My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"
Entry: 2025-06-02 18:58:03.077182+02 re-moat work by Dan Lyke comments 0
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
When the job lets you dig your own hole, that’s re-moat work.
[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-06-01 23:38:48.473857+02 The Italian Job, Blues Brothers, and eternal vigilance by Dan Lyke comments 0
This is marvelous: The West Australian — Andrew Miller: Classic car chases educate a child’s mind in ways the classroom just can’t
I was supposed to be helping the six-year-old with reading practice, but we got distracted and ended up watching classic car chases on YouTube.
Specifically, comparing and contrasting wanton automotive carnage in the movies The Italian Job and The Blues Brothers.
This naturally led to explaining the historical relevance of the Illinois Nazis — who met their demise by driving off an incomplete flyover while pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues — and why popular culture so often circles back to the dark risks of fascism.
[ related topics: Movies Sociology Heinlein Beer California Culture Automobiles ]
Entry: 2025-05-28 20:13:36.270822+02 Seattle PD shows up. Sometimes. by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Needling: Phew! City Always Has Enough Seattle Police Officers Around to Harass Queer Community
“Can our police respond to every domestic violence call? No. Can they respond to the scene of every shooting with a victim 5 minutes away in less than 20 minutes? Also, no,” said Mayor Harrell. “But I give you my word that there will always suddenly be a phalanx of cops available and quickly on-hand any time a queer person is legally naked at public longtime nude beach, exercising their First Amendment rights at a public park named after a gay legislator in the middle of a gay neighborhood, or asserting they have just as much a right to be at Seattle City Hall as any right-wing, religious nut-job does. Men baring nipples at a gay club? We always have enough cops to shut that shit down too.”
Non-satirically: 8 more arrests at dueling protests, this time at Seattle City Hall
The religious group arrived downtown first, finding a section of Fourth Avenue barricaded. They occupied the space behind the barricade and blocked exits with their private security, backed up by Seattle police officers, controlling the flow of people allowed onto the steps of City Hall.
[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment Nudity Law Enforcement Heinlein Civil Liberties Community Seattle ]
Entry: 2025-05-22 19:42:03.095075+02 Charlie Stross on Office 365 by Dan Lyke comments 0
Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop
Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.
Two reasons.
1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).
2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.
So good riddance to Office365!
[ related topics: Humor Books Privacy Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:08:05.228164+02 LLMs unredeemable? by Dan Lyke comments 0
In what follows, I will argue that being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable—at scale—is the killer feature of LLMs, not a bug that will ever be meaningfully addressed, and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology. By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:08:01.933266+02 Where are the Alexa+ AI users? by Dan Lyke comments 1
David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
me a month ago: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/0...d-alexa-in-february-where-is-it/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/0...d-alexa-in-february-where-is-it/
Reuters today: Weeks after Amazon's Alexa+ AI launch, a mystery: where are the users?
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:08:00.321419+02 Could have bought that for $20/month by Dan Lyke comments 0
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:07:07.240274+02 Grok goes full racist by Dan Lyke comments 0
You probably read about the whole Twitter pushing South African whiteness thing, but just to make note of it: xAI blames Grok’s obsession with white genocide on an ‘unauthorized modification’.
On Wednesday, Grok began replying to dozens of posts on X with information about white genocide in South Africa, even in response to unrelated subjects. The strange replies stemmed from the X account for Grok, which responds to users with AI-generated posts whenever a person tags “@grok.”
"Someone" fucked up the system prompt. Which, of course reveals how much might be hiding in the system prompt generally.
Via.
