Yeah, that’s basically why I got out of IT. Too many managers/clients refusing to listen to warnings about what would happen when they did X, then blaming the techies when things went to shit.

Because they are the “boss”, they have 0 accountability. Worst case for them is a golden handshake, and failing upwards where the cycle starts again.

We have our own cutie called Julie. She’s not so playful these days, but she’s very attached to us!

I think they have some areas where they’re very useful, but beyond those areas they’re only OK at best. They don’t come close to living up to the hype, which is mostly based on “the next version will be mind blowing!”.

They are a new type of app, nothing more. New types of apps can be extremely useful, and make a lot of tasks easier, e.g. spreadsheets. I would say at best generative AI is as game changing as spreadsheets were, but maybe less.

The hype machine wants us to believe they are as revolutionary as the PC itself, or the car. In fact 10 times as revolutionary! I just don’t buy it… at least not in the foreseeable future.

Good luck doing one on one assessments in a uni course of 300+

Yeah, it’s a fricken nightmare… Windows is ok in a well managed corporate setup where all the crap is uninstalled

I bought a laptop recently which came with Windows. I was going to setup dual boot because I need Office365 for work… but in the end I just gave up, deleted windows and installed Ubuntu.

I hear lots of people used to using Windows saying “I tried Linux and couldn’t get anything to work”… it’s not that I don’t believe them, but I really struggle to understand it. Windows is so much worse!

I’m not sure what makes you think the law applies to billionaires

LLMs choose words based on probabilities, i.e. given the word “blue”, it will have a list of words and probabilities that those words should follow “blue”. So “sky” would be a high probability, “car” might also be quite high, as well as a long list of other words. The LLM chooses the words not by selecting whatever has the highest probability, but with a degree of randomness. This has been found to make the text sound more natural.

To watermark, you essentially make this randomness happen in a predefined way, at least for cases where many different words could fit. So (to use a flawed example), you might make it so that “blue” is followed by “car” rather than “sky”. You do this throughout the text, and in a way that doesn’t affect the meaning of the text. It is then possible to write a simple algorithm to detect whether this text was written by an AI, because of the probability of different words appearing in particular sequences. Because its spread throughout the text, it’s quite difficult to remove the watermark completely (although not impossible).

Here’s an article that explains it better than I can: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/03/watermarking-help-mitigate-potential-risks-llms.html

There’s always software I can’t use properly (and not just Windows stuff), some stuff badly configured with weird error messages… last time I was not able to even use the apt command

I’m not sure what you were doing to break apt, but it was probably something pretty funky (or at least adding a bunch of repos without really thinking about it).

The thing with Linux is that it doesn’t stop you doing stupid shit as much as Windows. If you know what you’re doing, that’s a really good thing. It’s really annoying when your OS stops you doing something for your own protection if you know that you’re not going to break anything. Simple example: Windows locks any file that’s open, Linux doesn’t. That’s really convenient, but you can screw things up badly if you’re not careful.

If you’re a beginner, I would suggest sticking to the GUI, i.e. control panels, software installed, etc. in Ubuntu. If you ever go into command line, be really careful, and understand what you’re doing. Definitely do not copy and paste commands you find online without understanding them reasonably well. Ubuntu puts in pretty good protections in its graphical tools. You’ll be able to do whatever you need to do, but shouldn’t break anything. Over time, you’ll pick up some knowledge and be able to do more in the command line (etc.) without breaking things.

Nah. There’s fuck all there.

That’s why it’s called “space” and not “interesting shit”

I struggle to see why I shouldn’t wear a mask in certain situations. e.g. the supermarket, where I’m not there too long, am hardly talking to anyone, it’s indoors with lots of other (unmasked) people. There are almost 0 downsides to wearing one in that situation (for me at least).

COVID is still killing a lot of people, and even if it doesn’t kill you, it sucks to get it. So yeah, makes sense to me to mask when you can.

You might want to look up the law of unintended consequences.

The bigger the intervention, the bigger the potential unintended consequence.

By far the easiest solution to climate change is not emitting greenhouse gasses in the first place. It is still a monumental challenge but if we don’t do that, we’re just treating the symptoms not the cause

Every language starts out as beautiful, then it becomes popular, a whole lot of new features get wedged into it, and everyone who’s watched a 5 minute tutorial video starts coding in it.

I remember the days when Python, Java and even Perl were considered beautiful.

In some cases, it’s more complex than that. e.g. see this very interesting post by the r/LegalAdviceUK mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/

spez is a Musk fanboi. What a surprise.

Reddit’s clearly in a death spiral, but I’ve been wondering if was going to go thru an “alt right” phase. Guess we know now.