Not to be the “ai” guy, but LLMs have helped me explore areas of human knowledge that I had postponed otherwise

I am of the age where the internet was pivotal to my education, but the teacher’s still said “don’t trust Wikipedia”

Said another way: I grew up on Google

I think many of us take free access to information for granted

With LLMs, we’ve essentially compressed humanity’s knowledge into a magic mirror

Depending on what you present to the mirror, you get some recombined reflection of the training set out

Is it perfect? No. Does it hallucinate? Yes. It it useful? Extremely.

As a kid that often struggled with questions he didn’t have the words for, Google was my salvation

It allowed me to search with words I did know, to learn about words I didn’t know

These new words both had answer and opened new questions

LLMs are like Google, but you can ask your exact question (and another)

Are they perfect? No.

The benefit of having expertise in some area, means I can see the limits of the technology.

LLMs are not great for novelty, and sometimes struggle with the state of the art (necessarily so).

Their biggest issue is when you walk blindly, LLMs will happily lead the unknowing junior astray.

But so will a blogpost about a new language, a new TS package with a bunch of stars on GitHub, or a new runtime that “simplifies devops”

The biggest tech from the last five years is undoubtedly the magic mirror

Whether it can evolve to Strong AI or not is yet to be seen (and I think unlikely!)

Good job! OSINT rules. And regarding drones, surely any state actor may be doing this, however doing surveillance by drones over military bases is just so noob. That just points out they don't have a capacity to do reconnaissance with satellites, or they are doing something completely different. Probably making sure the target knows someone is watching, saying "We know where you have your sensitive spots".

This common response is pretty uninteresting and misleading. They simply predict tokens? Oh. What does the brain do, exactly?

As I said in a previous post:

I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed):

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” And it ‘is’ a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it.

So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.

If your job is pumping out low-effort websites that are essentially marketing tools for small businesses, it must feel like magic. I think the more magical it feels for your use case, the less likely your use case will be earning you a living 2 years from now.

Instead of a stand-alone piece of e-waste, how about this: a device with the same format (a ring and an button) but the only thing it does is trigger the pebble watch to start recording a message. This way the microphone isn't needed, just the radio (and much weaker radio at that), and the battery will last exponentially longer. Then just expose the charging terminals so that we can at least hack the device with custom made external charging controllers, or buy a charger separately.

Snowflake uses it: https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-sn...

Tigris uses it: https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/building-a-database-using-fo...

A good collection of papers, blog posts, talks, etc.: https://github.com/FoundationDB/awesome-foundationdb

The Earth is being pulled away from that water, just as the water on the right is being pulled away from the Earth.