Of course the story is changing and evolving: Musk ("xAI") now claims grok was hacked based on this repost of an xAI statement.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-05-16 17:02:25.498895+02 Why to use AI by Dan Lyke comments 0
Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party
If you aren’t using AI, you run a very real risk of falling behind in the race to produce voluminous mediocrity while slowly forgetting how to do your own job.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-05-12 04:54:39.285691+02 AI roundup for the weekend by Dan Lyke comments 0
Malicious npm Packages Infect 3,200+ Cursor Users With Backdoor, Steal Credentials. That's Cursor — The AI Code Editor
Gender, nationality can influence suspicion of using AI in freelance writing
A new study by researchers at Cornell Tech and the University of Pennsylvania shows freelance writers who are suspected of using AI have worse evaluations and hiring outcomes. Freelancers whose profiles suggested they had East Asian identities were more likely to be suspected of using AI than profiles of white Americans. And men were more likely to be suspected of using AI than women.
Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills
In the study "AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking," published in Societies, Gerlich investigates whether AI tool usage correlates with critical thinking scores and explores how cognitive offloading mediates this relationship.
Via, in the replies @borderham.bsky.social notes
It’s not that the machines are getting smarter. They’re just making us dumber.
And the whole thing is in a longer thread about Eric Schmidt's AI batshittery, which is making me think that maybe giving all of the capital to not terribly smart people who allocate money based on who blows smoke up their ass most effectively is going to lead to some pain...
Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
Beware any industry that claims you need more of what it is selling to offset negative externalities generated by its unbridled use. This seems to be the pitch of the AI cheerleaders: If your systems are doing a poor job screening automated activity from AI, the real problem is you're not using enough AI, dumbass.
Pivot to AI: Study: Your coworkers hate you for using AI at work: PNAS: Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll
[ related topics: Interactive Drama virus Invention and Design Writing Current Events Work, productivity and environment Television Heinlein Currency Education Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2025-05-09 22:53:42.104504+02 Lackadaisical engineer still is by Dan Lyke comments 0
In response to Pivot to AI's round-up of stories about how "prompt engineer" isn't actually a real job, Rycochet @Rycochet@furs.social notes:
@davidgerard 'I didn't spend two years using Stable Diffusion to generate big bosom, small girl anime pictures for 'memes', I was working as a freelance Prompt engineer! I even got retweeted by Elon once so you know I'm good! He doesn't just retweet any old garbage from a blue checkmark, you know.'
[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-04-28 03:30:03.209222+02 My neighborhood is like a third of the by Dan Lyke comments 0
My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"
[ related topics: Photography Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-04-27 00:00:38.429241+02 instant technical debt by Dan Lyke comments 0
Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town
Just described model-generated code as "instant technical debt" and I have to make sure not to use that in a job interview.
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-04-21 17:33:01.79891+02 ex-pope by Dan Lyke comments 0
Something in the air... Rick Gualtieri @rickgualtieri.bsky.social
So, reading between the lines, the Pope basically decided he would rather die than meet with JD Vance.
We get it, Pope Francis. Trust me, we do.
Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer
Pope Francis met with JD Vance and then literally fucking died of cringe.
Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone (accompanied by a picture)
this meeting could have been a (leaked) signal chat
Newsthump: Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance
A White House spokesperson told us, “This President is all about creating jobs for Americans, and just hours after a visit from the Vice President, we find yet another top global job has become available.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
I find it pretty interesting that US Vice President keeps referring to the late Pope as "Francis" instead of Jorge Mario Bergoglio – I thought James Donald Bowman had pretty strong opinions on birthnames. 🤔
[ related topics: Theater & Plays Heinlein Race Gambling Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-04-09 18:27:53.256126+02 Border Patrol lying by Dan Lyke comments 0
Nationwide there are roughly four times more Border Patrol than ICE agents. In El Centro, there are five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.
Their latest project is a series of fictionalized videos portraying migrants crossing the border as menaces with a bloodlust to commit crimes. Bovino shared the first video on social media with the caption: “Any town. Any neighborhood. Any family. When heartless criminals, sex offenders, and human traffickers illegally enter the United States and get away, they prey on our children, the most vulnerable members of our communities.”
We know, of course, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, statistically are less likely to engage in criminal activity than citizens.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Heinlein Community Video Economics ]
Entry: 2025-04-03 23:36:03.238695+02 Today's tariff news by Dan Lyke comments 0
Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.
