AI accelerates dysfunction. It will help you get to the wrong place faster if you're already heading there.
I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too.
The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.
I think that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2 because they see ‘speed’ in ‘completing work’ as a signal in better performance. Especially since VCs are pushing for speed (https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256), a lot of misguided person and company who is moving fast thinks they are in group 2, when the speed they have only doubles them down group 1
Where in those ~12 billion commits is the software, products and "innovations" which are supposed to be making our lives better? Software and apps in particular are getting worse, normies hate AI more than ever because they're even less likely to get their desired outcome when calling their doctor or trying to get their online order refunded when chatting with a cutely named chatbot, wages for (most) knowledge work are being driven through the floor, artists are being squeezed more than ever, etc., etc. That's to say nothing of the existential threats to the economy, environment and critical thinking which are growing daily. I really think we've lost the plot, folks.
On the topic of translation/ language learning, I still find Google Translate better for when I need to type emails in Russian (my older family who only speak it) as far as grammar is concerned than what LLMs spit out.
I'd be surprised if Google Translate isn't powered by a specialized, Transformer-powered model we would now recognize as a "small" language model heavily constrained to a specific task.
The transformer was invented as a machine-translation algorithm, later adapted to create LLMs. I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that a ML system designed for translation will always beat an LLM role-playing a translation system (assuming equal computing power and engineer effort).
We're going to see is a lot of stuff people use LLMs for moving back to using bespoke algorithms solving the one specific issue. LLMs are just machine learning unlocked for the masses, where you can ask it "translate this for me", "what's the sentiment of this text", and it just does it. Any of these were already achievable before LLMs, they just needed a machine learning engineer to implement.
I myself started an LLM driven project to classify and sort all the photos I've got. I just ask an LLM to poop out tags for an image. Using a proper algorithm for this is possible, but I'd need to put in some effort to actually get it set up. LLMs do make it easier since they can directly, instructively help you that set up, and provide an easy stream of training data to distill out a model perfectly fit to your usecase.
I think majority of work currently going through LLMs is such inefficient tasks that can be solved quicker and better with a limited algorithm.
Having an app means exactly nothing. How good your language skills will be after N years of learning is the actual measure of whether it's worth anything.
> ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before.
...that sounds pretty worthless tbh. The promise of AI wasn't that you can bang out your own little half baked duolingo clone. It was that every engineer was supposed to become hundreds or thousands of percent more productive. The assumption being that things generally would therefore get noticeably better.
We're seeing hundreds of percent more commits. We're not seeing that translate to any real world improvement of anything. That's the problem.
Call me "ignorant" if you want, but back it up by showing what all this "AI productivity" has actually accomplished in real economic terms. Not vaporware.
Out of curiosity, what real economic terms would you have to see to be convinced?
Do you mean more earnings per share for corporations or real utility impacts on social systems (e.g., more new drugs)
When I ask Claude about the AI ROI, it seems to cite that ~95% of AI PoC's are negative ROI but the 5% that do have ROI tend to have decent return -- my guess is mostly back office clean up to reduce expenses and increase revenue/profit.
IIRC Uber claim their 1.5k/mo budget lead to no new value creation.
FWIW, I look at the situation with similar skepticism. One argument you could make was what Marc Andreesen said with the hypothesis that "all the big companies get nuked", so no new valued gets created but the large market cap companies get eaten by thousands of little pirañas. Obviously, so far, that doesn't seem to be the case.
> Do you mean more earnings per share for corporations or real utility impacts on social systems (e.g., more new drugs)
I mean real utility impacts. More reliable and efficient software, better features, etc. So far we've seen none of that. In fact, it seems like the opposite--more volume but a much lower quality product.
Hang on! What's the proposed causal chain from AI to famine here? Inference -> energy prices -> fertilizer/food prices? Or are you referring to the war?
Most people would prefer an excellent language learning app to simply be available and ready for them to use, rather than having to come up with how such an app could best work, and to get an AI to implement it by themselves, and having to iterate on that. Just like most people simply want to buy nice clothes, and don’t want to become fashion designers and managers of a clothing factory. So far it doesn’t look like AI is making the former (readily available excellent apps) more widespread.
As someone also building a language-learning app for myself, it's not too hard to create an excellent app right now, but the "readily available" part of your requirements is now 10x harder than a few years ago. Users are getting bombarded by new apps, so marketing an app, which was already hard before AI, is now much, much harder.
I could try to market this app, but I tried that 2 years ago, and it was already essentially a failure. So I'm probably going to keep it for myself or just try to find a few users who like it and will use it for free.
I think I agree. But it's nice to have the option. Furthermore, i think it's too early to see the results of this, as technology takes a while to diffuse. Since there are so many people trying to take advantage of the hype to make a quick buck, it takes time to figure out what is actually useful and what is not
What are the boosters ranting and raving about if not the above? Am I just confused and the end game for all of the AI hype, investment, infrastructure build out, etc. over the last N years is ... hobby projects?
