

I thought you made a good point. I have decades of experience and I find LLMs useful for the things you described.


Pee drinking is somewhat impressive, but can he eat shit and die?


Ooh, unemployment! How exciting! I love Microsoft now.


What even is the requirement? “Must be able to ask a chatbot to do stuff”?


“We were still required to find some ways to use AI. The one corporate AI integration that was available to us was the Copilot plugin to Microsoft Teams. So everyone was required to use that at least once a week. The director of engineering checked our usage and nagged about it frequently in team meetings.”
The managerial idiocy is astounding.


And it won’t be the rich that get hurt when the AI bubble bursts. It will be us.


I agree that they are useful for this. In fact, as a programmer I find them quite useful whenever I need a bit of a guided start on something that otherwise I’d have to trawl the internet to find. Once the LLM has given a pointer it’s easier to follow up with appropriate resources. And the LLM is useful for writing code when the code is predictable and you know reasonably precisely what you need, where the LLM really just saves you some typing and you know how to review it for correctness. Outside of these cases you have to be pretty careful how you use them.
But I don’t think LLMs are as useful a tool as the business people want them to be. Programming is unusual in that it involves very predictable patterns, and the aim is to find the most appropriate pattern for the task. And software documentation too follows very predictable patterns. Where an LLM has seen the exact same pattern many times, it will be good at producing it on demand. So programming and explaining software is a good use case for LLMs. But not many areas of activity are like this, and when you get out into all the nuance and complexity of other less formal domains, LLMs are so prone to slipping up that they’re much less useful.
I’ve tried getting LLMs to summarize notes for talks on complex topics, and they are not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to tidy documents and they’re not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to explain complex topics for someone who knows nothing, and they can be good at it but they can also be misleading, and you don’t know which one you’re getting unless you go to other sources you could have checked in the first place.
So I think they’re most useful for a quick orientation on a topic that points you to further sources, or for very highly formalized activities like programming. But they can’t be trusted for math or physics or law or medicine or literature or philosophy or complex decision making or psychology or any number of other areas.


It’s impressive, just not particularly useful, and certainly not something most people consider a priority.
Windows still takes forever to delete files, has a search indexer that makes laptops too hot to touch, steals focus while you’re typing in a password, takes much longer than Linux to open a web browser, turns apps white and “Not responding” for no apparent reason, has an ugly and slow Start menu that doesn’t foreground the things you want, pops up needless crap like stock tickers and news stories while you’re trying to get on with other things, sneakily turns on settings you deliberately turned off, and hassles you continually to agree to things you already said no to. And it spies on you.
Microsoft, if you’re looking to please users, those are all higher priorities for real users than any AI. But you’re not looking to please users, are you? Because Windows is for Microsoft, not for users.


They trained it on the work of people like you.


Web archives preserve information the US Government has deleted, like reports on the economy, climate change, and Black history. In general they work against censorship of the internet. This is just another case of using “protecting the children” as a cudgel to kill politically inconvenient sources of information.


Yet. Some exec at Microsoft is thinking “the problem is that PCs aren’t locked down like phones and there’s nothing stopping you from running an alt OS on the desktop yet.” If they can’t force everyone to use their AI crap they’ll lobby the US Government and give Donald Trump some fake award, and before you know it desktop Linux will be a crime just like fixing your own tractor is a crime.


deleted by creator


The EU, USA and UK will want to find any way to take down Spain’s government since it has shown itself to be genuinely left-wing and governing for the people not the billionaires. Internationally, Spain has stood out lately in holding sane positions that cast a stark light on the corruption and deceitfulness of neoliberals elsewhere. Anyway, that’s to say that we should read criticisms like this of Spain with that background in mind.
Chuck Schumer humiliates himself daily without anyone else’s help.


The cycles seem to be speeding up.


Since they give no indication of how they’re doing it or what information they’re gathering, no one can really explain. It may be some kind of traffic analysis where an AI provides heuristic recognition of probable VPN traffic.
I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?


I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.
They misspelled “whites”.