The price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 2.3% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $3,800 in 2024$. Annual losses for households at the bottom of the income distribution are $1,700.
As others have pointed out, in the face of an 11½% effective percentage point increase, it's perhaps worth looking back to previous tariff disasters
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff remains a cautionary example of protectionist economic policy, frequently cited in debates over the risks and consequences of trade restrictions in modern economic discourse.[3] Excluding duty-free imports, the tariffs under the act were the third highest in U.S. history, after the tariffs imposed on the world by Trump in 2025 and Tariff of 1828.[4]
[ related topics: Dave Winer Invention and Design Current Events Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Race Economics Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-03-27 17:50:02.340999+01 I think it's becoming more and more by Dan Lyke comments 0
I think it's becoming more and more clear that the "AI job skills" for the future will not be focused on using AI as an assistant, but in understanding and mitigating the impacts of AI as an adversary.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-03-25 15:25:02.92101+01 Heard someone yesterday who's part of a by Dan Lyke comments 0
Heard someone yesterday who's part of a healthcare startup bemoan that their IT group isn't approving use of Microsoft's LLM product, and... We as an industry have done a really bad job educating people about privacy, security, *and* LLMs.
[ related topics: Humor Privacy Microsoft moron Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-03-22 00:59:52.10654+01 ChatGPT and loneliness by Dan Lyke comments 0
OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing
The researchers found some intriguing differences between how men and women respond to using ChatGPT. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who set ChatGPT’s voice mode to a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI currently has no plans to publish either study.
OpenAI Study Finds Links Between ChatGPT Use and Loneliness
Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organizations and have not been peer reviewed.
[ related topics: Current Events Heinlein Gambling ]
Entry: 2025-03-17 22:04:31.839321+01 Willing to take that risk by Dan Lyke comments 0
The great thing about this story isn't the guy who's willing to go to jail for destruction of evidence rather than cop to corporate espionage, it's that the Deel executive team was so bloody inept in their spying when they fell for the Rippling honeypot: Lawsuit Alleges $12 Billion "Unicorn" Deel Cultivated Spy, Orchestrated Long-Running Trade-Secret Theft & Corporate Espionage Against Competitor
Deel’s Alleged Spy Locked Himself in Bathroom When Confronted by Court-Appointed Solicitors Friday
“I’m Willing to Take that Risk [of Violating the Court Order]” Alleged Deel Spy Declared When Served with Legal Papers to Hand Over His Phone
[ related topics: Weblogs Law Heinlein Sports ]
Entry: 2025-03-11 18:02:09.715832+01 AI Search has a citation problem by Dan Lyke comments 0
Columbia Journalism Review: AI Search Has A Citation Problem
Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong
Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.
TechMeme rounds up coverage, got this from Their Fediverse feed.
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-01-27 19:35:02.903451+01 OH Keeping up with React changes is a by Dan Lyke comments 2
OH: "Keeping up with React changes is a full-time job".
So, uh, tell me again what this framework is offering?
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-01-18 00:50:43.213564+01 Is cinema sexy again? by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm trending remarkably vanilla, but this is interesting: Is cinema sexy again? How 'Babygirl' is inspiring important conversations about kink
“I think that Babygirl does an excellent job of portraying two people, new to BDSM/kink, trying to understand and act on their desires,” Dr. Stefani Goerlich, a clinical sexologist and award-winning author, says.
“Unfortunately, it does an excellent job of showing the risks, dangers, and pitfalls of trying to stumble into kink - without calling them out as such in the film. So the end result is a film that accurately depicts the ways in which people new-to-BDSM can get themselves into trouble (physical and emotional) but it is NOT a positive portrayal of BDSM, because it shows these negative outcomes without critical analysis or discussion of how to do things correctly.”
