The AI boom

They misspelled “bubble.” None of the AI providers have a path towards profitability.

Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.

In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.

The challenge is basically twofold:

1. There’s a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
2. As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it’s displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.

As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.

I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.

Long story short:

• Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
• The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
• That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
• So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.

Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

Dude. I mean this in all sincerity: Eat my entire ass. Conflating voting with support for genocide might not be the stupidest thing I’ve ever encountered, but it’s gotta be in the top twenty.

You’re an advocate of not voting? Then I hope you get the day you voted for.

Welcome! Isn’t it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn’t trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it’s a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.

(Obligatory: I use arch BTW)

They can tell the difference. But you’d be amazed at the mental gymnastics someone with extremely strong motivations can engage in.

You gotta remember that these are mostly people who went back to the Trump trough three times in a row, even as he’s been steadily destabilizing and destroying their lives. If they admit they fucked up now, they have to admit they’ve been fucking up for over a decade, non-stop. Many of them would literally rather die than do that.

In order to get there, they need to recognize the fact that if they make themselves a disposable rubber-stamp for everything a dictator does, inevitably the dictator realizes he doesn’t even need them anymore and disposes of them.

I hope they are at the point of realization, but I have doubts.

God, that’s so frustrating. I want to shake them and shout, “No, your code is 100% ass now, but you don’t know it because it passes tests that were written by the same LLM that wrote your code! And you have barely laid eyes on it, so you’re forgetting what good code even looks like!”

So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it’s actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I’m sorry you’re having to put up with it.

I’m lucky that in my day job, we’re not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the “AI coding platform” our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can’t even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it’s such a piece of garbage.

“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.

I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.

Intermittent reminder that every single one of his tariffs is illegal.

Which version of Linux did you install? It supports a lot of them, and most have updaters that are easily configured from the task bar, just like Windows.

Thanks to this crap, the world is being flooded with awful, unmaintainable code, and the thing is, the LLMs that build it promptly forget everything about it as soon as you move on to the next task. Fixing this garbage will be an unending nightmare.

I interview juniors regularly. I can’t wait until the first time I interview a “vibe coder” who thinks they’re a developer, but can’t even tell me what a race condition is or the difference between synchronous and asynchronous execution.

That’s going to be a red letter day, lemme tell ya.

Is that a win for Google, though? They make most of their money from AdSense, because websites want to display ads. If people aren’t clicking through to websites from their search results, that seems like fewer opportunities to display ads, reducing the viability of AdSense.

Ask her to read the links from her ChatGPT queries with you. Do it together. Show her how ChatGPT is confidently and convincingly lying to her. And each time she comes back with another result from a biased prompt, do it again. Eventually she’ll at least stop trying to convince you that ChatGPT knows all, out of embarrassment.

What I really want conservatives to contend with is the fact that cutting the size of the federal workforce this way has done LITERALLY NONE of the things they always insist shrinking the government will accomplish.

• It has not reduced prices. In fact, those are way up.
• It has not reduced taxes on the middle and lower classes. In fact, those are up too (while taxes on the ultra-wealthy continue to drop).
• It has not made government services more efficient. In fact, those are now substantially shittier.
• It has not made health care less expensive.
• It has not made unemployment go down (obviously).
• It has not made the private sector step in where government services falter.

Everything is more expensive and less efficient now. Small government does not equal good government.

Conservatives, this is what happens when you elect people who will actually follow through on the batshit insane garbage you’ve always wanted. You own this mess.

Hmmm. The NVMe standard has existed since 2011, and Samsung released their first commercially-available drive with it in 2013. So Microsoft has had at least 12 years to make nvmedisk.sys the standard driver for these disks.