floofloof
@floofloof@lemmy.ca
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 4 days ago:
That’s been the thinking for the last couple of decades at least. But it can’t continue if people can’t afford new hardware.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 4 days ago:
If there’s any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
- Comment on Big Brother Is Watching Your Online Criticism of ICE Crackdowns 4 days ago:
They’re still preparing for when they have enough force.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
Even more efficient: humans do the specs and the implementation. AI has nothing to contribute to specs, and is worse at implementation than an experienced human. The process you describe, with current AIs, offers no advantages.
AI can write boilerplate code and implement simple small-scale features when given very clear and specific requests, sometimes. It’s basically an assistant to type out stuff you know exactly how to do and review. It can also make suggestions, which are sometimes informative and often wrong.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
The hard thing about debugging other people’s code is understanding what they’re trying to do. Once you’ve figured that out it’s just like debugging your own code. But not all developers stick to good patterns, good conventions or good documentation, and that’s when you can spend a long time figuring out their intention. Until you’ve got that, you don’t know what’s a bug.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 week ago:
Capitalism is destroying the world. We need to rise up against that. The AI bullshit is just one manifestation of the whole world being geared to serve capital and the handful of people that control it.
- Comment on Netflix kills casting from phones 1 week ago:
Isn’t that like inviting all your friends and family onto your LAN? That would seem to have its own security risks.
- Comment on Thieves are starting to steal RAM now that it's as expensive as gold — a memory kit disappears in the snail mail at four in the morning with a bogus signature 1 week ago:
It’s a good time to preserve old hardware and software that will run on it. If all these price crunches have a silver lining, I hope it’s that they motivate people to resist the pressure from tech corporations to be constantly upgrading.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Comment on YSK that americans can now deduce private jet expenses from their taxes 2 weeks ago:
Deduct. And the USA is taking the world in completely the opposite direction from where it needs to go.
- Comment on LisaGUI recreates Apple’s Lisa interface in your browser 2 weeks ago:
The Infinite Mac site linked from this story is also impressive, and runs the actual OSes.
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 2 weeks ago:
It pays badly and it can be disorganized, but I prefer it to the bullshit you get with big corporations, and no one I work with is that bad of a person. So yes, it has its upsides.
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 2 weeks ago:
I’ve become quite good at paying just enough attention that I can jump in if anything important comes up, and meanwhile continuing to work. I don’t turn my camera on.
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 2 weeks ago:
We stick to that format with minor variations:
- Update on everyone’s pets’ health
- Update on peoples’ kids’ behaviour
- Update on team members’ health and their families
- Miscellaneous gripes
- All the sports: what happened, what people think will happen, and details of particular players
- Mutual accusations of breaking things
- Defence against said accusations
- Gripes about boss’s emails
- Long, in-depth accounts from two team members of their last day’s work, minute by minute, with digressions into big-picture frustrations and grumbles about management, customers, etc.
- Recounting of the history of these issues over the last 15 years or so.
- Each person tells us that they’re working on the thing the kanban board says they’re working on, and that it will take them as long as it says on the board.
- Holiday plans or accounts of past holidays
- Goodbye
- One guy jumps in with a 15-minute anecdote about taking his dog to the vet
- Goodbye
- Any further anecdotes
- Goodbye.
Its supposed to take 10-15 minutes but it takes up to an hour, sometimes more. I usually tune in late and sometimes pretend I lost my internet connection halfway through.
- 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 2 weeks ago:
Who hasn’t encountered that one jerk who builds only new code to impress management, and never maintains or fixes existing code? I think of them as proof-of-concept posers. They make things that look flashy, impress the execs, and dump all the bugs, maintenance and actual architecture on the other devs. LLMs are going to be a gift to these people and a pain for everyone who actually knows how to engineer things well. They’ll encourage this kind of shallow flashiness and make the maintenance problems worse, but the suits will be convinced that only the LLM posers are productive.
- Comment on Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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’ 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
Ooh, unemployment! How exciting!
- Comment on Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
And it won’t be the rich that get hurt when the AI bubble bursts. It will be us.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 11 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" 3 weeks 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" 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Adguard DNS: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today 4 weeks 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.