Piskvorrr

I mean, it is obvious for a human inspecting the one specific input and output sample, but how do you do this at scale? (Spoiler: cross your fingers and hope, that's how)

Except when they "extract" something that wasn't in the source. And now what, assuming you can even detect the tainted data at all?

How do you fix that, when the process is literally "we throw an illegible blob at it and data comes out"? This is not even GIGO, this is "anything in, synthetic garbage out"

In which case...what good is a model that predicts semi-randomly? Oh.

("But it works - when it works" is a tautology, not a useful model)

That is, literally, faith-based business management. "We suck, sure - but wait, a miracle will SURELY happen in version 5. Or 6. Or 789. It will happen eventually, have faith and shovel money our way."

By then, the startup will have folded, and the C-levels will have moved on to the next Idée Du Jour.

- terminally online

- DLC

- IRL

As in, "things that happened before my Xth year of life are Normal, nay, Traditional even. Everything afterwards is Ephemeral, and possibly Heresy as well."

Alas! All is ephemeral.

HTAs were equal parts great (for their time) and terrible (plus they stuck around until IE died): a bog-standard webpage, but IE-only and with local-user process execution powers. Also, the local persistence was...problematic.

Only similar in the vaguest sense.

I am afraid that you underestimate the power of organic, human stupidity.

How I envision this to work:

- vibe code a thing

- it doesn't work, but it was CHEAP

- hire someone "to fix it"

- actually means "rewrite most of it, but cheaper"

- also means "become the scapegoat"

To a developer, it offers most of the work for very little payment. Not an enticing proposition.

(Yes, I've been burned by various "it's 90% done, we just need a few fixes", and that was BEFORE the current slop era)

Data at rest, also? Meanwhile, same govt. invests in LLMs slurping power by the megawatt, but surely that is an unproblem.

IDK if any pulse dialing phones (as opposed to DTMF) are still capable of reaching the phone network at large, but I'd imagine that's the use case.

An opportunity to rant about South Africa, because that's surely what the email said - honest, that came out the request to transcribe!

In other words, a singularly noisy pipe. (yeah, I know, it's going to be great as soon as it starts being great)

And they're a best-effort, asynchronous store-and-forget^Wforward, reply-whenever-if-at-all solution.

It moves slowly enough that the wheel will approximately never turn enough to generate significant torque.