One thing I suspect is that leadership at tech companies that would have previously been working off of direct experience with technical processes, even if they no longer work directly on their own codebases, is pretty clueless about AI coding because it's so new. All they have to go with is what they read, or sales pitches, or their experience dabbling with Cursor to build simple python utilities (which AI tools work pretty well for most of the time), and they don't see what it can and can't do on a real codebase.
Readit Newswriteslowly commented on AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink leaddev.com/culture/ai-co... · Posted by u/bluefirebrand
writeslowly commented on Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist research.google/blog/acce... · Posted by u/Jimmc414
I recently ran across this toaster-in-dishwasher article [1] again and was disappointed that the LLMs I have access to could replicate the "hairdryer-in-aquarium" breakthrough (or the toaster-in-dishwasher scenario, although I haven't explored it as much), which has made me a bit skeptical of the ability of LLMs to do novel research. Maybe the new OpenAI research AI is smart enough to figure it out?
[1] https://jdstillwater.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-put-toaster-in-d...
I mean, do you think this is awful ?
This looks like my experiments to get R1 to write fiction and I think it’s worse than what you get from openai. For instance, it’s using very colorful language to describe a place that’s both a remote fishing village on the edge of a cliff hours before dawn, and a bustling wharf with chattering laborers and large ships anchored in the distance. It also starts by saying the protagonist wakes up with his mouth tasting like blood, that he was screaming, and that his throat is hoarse from holding back from screaming. It’s very colorful but it’s very confusing to read.
I suspect you can update the prompt to make the setting more consistent, but it will still throw in a lot of inappropriate detail. I’m only nitpicking because my initial reaction was that it’s very vivid but feels difficult to understand and I wanted to explain why.
writeslowly commented on Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2... · Posted by u/terryf
> This is the kind of thing that I think people assume the government labs might do, but in my experience, is pretty unusual and pretty unlikely. In general, you have to remember that the national laboratories are pretty, well, boring, when it comes to classified information. They want to be boring in this respect. They are not doing cloak-and-dagger stuff on the regular. They’re scientists and engineers for the most part. These are not James Bond-wannabes.
The Sandia folks may be extra special, it is a pretty famous place. But engineers are people first of course, so lots of variation. And also, some are super serious of course, but there are hacker tendencies, playful tendencies. I bet if some intelligence agency folks wanted to, they could find some engineers out there who’d be receptive to this sort of thing.
If it is a fake, known-stupid design, including it would be a funny prank that wastes the time of people that might want to nuke us, right?
Somebody (probably a programmer or engineer) took the time to create all of that rad 3D word art, multicolored pie-chart, and the mountain logo, it's not hard to imagine they'd also throw in an eye-catching fake nuclear warhead for fun.
What are the use cases for the advertised barcode reader accessory that appears to shoot the laser out the side of your laptop?
https://connect.na.panasonic.com/toughbook/accessories/fz-vb...
There's a famous study that found that hockey players are statistically more likely to be born in certain months, due to them being the biggest in their year-groups, which created a self-fulfilling cycles of attention from coaches.
Reinterpreted, if you're an Aquarius, you're 50% more likely than an Aries to get into the NHL[1]. So, I guess I do sometimes believe in astrology, it's just very rarely better than random.
[1] https://www.quanthockey.com/nhl/birth-month-totals/nhl-playe...
This study tested sun-sign (which is basically birth month I think) against personality tests for predicting life outcomes and found that sun sign did very poorly compared to the personality tests. I'd have thought there would be a small chance of birth month predicting some things, and then adding in other astrological facts (the position of Jupiter or whatever) would make things worse, but both methods appear to be equally bad.
writeslowly commented on A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023) nightingaledvs.com/dark-s... · Posted by u/skadamat
Have you used the latest Weather app? Which DarkSky features is it missing?
If I wanted to see the heat index at 3PM in Dark Sky, I could just tap the "feels like" button under the hourly forecast (pictured further down in the linked blog post) and look at what it says at 3PM.
I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:
1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen
2. Tap on the dropdown icon
3. Tap "feels like"
4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible
writeslowly commented on Automakers Sold Driver Data for Pennies, Senators Say nytimes.com/2024/07/26/te... · Posted by u/strict9
A long time ago, I read an article about a journalist that did just that: bought a pack of “anonymized” location data set, then promptly tracked and interviewed one of the people in said data set.
It kills me that I can’t remember where the article was exactly, because it’s one of mu favorite examples of why fighting indiscriminate tracking is important. I remember it being from a Scandinavian newspaper, maybe Dannish?
One of the worst (best?) examples I remember was the Web of Trust extension in 2016. The company claimed it was selling anonymized user data but it was actually leaking information through recorded URLs about all sorts of private things like account names, addresses, ongoing legal investigations, etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services#Sale_of_user-rela...
The whole thing seems like a pretty good example of collaboration between human and LLM tools.
I actually like LLMs better for creative thinking because they work like a very powerful search engine that can combine unrelated results and pull in adjacent material I would never personally think of.