Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
I'm surprised YouTube allows it. I'd expect them to want "their" share of the ad money, since creators in a way are side stepping the "normal" ad flow.
Comment · 2 months ago
Full agree. I until very recently thought AI tools of today were limited to prohibitively expensive high end hardware hosted in data centers.

I was surprised and amazed to get "decent" (with the expectations set right / low) coding performance out of Qwen3.5-9B on a decidedly medium end Radeon 9070 paired with a 5700x3d and 32GB of DDR4 RAM.

We can finally reason with and "talk" to our hardware.

Comment · 3 months ago
> Luckily, it doesn't matter because it's a solution in search of a problem. Most consumers aren't using AI apart from google search.

This is... a view.

Maybe I live in a strange sphere of strange ("normie"-ish) people, but the people around me are for sure using AI. Mostly chatgpt to be fair. They use it to compare products that they intend to buy, identify plants in nature, create travel plans, find interesting places to visit nearby, give movie suggestions based on what they have previously enjoyed and so on and so forth. AI is becoming a very integrated part of their reality. To "google" something and digging through the search results manually is very rapidly being replaced by asking chatgpt, for better or worse.

Comment · 4 months ago
> all the way to local models for some tasks.

I think this is the key takeaway for the future of AI. Give tech a few years to catch up and we will likely have the functionally equivalent to today's models running on consumer grade hardware. From there it will explode, where "it" is how we use and interact with computers. AI will be integrated into just about every workflow.

The business case in this future would be to sell the trained models to end users. The investment would be shifted towards the training of models and delivering updates, with revenue coming from model licenses, upgrades and cloud services for tasks that exceed the local capabilities.

Comment · 4 months ago
> I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world.

Hello myopia my old friend. We will wear glasses to the end. Because my vision's slowly slipping. Played Gameboy while I should be sleeping. And the vision that I once could claim. Doesn't remain. Now there's just the blur, of distance.

Comment · 5 months ago
I (software engineer) have lived with a software engineer for 14 years. We (half jokingly, somewhat seriously) refer to non-software engineers as "real persons", or human-humans.
Comment · 5 months ago
> There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice.

This metric highly depends on who uses the AI to do what, where strong emphasis is on "who" and "what".

In my line of work (software developer) the biggest time sinks are meetings where people need to align proposed solutions with the expectations of stakeholders. From that aspect AI won't help much, or at all, so measuring the difference of man hours spent from solution proposal to when it ends up in the test loops with and without AI would yield... very disappointing results.

But for troubleshooting and fixing bugs, or actually implementing solutions once they have been approved? For me, I'm at least 10x'ing myself compared to before I was using AI. Not only in pure time, but also in my ability to reason around observed behaviors and investigating what those observations mean when troubleshooting.

But I also work with people who simply cannot make the AI produce valuable (correct) results. I think if you know exactly what you want and how you want it, AI is a great help. You just tell it to do what you would have done anyway, and it does it quicker than you could. But if you don't know exactly what you want, AI will be outright harmful to your progress.

Comment · 5 months ago
From the article:

> And they don’t travel very far, so only nearby microphones would “hear” the tag. That makes the devices inherently private, Deng said, because other people wouldn’t detect any activity unless they were within a meter or so.

It would seem these things don't really produce loud noises, so probably not adding much to the noise pollution that already exists in our environments. At the same time it seems the statement kind of negates the "point" of this tech, that you don't need an active (energy consuming) device close to the source of the events that you want to detect. So not sure of how to interpret it.

Comment · 6 months ago
I'm starting to notice how those who don't use AI end up having to hand tasks over to people who can get them done quicker.

It is anecdotal for sure, but it's a pattern that seems to be emerging around me that expectations of velocity increases, and those who don't use AI can't keep up.

Comment · 6 months ago
I'm firmly in the LLM fanbase. Not because I can't type code (was doing it for over 17 years, everywhere from low level hardware drivers in C to web frontend to robot development at home as a hobby - coding is fun!), but because in my profession it allows me to focus more on the abstraction layer where "it matters".

I'm not saying that I'm no longer dealing with code at all though. The way I work is interactively with the LLM and pretty much tell it exactly what to do and how to do it. Sometimes all the way down to "don't copy the reference like that, grab a deep copy of the object instead". Just like with any other type of programming, the only way to achieve valuable and correct results is by knowing exactly what you want and express that exactly and without ambiguity.

But I no longer need to remember most of the syntax for the language I happen to work with at the moment, and can instead spend time thinking about the high level architecture. To make sure each involved component does one thing and one thing well, with its complexities hidden behind clear interfaces.

Engineers who refuse to, or can't, or won't utilize the benefits that LLMs bring will be left behind. It's just the way it is. I'm already seeing it happening.

Comment · 6 months ago
I do a hybrid, where I keep lowest tier subscriptions but choose to watch content off of our media server setup at the highest available quality, without advertisement.

I don't mind paying for what I consume, but God damn is the value proposition at the floor currently. Here even the rather expensive mid tier subscription gives you 1080p at most with all the big players. It's as if they somehow converged to this model and aren't competing anymore. Coincidence, I'm sure.

Comment · 7 months ago
A notification on my phone. I don't know what produced it exactly, but it was probably connected to my google account (sigh!) somehow.

It's something that happens rarely enough for me to not having developed an automatic "aw hell nah, no f-ing way" filter towards it anyway, and I (naively) did click the notification and "got hit" by the article.

Comment · 7 months ago
This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9 minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with summarizing it.

AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.

Comment · 7 months ago
Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content" is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers.

I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.

I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".

Comment · 7 months ago
Yeah. In these cases it's not like anyone is going to spin up their own instance and start competing with you.

Government / handles society-critical things code should really be public unless there are _really_ good reasons for it not to be, where those reasons are never "we're just not very good at what we're doing and we don't want anyone to find out".

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