Balder

The algorithms optimized for engagement with no ethics was the point the world starts going downhill.

I’ll wait until they kill it two months from now.

That’s a bit too dismissive. I’ve had a lot of interesting chats with LLMs that led me to find out what I didn’t understand about something. As an example I’m reading a book explaining some practices of Structured Concurrency in Swift and many times I asked ChatGPT is the author is correct about some phrasing that seemed wrong to me. And ChatGPT was able to explain why that was right in that context.

Not when companies force them on you as well.

My current company forces me to use it and measures how many prompts I’m making as “productivity”.

I am a small sample to confirm that’s exactly the reason in my brother’s company.

And in my company we’re pressured to make X prompts every week to the company’s own ChatGPT wrapper to show we’re being productive. Even our profit shares have a KPO attached to that now. So many people just type “Hello there” every morning to count as another interaction with the AI.

In reality, this doesn’t affect the existing batteries we have, it’s just for future battery technology.

No paywalled link: https://archive.is/1QR8H

At this point, I think it’s required to have a sort of alternate identity online and keeping anything private, photos of yourself and other information just offline. Except for government stuff, which requires your real identity.

Brace yourselves, because this is only going to get worse with the current “vibe coding” trend.

Only those that criticize the government, somehow. “Oops, because of some complicated algorithm, it only affected people who posted the word ‘orange’ on social media recently.”

I mean, you can argue that if you ask the LLM something multiple times and it gives that answer the majority of those times, it is being trained to make that association.

But a lot of these “Wow! The AI wrote this” might just as well be some random thing that came from it out of chance.

I remember listening to a podcast that is about scientific explanations. The guy hosting it is very knowledgeable about this subject, does his research and talks to experts when the subject involves something he isn’t himself an expert.

There was this episode where he kinda got into the topic of how technology only evolves with science (because you need to understand the stuff you’re doing and you need a theory of how it works before you make new assumptions and test those assumptions). He gave an example of the Apple visionPro being a machine that despite being new (the hardware capabilities, at least), the algorithm for tracking eyes they use was developed decades ago and was already well understood and proven correct by other applications.

So his point in the episode is that real innovation just can’t be rushed by throwing money or more people at a problem. Because real innovation takes real scientists having novel insights and experiments to expand the knowledge we have. Sometimes those insights are completely random, often you need to have a whole career in that field and sometimes it takes a new genius to revolutionize it (think Newton and Einstein).

Even the current wave of LLMs are simply a product of the Google’s paper that showed we could parallelize language models, leading to the creation of “larger language models”. That was Google doing science. But you can’t control when some new breakthrough is discovered, and LLMs are subject to this constraint.

In fact, the only practice we know that actually accelerates science is the collaboration of scientists around the world, the publishing of reproducible papers so that others can expand upon and have insights you didn’t even think about, and so on.

I wonder if they say people should be careful with Chrome 😂

Having more people does help, but only to a certain extent. At some point, it just becomes difficult to moderate and having a higher number of casual users that don’t give a shit about the rules.

I’m pretty sure a $10 one time payment won’t pay for the costs of development that Firefox requires.

Open source only works when there are people motivated enough and skilled enough to maintain something for free or when the organization managing it has another source of income.

There is something about the simplicity of this kind of thing that makes it so attractive. There’s no bloat, just a device for a maker individual to play around with.

But it makes me wonder if there’s something similar to this but more “ready” for people to buy and play around building software. I’ve thought about learning more low level stuff with emulators, not a real device. A real device like this with a minimal Unix-like OS and some development kit to play around would be interesting.

“Italian organized crime groups receipts have been estimated to reach 7–9% of Italy’s GDP.”

But I guess pirating books is a more pressing problem.

If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.

I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.

So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.

I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.

It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).

I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.

Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.

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I mean, this post makes no valid argument against JavaScript, there’s no benchmarks or anything aside from an opinion.

I don’t personally like webdev and don’t like to code in JavaScript, but there are good and bad web applications out there, just like any software.

A single page can send out hundreds or even thousands of API requests just to load, eating up CPU and RAM.

The author seems to know the real problem, so I don’t know why they’re blaming it on JavaScript.