[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Sociology Television Heinlein California Culture Community ]
Entry: 2024-11-26 18:35:02.615631+01 One Petaluma podcast feels like it by Dan Lyke comments 0
The One Petaluma podcast feels like it sometimes struggles to get its feet, but I'm really enjoying episode #4 where city staff talk about what drew them to and keeps them in the job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoDNtyyzdM
[ related topics: Movies Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-11-07 19:25:42.097752+01 Automate that gold farming! by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Merry Jerry 🎄🎅🕎⛄️❄️ @jerry@infosec.exchange
I think i stumbled on the next billion dollar idea: AI bots to play video games for you. Playing video games can be mentally taxing - wouldn’t it be nice to offload that work to AI so you can do other things, like get a 3rd job to help pay for my game playing AI bot?
[ related topics: Games Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Currency Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2024-11-05 20:18:22.39178+01 Strategy by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT RolloTreadway @RolloTreadway@beige.party
@davej @RickiTarr There's an old trade unionist saying here in the UK, which I bring up quite often but it often bears repeating:
Vote Labour on Thursday, fight Labour on Friday.
And I think that works in most countries, replacing Labour with the name of the relevant party. You vote for the people you're most able to influence, you do everything you can to help them win, and when they do win, that's when you get to work.
[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-29 22:35:02.02242+01 Julia Evans does a great job of by Dan Lyke comments 2
Julia Evans does a great job of demystifying things like Git, and recontextualizing a lot of technologies that olds like me take for granted for the kids these days.
It's fascinating to see this "what do the control characters do" chart, because there's so much "yeah, but, and...", and yet it's kinda mostly right and I can see that contextualization.
https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/113392535388687769
[ related topics: Children and growing up Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-29 21:14:43.618+01 Virtual interviewee by Dan Lyke comments 0
What I’m really not sure about though is what the endgame is for this person? How will they pass 3-4 rounds of interviews? What will they achieve if offered a job? When does the time spent on this pay off?
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2024-10-22 21:25:02.855833+02 Realization by Dan Lyke comments 0
Realization: LLMs are automating Malcolm Gladwell's job.
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-12 17:46:43.349261+02 Limited Federation by Dan Lyke comments 0
Shades of the old Elf Sternberg "Balkanize Usenet" proposal: The Oliphant: Islands
Islands are opt-in federated networks consisting of a chain of allowlist or “limited federation” servers linked together. Everyone in the network federates with each other, and as such the entire network is more resilient and able to handle moderation challenges simply impossible in the wider fediverse.
Although I think Tara is doing an amazing job at moderating the Mastodon instance I use.
[ related topics: broadband tolkien Writing Heinlein Net Culture ]
Entry: 2024-09-30 03:45:02.533712+02 And Friday was miserable yesterday I by Dan Lyke comments 0
And Friday was miserable, yesterday I was a total lump, today I got out in the shop and did some stuff (built some fixtures for bandsaw bearings, still don't know why the blade is drifting like it is, need to get work sorted so I feel justified in springing for the Carter upgrade rather than something I built myself with a file and a hack saw and skate bearings).
But I'm definitely testing positive for COVID now. Ugh.
[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Skating Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-09-10 00:51:41.23322+02 Square dance community musings by Dan Lyke comments 0
As I won't shut up about, Charlene and I obviously had a good time at Sactown Stomp this last weekend. Re-energized us on much of what we love about square dancing and the square dance community. Some good conversations there, and the drive home involved discussion about what we could do short of trying to start a club again to help bring more of the energy we love to our participation in square dancing. Which made us ask what makes the square dance fly-in format so much more sense of community than the club event, and I think we settled on a few things:
So we're trying to think about what this means. Would it draw anyone, for instance, to rent a hall for the day before an evening dance and inviting some callers you may not have experienced before to play? Are two rooms important for that?
Is there a way to get the sense of "sitting down with friends for dinner" without completely overwhelming a single kitchen by bringing 3 squares of people into a restaurant at one time? Does catering work? (This is where a few hundred people and a walkable region around a hotel works.)
