If you hypothetically were into dinosaurs as a kid in the 80’s and wanted to understand what’s happened since, where would you start? Books/movies/TV etc. Mostly nonfiction. Let’s take Jurassic Park and Prehistoric Planet as read

@atax1a (for those following along at home: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil )

Has any other product category had so many egg-on-the-face embarrassing launches and still somehow shuffled on? If Google had been this bad the first time I used it, I never would have gone back a second time.

OpenAI's SearchGPT appears to get lost on its first hunt

SearchGPT hallucinates answer in first demo video

TechRadar (www.techradar.com)

@faoluin @catsalad I did the research

An Economical Method for Securely Disintegrating Solid-State Drives Using Blenders

Pulverizing solid-state drives (SSDs) down to particles no larger than 2 mm is required by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to ensure the highest level of data security, but commercial disintegrators that achieve this standard are large, heavy, costly, and often difficult to access globally. Here, we present a portable, inexpensive, and accessible method of pulverizing SSDs using a household blender and other readily available materials. We verify this approach by pulverizing SSDs with a variety of household blenders for fixed periods of time and sieve the resulting powder to ensure appropriate particle size. Among the 6 household blenders tested, sharp-blade blenders with high peak power (1,380 W) and high blade speed (28,000 RPM) properly disintegrate 2.5-inch SSDs in less than 20 min. This method is useful for pulverizing small numbers of SSDs that contain secret information when on-site conventional disintegrators are not available or practical.

Scholarly Commons (commons.erau.edu)

@faoluin @catsalad blender

@inthehands One could imagine using a fixed set of model weights and not retraining, using a fixed random seed, and keeping the model temperature relatively low. I'm imagining on some level basically the programming-language-generating version of Nvidia's DLSS tech here. But that's not what people are doing and I'm not convinced if we did that it would be useful

@inthehands Another bull-case argument about LLMs is that they are a form of autonomation (autonomy + automation), in the sense that the Toyota Production System uses it, the classic example being the automated loom which has a tension sensor and will stop if one of the warp yarns break. But we already have many such systems in software, made out of normal non-LLM parts, and also that's ... not really what's going on here, at least the way they're currently being used.

@inthehands Yes! Yes. This is it exactly.

One can imagine a version of these systems where all the "source code" is English-language text describing a software system, and the Makefile first runs that through an LLM to generate C or Python or whatever before handing it off to a regular complier, which would in some sense be more abstraction, but this is like keeping the .o files around and making the programmers debug the assembly with a hex editor.

@inthehands The bet that a lot of these CXOs are making implicitly is that this will be like the transition from assembly to higher-level languages like C (I think most of them are too young and/or too disconnected to make it explicitly). And I'm not 100% sold on it but my 60% hunch is that it's not.

This, this, this.

@inthehands

As frustrating as it can be from the outside, anybody who's ever watched (or been) a developer who was like, "enh it was easier to write the library/script/tool that I needed from scratch than to use repurpose any of these several preexisting ones" has seen this in action

IOC.exchange

(ioc.exchange)

@lzg “what, the externally-visible work product is only _part_ of the work?????”

What I’m taking from this is that software engineers spend most of our time on engineering software, and writing code is (as expected) a relatively small portion of that work.

Imagine this for other engineering disciplines. “Wow structural engineers seem to spend most of their time on meetings and CAD and relatively little time physically building bridges with their hands! This is something AI can and should fix. I am very smart”

Amazon says developers spend 'just one hour per day' on actual coding

The company announced Amazon Q Developer, an AI tool designed to eliminate some of developers’ more tedious tasks.

Fortune (fortune.com)

@foone the flip side is that it’s always just as vulnerable and there are only more and more known vulnerabilities

@skinnylatte I very much regret that I never did any fishing while I lived in California, but also it had never occurred to me that sea urchin would be, like, a thing you could just, like, collect and eat

(In the same way that I’m still flabbergasted every time I remember that lemons and limes grow on trees there)