floofloof
@floofloof@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken 17 hours ago:
Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but for several years and on several different machines I’ve found Linux just works, while Windows is an endless treadmill of frustration and brokenness.
- Submitted 1 day ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on Microsoft says Copilot will 'finish your code before you finish your coffee' adding fuel to the Windows 11 AI controversy that's still raging 1 day ago:
I thought you made a good point. I have decades of experience and I find LLMs useful for the things you described.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Goes Haywire, Boasts About Billionaire’s Pee-Drinking Skills and ‘Blowjob Prowess’ 1 day ago:
Pee drinking is somewhat impressive, but can he eat shit and die?
- Comment on Microsoft says Copilot will 'finish your code before you finish your coffee' adding fuel to the Windows 11 AI controversy that's still raging 1 day ago:
Ooh, unemployment! How exciting!
- Comment on Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats 1 day ago:
What even is the requirement? “Must be able to ask a chatbot to do stuff”?
- Comment on Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats 1 day ago:
“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.
- Comment on Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats 1 day ago:
And it won’t be the rich that get hurt when the AI bubble bursts. It will be us.
- Submitted 2 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 2 days ago:
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, and the LLM really just saves you some typing.
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.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 2 days ago:
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… Microsoft, those are all higher priorities for real users than some AI assistant.
- Comment on Cloudflare blames massive internet outage on 'latent bug' 3 days ago:
They trained it on the work of people like you.
- Comment on UK Labour to Let Authorities Take Jewelry From Asylum-Seekers as Part of Sweeping New Immigration Crackdown 4 days ago:
The policy, which some critics said was “reminiscent of the Nazi era,” was just one part of the Labour Party’s total overhaul of the nation’s asylum system, which it says must be made much more restrictive in order to fend off rising support for the far-right.
One day the policy of fending off the far right by becoming them surely has to pay off. Maybe once the last Labour supporter has left and turned the lights off.
- Submitted 4 days ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Adguard DNS: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 1 week ago:
Please don’t say that too loud. Some exec at Microsoft will hear “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,” and they’ll lobby the US Government, and before you know it desktop Linux will be a crime just like fixing your own tractor is a crime.
- CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: "The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!"www.patrick-breyer.de ↗Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 54 comments
- Comment on I've heard New Yorkers are devastated 1 week ago:
Mamdani. I wouldn’t be picky but Cuomo made it a deliberate act of disrespect to get his name wrong.
- Comment on Exclusive: Ofcom is monitoring VPNs following Online Safety Act. Here's how 1 week ago:
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.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on Air Tag Alternative 1 week ago:
I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?
- Comment on US to remove warnings from menopause hormone therapy 1 week ago:
So then it’s safe to give to trans people too, and we won’t hear Republicans pretending it isn’t?
- Comment on what would you do with an old dell server? 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on God ****** dammit, here we go again 1 week ago:
The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source, so you don’t know which passwords to change. To be safe you’d have to do all of them.
Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.
- Comment on God ****** dammit, here we go again 1 week ago:
Only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.
Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Presumably once YouTube finishes rolling out age verification, all these age restricted videos will require logging in to view them.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on Is Kagy web browser worth it? 2 weeks ago:
Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.
- Comment on 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower 2 weeks ago:
You can talk horsepower and dogpower all day, but I won’t really understand until you translate it into bananapower, for scale.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.