No answers, just brainstorming. Thinking about venues (a walkable downtown would be cool for so many reasons, so could ya, like, rent Out West Garage for a weekend?). Thinking about ways to piggyback on existing events. Thinking about the SCVSDA Jubilee and other similar events...
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Food Space & Astronomy Law Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Travel Community ]
Entry: 2024-09-09 19:18:53.203986+02 Weekend by Dan Lyke comments 0
Friday we went up to Sacramento, plugged the car into an L2 charger in a garage in old town Sacramento, wandered through the heat towards downtown, eventually found Capital Books, came back via a snack at Salud restaurant on Cesar Chavez plaza, to discover that the L2 charger was running about 3kW. Sigh. Anyway, fun party that evening, danced 'til I couldn't see straight at Sactown Stomp, hosted by Capital City Squares. First time seeing so many of those folks since COVID started, some bumps 'cause this was an attempt to reboot Stumptown Stomp in a new venue (that wasn't as walkable as Guerneville, both from geography and heat) and carpet in one of the dance venues.
Sunday we went up to Grass Valley on Sunday, saw those kids, but/and... trying to keep to L2 charging, in the afternoon we parked the car up at the campus, hung out at the koi pond, and walked down to Briarpatch Co-op to refill water and use the bathroom and stuff. So we bought a container of gelato and sat in the AC and I noticed that there, in the community ownership locally grown whatever and so forth (with, let's be fair, prices to match)... that it was a Unilever brand.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Invention and Design Food Heinlein Sports Automobiles Community Fashion Maps and Mapping Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-07-19 17:39:22.678587+02 Recruiting, with visas and champagne by Dan Lyke comments 0
SpaceX rivals are trying to capitalize on Elon Musk’s move to Texas by poaching his employees. Stanislas Maximin, of Latitude:
"For SpaceX employees misaligned with these values and looking to join an inclusive and highly ambitious rocket company in a great living city near Paris, my DMs are open," he wrote on X.
"We take care of everything for you; moving out, visas, full healthcare, your house/apartment, finding your spouse a job… a few have already taken the plunge, join them!" Maximin said. He added that he would offer 12 bottles of champagne to every engineer making the move.
Via.
[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Marriage Real Estate ]
Entry: 2024-07-08 23:24:06.794119+02 Productivity and hours worked by Dan Lyke comments 0
Good to see DeMarco & Lister mentioned in this. It's amazing how much modern software development stuff ignores things that we knew back in 1987: RT david_chisnall @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
@bbbhltz @hacks4pancakes When people join my team, I tell them to go and look at productivity studies. Across different industries (I originally thought this was solely for knowledge workers, but I recently chatted to a researcher who has reproduced the same result in the construction industry), they all show roughly the same shape:
Productivity increases up to 20 hours a week.
It then plateaus up to 40.
It then starts to decrease and is typically negative by about 60.
This is the total net productivity, not the delta. If you are working 60 hour weeks, you would probably be more productive if you just stayed in bed all day.
For programmers, just think about how long it takes to fix a bug that you introduced when you were tired. Fixing mistakes (in any field) is often slow and expensive. Reducing the likelihood of making mistakes is usually much cheaper.
This is for sustained periods. People can often be productive for a 60-hour week if they are well rested, so if you have a one-off urgent deadline, it *may*be okay to work longer hours to meet it, as long as you take enough time off to recover. Averaged out (factoring in the recovery time), this tends to be less productive overall (ignoring the secondary impacts on people who have other commitments, like to see their families, and so on), so it’s generally a bad idea.
I want the most productive 20 hours of each employee each week. I don’t care when they happen (I’ve worked with some people who find they are most productive 2-4am, and that’s fine). Employees are responsible for getting enough rest to make sure that they can be productive for 20 hours each week.
I wrote our vacation policy to be explicit about the point of leave. It is not a gift from the company. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is an obligation from the employees to the company to ensure that their brains are taken care of so that they can be productive. My contract (which is the model for new employees) has a minimum amount of leave I must take each year and a maximum time I can go without taking at least two days of leave.
