Em Adespoton

Heh; I remember when Candy Crush was just one guy and an Apple Developer account.

Yeah; allies still care because of the US military industrial complex. Compromising the US still compromises a large chunk of the world, making things even worse for everyone than the current US administration can do on its own.

The one thing I’m continually annoyed about though is battery management.

Why, in this day and age, do we not have a smartphone that can last on a single charge for a week? Instead, after a year or two of use, the devices with a glued in battery can barely last 8 hours on a charge.

Doesn’t seem all that smart.

There’s also the fact that

1. It’s only really good at this if you want it to generate Python, PowerShell, bash, or C++ code. Try any other language and it quickly assumes you’re using outdated and often incompatible libraries or doesn’t really understand how the language functions.
2. at the end of it all, neither you nor the AI has learned anything new; you’ll have to put in the exact same amount of work the next time. If you do it yourself, then over time that 10% advantage goes away.

Now, these things could both change over time, but humans are much more efficient to train than current state of the art probability sieves we call GenAI.

Single word answer, but it really is the best option: invest in people who need a kick start but are for the most part too poor to be grossly unethical.

Just make sure you’re investing in an ethical microloan company; some of them aren’t above a bit of grift themselves.

I don’t miss spending hours trying to get a slot on the modem pool.

But I’m still happy to while away a few hours on mume.org or some random Diku server.

Facebook was never fine; it just wasn’t a silo effect at first—but it was still a privacy and security nightmare.

I remember cliques and a lack of online monoculture on Usenet and IRC before the World Wide Web even existed; the web exploded things even further, as did the privatization of DNS and takeover of funding by VCs and ad conglomerates. All that had happened by 1998.

I’ve been using Apple products since 1979. I’d definitely say that the statement is true; Apple rarely leads the charge. That doesn’t mean they never do, but they tend to, in most cases, wait for a trustworthy tech to come along, and then push forward with it, dragging the rest of the market along behind them. There’s always innovations and synergies, many of which wouldn’t happen naturally in the market, but the stuff they integrate is generally already well tested and proved.

Counter examples include the original Macintosh, the Newton MessagePad and kinda-sorta the iPhone. More common behavior is related to things like PowerPC/ARM, USB, Firewire/Thunderbolt, nVME, trackpads, wireless peripherals, and the like.

When was this?

Asking as someone who’s been on the Internet since 1989.

For decades, many computer scientists have presumed that for practical purposes, the outputs of good hash functions are generally indistinguishable from genuine randomness — an assumption they call the random oracle model.

Er, no. The falsity of this is taught in virtually all first year CS courses.

Computer programmers and other IT workers? Sure… but hash functions have never been considered a substitute fore pure randomness.

That’s why we have a random generator in each computer based on thermal variance, I/O input, and other actually random features. And even then, we have to be careful not to hash the randomness out of the source data.

And those status reports will be generated by AI, because that’s where the real savings is.

So you treated it like a junior developer and did a thorough review of its output.

I think the only disagreement here is on the semantics.

Yeah, I’ve added AI to my review process. Sure, things take a bit longer, but the end result has been reviewed by me AND compared against a large body of code in the training data.

It regularly catches stuff I miss or ignore on a first review based on ignoring context that shouldn’t matter (eg, how reliable the person is who wrote the code).

I’ve had success with:

• dumping email threads into it to generate user stories,
• generating requirements documentation templates so that everyone has to fill out the exact details needed to make the project a success
• generating quick one-off scripts
• suggesting a consistent way to refactor a block of code (I’m not crazy enough to let it actually do all the refactoring)
• summarize the work done for a slide deck and generate appropriate infographics

Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.

Security isn’t the size of the app, it’s how you use it :)

Well, browse Google below the SEO dreck. Then follow the links.

Or, find some niche hobby site and follow its links.

Branch out from the world wide web… I still visit Hotline sites, the odd Gopher server, and other protocols of yesteryear.

Browse a few sites in the wayback engine and find linked sites that still exist there.

Or, go a totally different route and browse Tor or I2P.

That means you need to get out more.

The old Internet is still out there; it’s just that it is as flaky and hard to navigate as it always has been.

The “modern” Internet is just a select number of services that send each other traffic and run by the algorithm.

Most of the Internet I use in my spare time is stuff that’s been around since the 90s and still has about the same number of users it had then. Some of it is even indexed by search engines.

I wholeheartedly agree.

There are better emotions to feed, and they don’t tend to result in rejection.

“Black pill” is a different thing from not dating.

I never dated, just spent time with people who shared my interests. Eventually, I and one of the people who I shared interests with realized that we were often doing so exclusive of other people.

We essentially went from just living our lives to everyone seeing us as a couple, eventually us included.

Pursuing dating for the emotional high will let you down every time. Being real about who you are and what drives you, and learning to have healthy give and take relationships that don’t involve unrealistic expectations means you’ll end up with a more fulfilling life.

Supercomputers once required large power plants to operate, and now we carry around computing devices in out pockets that are more powerful than those supercomputers.

There’s plenty of room to further shrink the computers, simplify the training sets, formalize and optimize the training algorithms, and add optimized layers to the AI compute systems and the I/O systems.

But at the end of the day, you can either simplify or throw lots of energy at a system when training.

Just look at how much time and energy goes into training a child… and it’s using a training system that’s been optimized over hundreds of thousands of years (and is still being tweaked).

AI as we see it today (as far as generative AI goes) is much simpler, just setting up and executing probability sieves with a fancy instruction parser to feed it its inputs. But it is using hardware that’s barely optimized at all for the task, and the task is far from the least optimal way to process data to determine an output.