mkleczek

There is no AI in the world that can replace live AC/DC performance.

That's my recent experience as well. You have to know the domain and have technical knowledge so that you understand (not in every detail) what AI is actually doing and why. You also have to understand what you want and why you want it.

But once you do, working with AI is like having a very capable team of programmers knowing all programming languages you might need and understanding your goals.

Because it is not capable of ordered index scan that handles both filtering (by multiple conditions) and "order by" - text search returns potentially a very large set of results that must be sorted and then truncated (to satisfy limit).

EDIT: or I misunderstood the question. GIST+trgm works but its search capabilities are limited, it does not handle "order by column" so requires weird workarounds, and it is not very efficient.

I am still looking for a good solution to the following use case:

create table entry (id, user, entry_date, entry_text);

select * from entry where user = ? and entry_date <= ? and entry_text matches ? order by entry_date desc limit ?;

(eg. page through the list of financial transactions with description matching some criteria, latest first)

So far only GIST with pg_trgm handles that without the need to sort large result sets.

From my experience the issue really is, unfortunately, that it is impossible to tell if a particular detail is irrelevant until after you have analyzed and answered all of them.

In other words, it all looks easy in hindsight only.

At least in case of the kitchen contractor, you can trust all the electrical equipment, plumbing etc. is going to be connected in such a way that disasters won't happen. And if it is not, at least you can sue the contractor.

The problem with LLMs is that it is not only the "irrelevant details" that are hallucinated. It is also "very relevant details" which either make the whole system inconsistent or full of security vulnerabilities.

I am Polish and I was 15 in 1990 when the Berlin Wall fell.

Lately I was thinking if it was only me or my fellow Poles remembering 90s as times of freedom and hope.

Thanks for confirming it is much wider experience and memory.

Indeed. The organization changed in the passing years.

My worry is that there is more will to just dissolve it instead of working on improving it.

This.

It looks like it goes in cycles: after major catastrophic event subsequent generations that don't remember the catastrophe are willing to engage in another one (I think of WWI and WWII as one event). If the memory was stronger there would be more pressure to find other means of resolving issues.

Eg. as a "half boomer" European I remember well why EU was created. It looks like the reasons have been largely forgotten now.

> The economic interest is the US ability to as rapidly as possible convert those shipyards to military shipyards during a large scale prolonged war.

Nah, that doesn't add up. US needs _ships_ and SOTA military equipment to make sure that any military conflict is as short as possible (ie. US wins). Losing money on unused production capability does not make sense because in case of prolonged conflict there is time to build the capability (as it happened during WWII).

In reality, what you call "prolonged military conflict", is nothing more than normal international competition. One could even argue US is in prolonged military conflict since WWII. In which case making rational decisions based on hard economic criteria (ie. not losing money) is the key to success.