The book I most recommend to new managers is PeopleWare and the most important point in that book is that, as a manager, it is not your job to make people work. Most people take pride in their work and want to do it well. Your job is to remove obstacles that stop them from being able to do good work. I don’t think it goes quite far enough because sometimes the biggest obstacle is the employee. If you’re hiring smart and motivated people, the most likely failure mode is that they work too hard and don’t notice their productivity dropping off. Sometimes you have to force them to take a week off (and you need a leave policy that supports you in doing so).
Sorry for the long rant, I haven’t had coffee yet and bad management annoys me, even when it’s depressingly accurate satire.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Machinery Fabrication Model Building Furniture ]
Entry: 2024-07-02 18:08:38.169261+02 "AI" cynicism of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Goldman Sachs: Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit? Turns out $50B for $3B in revenue might not be a great trade-off.
Business Insider: Goldman Sachs says the return on investment for AI might be disappointing
Via @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange who points out that, among other things:
Experienced developers using Copilot are 20% less productive.
Which I think we knew, we also know that Copilot generated code creates technical debt. And that training costs are going up faster than capability increases.
RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social
An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:
1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, offering several options.
2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.
3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.
Fun times.
To which Amelia Bellamy-Royds @AmeliaBR@front-end.social replied:
@mhoye New addendum to "A computer can never be held accountable, so a computer should never make a management decision":
Managers who think their job can be replaced by a computer, and who will do anything to avoid being held to account, they should never make a management decision, either.
Edit, just because I needed a place to hang it 'cause I don't think it's actually worth following, but it's nice to have: Vox: What, if anything, is AI search good for? (tl;dr: nobody knows)
[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2024-06-19 19:55:01.893718+02 Because it's fire season way by Dan Lyke comments 0
Because it's fire season, way early, another shout out to https://www.watchduty.org/ . In a world where "local journalism" seems to be "republishing Nixle alerts, but with typos", Watch Duty does an *amazing* job of integrating public data, crowd-sourced information, and official updates.
Definitely worth donating to and using if you're in fire country.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Journalism and Media Heinlein Pyrotechnics ]
Entry: 2024-06-17 23:31:58.9238+02 Ants on Caffeine by Dan Lyke comments 0
Sure, let's give ants drugs, what could go wrong? Pest Management Professional: Caffeine experiment poses new strategies for ant control
Ants given caffeine do an even better job of locating food
The focus here seems to be not on weaponized picnic destruction, but on getting ants to carry poisons back to their nests faster, but...
iScience: Acute exposure to caffeine improves foraging in an invasive ant
Without caffeine, we found no effect of consecutive foraging visits on the time the ants take to reach a reward, suggesting a failure to learn the reward’s location. However, under low to intermediate caffeine concentrations ants were 38% faster with each consecutive visit, implying that caffeine boosts learning. Interestingly, such improvements were lost at high doses.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109935
[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Food Current Events Heinlein Education ]
Entry: 2024-06-17 18:52:40.824644+02 Ride that hype machine! by Dan Lyke comments 0
Financial Times, June 16 2024: AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’
Simon Stephens, AI lead for audit and assurance at Deloitte UK, says: “One way it will help is by automating large portions of manual data entry, saving time whilst allowing people to focus on more value-added and often more interesting tasks.”
“There is not really going to be a blockchain team any longer,” said a person familiar with the situation.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-06-03 18:39:51.561738+02 Moving debugging from 90% of programming to 100% of it by Dan Lyke comments 1
How does AI impact my job as a programmer:
Remember; already, the overwhelming majority of our time in the programming tools goes into tasks that require the investigative skill set rather than the building skill set. Large language models shift even more of that time into investigation, because the moment the team gets a chance to build, they turn around and ask ChatGPT (or Copilot, or Devin, or Gemini) to do it. When we learn that we need to integrate with Google Cloud Storage, or spaCy, or SQS Queue, or Firebase? Same thing: turn around and ask the LLM to draft the integration.
[ related topics: Software Engineering Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
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