Who are “you guys”?

I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.

What’s with the suggestion that they’re injuring people at all? Has it happened?

This crude recourse to “evolutionary fitness” is the rhetoric of fascists.

I’m almost won over by your charming manners, but…

1. What is your source?
2. What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
3. Tesla’s self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
4. Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla’s, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won’t open without power (not to mention autopilot’s limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don’t share, so again it’s worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla’s safety.

I quite like lane assist in the 2019 Honda I drive, even though it gets it wrong occasionally. It will not function unless it detects that you’re providing some steering input of your own, and it’s easy to override just by steering the way you want to go. That and cruise control are handy on the highway and have worked well for 6 years with no problems. But it’s very far from either functioning or being advertised as “full self driving.”

Wouldn’t someone have noticed all the traffic on the network? And if the conversations were processed locally, wouldn’t someone notice the energy and cooling needs of the processor in the bulb, not to mention the presence of a load of memory? This seems very implausible.

We all know that cops will try to charge you with assaulting them if you so much as shrug while being arrested. And they’ll contrive situations just so they can do that. I’d say that makes their statistics meaningless without specific details and proof.

I find getting the LLM to either generate or rephrase documentation gives a distinctly worse result than doing it myself. I was in a hurry to document a new API from scratch recently and thought I’d try Copilot, but the results were overly verbose and sometimes inaccurate so I ended up rewriting all of it.

The LLM is best for boilerplate code that is easily predictable and verifiable. Beyond that it’s sometimes good for initial suggestions if you don’t know where to start with a tool, after which you can go to the actual documentation. But you’ll need to do that, because half the time the suggestions use nonexistent APIs and methods.

I have always thought that writing code is the easy part of being a developer. The hard parts are the parts management doesn’t appreciate: clarifying requirements, architecting new systems, translating business goals into something codable, letting egotistical know they’re not making sense without offending them, designing effective testing processes, persuading management to prioritize reducing technical debt, and integrating and maintaining existing systems. Maintenance is a huge part of the job that no one gives you credit for. Oh, and if you ever touch the front end, CSS.

She said that there’s been a 500 percent increase against ICE agents who are just “trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from… communities.”

Exactly what the Nazis who ran extermination camps claimed.

An article on the same topic:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-ap-stylebook-warps-reality-to-serve-power

Watts confirmed New Zealand had exited the group after the move was reported by Carbon News.

He said he did not think it would have a significant impact on New Zealand’s international reputation.

Reputation among rich assholes? Because it certainly makes NZ look worse to the rest of us.

I seem to remember he took a poster off the wall to keep as a souvenir, so they killed him. Don’t touch the posters, people.

Seems like in the USA everyone gets treated badly all of the time, except the very richest.

No one is immune to a concerted propaganda campaign. American propaganda has just been a bit more extreme than most, for a bit longer.

You have 10 minutes to clear your desk and get out. Not a team player!

The investment in demonizing scapegoat groups does seem to pay off for the far right. It helps them sell their own ideology as a solution for people’s woes, if they can convince people their problems are caused by the designated scapegoats. It effectively distracts people from the plunder of their lives by rich kleptocrats, while filling them with the kind of misdirected hatred that fascism thrives on.

If it gets wrong enough, people will stop using it. So it would be in the interests of AI companies to pay for good sources of data.

Or at least you’d hope that. In actual fact they’ll be thinking: let’s keep stealing because most people don’t know or care whether what the AI says is true. Besides, they can make money by turning it into a tool for disseminating the views of those who can pay the most.

A Russian who has opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s probably on the phone to Putin promising her delivery right now. It’s one less academic in the USA too - from MAGA’s perspective everybody wins!