DubiousPusher

As a privacy and security focused company, this would seem like reputational suicide. Which in the privacy and security space you would figure is basically corporate suicide.

doh!

Living? Probably. Happily? Probably not.

What? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.

To the chagrin of the unfortunate General Foods corporation, the water flavor enhancement product used at Jones Town was actually Flavor Aid.

And maybe that's a pretty good analogy to what's going on with this post. It contemplates a world of suburban parental neglect and private burrito taxis and lays them at the feet of AI. But these were happening before LLMs burst onto the scene.

In a world of $3,000 rent and $3,000 medication and $3,000 preschool, what do you expect will happen?

Exactly. You can buy on server grade mobo and CPU, stock it with ddr4 and run qwen and basically get gpt 3+ level quality now. A year from now, I imagine we'll see even better efficiency.

I've spent 10 years implementing new technology into businesses from all over the world and the thing that has killed the most projects at the proof of concept phase has not been whether it works. It's whether the cost of going to production from PoC produces a significant ROI. AI is absolutely changing the economics there.

Humans were simply nowhere near answering all the useful questions they had which software could answer. The problem was that software was expensive.

Now, software is cheaper and so people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them.

This is really something which feels like it should be a library of regexp.

If you're standing in GNC staring at a tub of creatine wondering if it will make you smarter, you better hope it does...

exits stage left

I'll be here all week folks!

I think this is a really sober comment. There are lots of knock-on effects of this claim, even if it's not true which are consequential. The fact that a spokesperson for the US government is going out of their way to comment is concerning.

Strong bee-hive pinata vibes here.

It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.

My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs.

You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles.

This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.

Yeah, this is very much one of those stories where people from many different perspectives or chopping it up on a plate and ripping it through a straw.

I think the important lesson is to use clear eyes to evaluate what the rewrite buys you. I was on a team that rewrote a native code app in C#. We also had access to early cloud tech in the Azure stack, what is called queue now and then was called service bus.

These two technologies combined greatly simplified this specific product making it far easier to maintain. Performance on these services was not important so native code was carrying a lot of penalties without the benefits.

Having a well documented messenger like service bus with great SLAs removed several tools we had needed in the old implementation.

We were able to leverage the tests form the original product to define success and tmthus were able to solve a lot of the edge cases in the new code w before we even shipped.

However, the old code was perfectly fine code. If new technologies had not provided significant simplification of the service architecture, a rewrite would've been foolish. And without the very good previously existing tests, we would've run into a lot of issues as we released.