare service, the guy was driving a new BYD compact SUV. I was surprised at how nice it was. The interior styling was still a little eccentric, which is something I noticed before with Chinese cars, but the build quality appeared to be very good. It was definitely a vehicle I would consider if they were for sale here in the US. American car manufacturers must be relieved to be protected by arbitrary trade barriers.

Yeah, it’s so unsurprising. It’s why I believe the US Demoractic party of today is, at least to some degree, controlled opposition. I don’t like this theory, but I cannot see a more rational explanation for their behavior. They’ve been letting the Republicans walk all over them for years. Why?