Notices by Jeff Grigg (jeffgrigg@mastodon.social)

@VeroniqueB99

"Everyone brings happiness to a room …
Some when they enter, others when they leave."

@aaribaud @yncke

Well as long as we can externalize the costs onto others, it's all good, from our perspective.

😈

@aaribaud

"And NO, I am NOT AT ALL interested in your perverse desire to do THAT!!!"

... they say next.

And often.

@aaribaud

"And that's why all trips require four jumps, regardless of length. And why the stars always appear as linear 'streaks' during transit; you're not going infinitely fast; you're just looking at them 'from the wrong angle.' "

@tankgrrl

“the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.”

[And the FACT is that it's going in the *opposite direction*, and FAST!!!]

“AI industry is a “$10 to $30 billion [total addressable market] industry pretending to be a $1 trillion one.”

“Generative AI doesn't work, and Big Tech is out of hypergrowth ideas.”

[All TRUE.]

@tankgrrl

Actually, there *are* well known ways to dramatically improve your products, your services, the quality of them, reduce the costs to provide them, improve your work environment, etc.

And these ways are well known. Tried and tested. And proven to work.

But none of them is as "sexy" or easy to sell as the *con games* that are dominating the industry today.

Actual real progress and improvement is *hard work*. But who's willing to do that, these days?!?!?

@catsalad

Welcome to The Infinite Cat Project! ^-^

https://www.blevin.org/cat/index.html

@pgoetz @mike_bowler

I am a very senior person. And I have used many technologies.

But our field is so broad that even the most junior of new developers has seen and used tools and techniques that I have not.

And also, at the absolute bare minimum, explaining my reasoning to someone else, teaching them to understand, clarifies my own thinking.

So working with others, even my "juniors" is always a personally rewarding growing experience, where I learn valuable new things too!

@xgranade

The part about consent violation that really surprised me was corporations accepting that their operating system and application vendors can just force advertising on all their employees, without corporate or employee consent.

I raised the issue to corporate security at one point, as M$ Windoze kept advertising *games* to corporate employees on corporate computers, disregarding severe corporate policies forbidding anyone from using such games. But I could not get anyone to "care."

@MicroSFF

"No. They must certainly have meant 'light-weight sabre.' A sabre made out of light would not make any sense."

@SolarDavy @jasongorman

After a "too big to fail" company is nationalized, then it's *essential services* should be split up. And everything else put on "controlled shut down."

@Gargron

My experience has been that LLM translations are almost good enough to verify that a message is a scam.

@Gargron

I like the analogy of Generative AI to asbestos — a toxic problem that must be removed at great expense at a later date.

But I have to point out that asbestos was *actually quite useful* and used, all the way back to the stone age — for its fireproof fibrous properties. We only learned of the health impacts relatively recently.

Generative AI, while quite the parlor trick, and good for impressive demos (when you overlook the obvious problems), has only ever shown quite limited value.

@dalias @AeonCypher @cdarwin

Generative AI models, with reasonable human prompting, have been producing results that humans have and would consider copyright infringing, if humans had produced those or similar results. Since the prompts themselves do not appear to be copyright infringing in any way, I think we'd have to conclude that the operation of the models is in violation.

And even if the work is not a "copy," it's designed to compete with the original authors -- a violation in itself.

@dalias @flying_saucers @futurebird

Noted and improved.

Alternatives to "lame excuse" here:
https://www.powerthesaurus.org/lame_excuse/synonyms

@flying_saucers @futurebird

Improving education begins with

- more teachers
and
- better pay.

...

Everything else is a lame excuse.

And most of "everything else" is generally a distraction from the main problems.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@VeroniqueB99/115686590113172473

And there you have it: The War on Christmas. 😢

@whitequark @rothko @jdeisenberg

What?
All of his postings are on the Usenet news groups, of course!

😆

@jdeisenberg @whitequark

One thing noticeably missing is that one critical tiny block that was supporting the whole thing, labeled “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”.

@WhisperingHek @pascaline @jeffowski

So the average american is "bi-"?