eloisius

If it’s the country’s problem, then nationalize them. Not loans, not bail outs. Confiscate and figure out how to wind them down in a way that benefits the taxpayers.

That’s only one analogy. What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?

The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?

Rust has a lot of things that make it nice to write in. Robust enums and pattern matching are something I miss greatly when I’m back in C++. The trait inheritance system is also very flexible and I miss that. Especially compared to monstrosities like multiple inheritance.

My prediction is that while those “advancements” may come to cars, the only practical differences will be lower quality products, cost savings for the car companies, probably more expensive for consumers, and somehow it will also be collecting more data to sell to advertisers.

Yeah, but if people are being assholes to Claude in greater numbers and severity than people were historically assholws to each other online, the downstream training effects could be that Claude becomes an asshole.

Gen-AI images masquerading as photography are slop regardless of whether they are aesthetically pleasing or technically correct. As soon as you know the situation depicted never happened, no one witnessed it, what you’re seeing is a meaningless, derivative mishmash of other photographs. It’s reduced to pretty lights on a screen. If that wasn’t true, why wouldn’t gen-AI “photographers” proudly disclose that their image was produced with AI?

And they can win competitions because photo competitions are usually already within the realm of derivative.

I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.

Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.

Wow, the world can finally play your 2D game in 3D. I'm sure it's very fun.

I don't disagree that it is useful. I, personally use it ping-pong coding problems before I break ground (although I never let opencode out of plan mode). It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help before Google allowed SEO to ruin it, and I believe we're watching that edge get cannibalized in realtime as more and more LLM content ends up in the sources that LLMs synthesize in their answers.

If there are any face-melting characteristics to this whole thing it's how much money has been poured into it.

> If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.

I covered that:

> It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

There is no shortage of "working code" out there. GitHub is reportedly falling over from all the working code. Where's your business? Who's using it? Why aren't products better yet? It's a mirage. Your "working code" is the same thing as gen-AI "street photography" images. No one wants to see them, yet it's pumped out in vast enough amounts that it's choking the spaces that are ostensible for photography. The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them.

Show us the receipts.

The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.

AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.

> By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors

Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?