Here's a quote I found after a quick web search for "dario ai benefits":
> The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long (and includes robotics, manufacturing, energy, and much more), but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are:
It's hard to separate out the hype from the results, but if you think none of that's being tried or worked on then you're the Ostrich with your head in the sand. Mayo Clinic says AI models help detect pancreatic cancer on CT scans 3 years before clinical diagnosis.[1] Breast Cancer.org says emerging research shows AI might spot cancers in mammograms that radiologists might miss[2]. Nature.com has a paper conclusing that AI (in various forms) have "already revolutionised the diagnosis, prognosis, screening, biomarker discovery" of cancers.[3] Cancer.gov says NCI scientists are using AI to improve cervical cancer screening with deep learning and digital images[4].
Dr David Burns offers his Teams CBT therapy with an LLM based app for people who can't afford therapist visits[5].
U. Chicago says that AI weather forecasts can be faster and cheaper than supercomputer-based physical simulations and produce results weeks ahead, which makes accurate forecasts affordable and available for farmers in middle-income countries[6].
With your smartphone camera you can get an AI-assisted bike-fit at home[7].
You can get a bike fitness training plan[8] and performance analysis with an AI that you can chat with to analyse and explain or change it, used by three professional cycling teams.
Prophix Australia analyse photos of powerlines taken by helicopter using AI to track assets and identify and verify potential faults[9]. AI systems scan images for early signs of plant disease in the vineyards of the Swiss Alps [also 9]. AI systems analyze multispectral images and satellite images of crops to detect nutrient deficiencies or pest problems in large farms[also 9].
In 2020 - 2022 a trial of a system in a hospital to identify patients at risk of sepsis helped medics treat them 2 hours earlier and reduced the death rate from sepsis by 18%.[10]
Self-driving cars now exist. Camera drones which follow you and respond to gestures now exist.
As a hobby I am playing around with mesh radios using Lora.
Let me tell you, it is _silly_ the amount of vibe-coded software in this area is popping up every week. Is the software duplicated? To an extremely large extent, yes. It is useful? Yes, but each piece of software seems to have a smaller and smaller audience, and quality is often severely lacking.
Iv'e done my own, too, for "RF debugging" as I called it to look into SNR issues related to interference. The software getting produced is likely useful _somewhere_, its just that youre not going to notice it.
Are we just moving towards personalised digital assistants for everyone, which in turn will produce software to function? Not unlikely.
Yeah, a lot of the software around MeshCore people have created seems heavily vibe coded (since got used to having press a button multiple times until it works) & the community seems to be surprisingly non-critical to "AI" technologies. Is it just about timing or something else ?
There's something poetic about a company that's leading in the realm of funding, researching, using, selling, etc. AI is actively watching the destruction of one of its core products due, in large part, to that same AI they're selling.
Crazy how more code haven't really yielded better products. Who would have guess that the number of lines of code wasn't the problem. Except that very basic tools that I use daily, pretty much every piece of software has become worse in the past few years. The closer to the consumer the software sits, the worse the quality is becoming.
Is it a "productivity panic"? I'm personally pushing a lot more commits because I'm spending more time playing around with ideas on side projects.
Is this all wasted if commits drop in a few months because folks are just pushing a lot now to figure out what works and what doesn't and we eventually settle into something between where we are now and where we were a year ago?
I have always believed that the MagSafe connector should be on the brick. A short, regular USB type C cable to the power brick and a MagSafe connector between the brick and the wall.
Bonus points if the brick incorporates a small hub with additional ports. This would allow you to choose between using a regular USB type C power cable or the proprietary brick with MagSafe built in.
One of the great features in Chrome is that you can open your recently closed tabs with CTRL+SHIFT+T. This will bring back an entire window full of tabs and even works between reboots. I usually have a dozen tabs open and when I reboot, I simply open up Chrome again, CTRL+SHIFT+T, and I am right back where I was.
To get around this problem I just use a simple command-line utility that I wrote called gitswitch that I call whenever I jump to a new project. My name never changes but my email does, so that's all the utility changes. I suppose it would be neat to build in profiles, but I jump between 2-3 PCs regularly and would probably forget to update my profiles.
Thanks for sharing this. I have been evaluating the red gate suite of tools. Is there a particular module in their deployment suite that helps manage/automate standards as you mentioned?
Our team consists of a single DBA and around a dozen developers. We're a .NET/C# shop but we use Oracle Databases.
On the project we used red gate for we were dealing with a Microsoft shop, so SQL Server. And we used the full suite, including SQL source control which gave hooks for some of our custom scripts to run too, but most of it was doable with the tooling. The software wouldn't catch all policy violations, but what it make it quick for us to fix them when they were found. But in general we were able to automate 98% of the tasks and only deal with true outliers.
I am not sure with Oracle what is available specifically and it has been a number of years since I worked with redgates tooling, but it was quality stuff. And I remember them being super helpful when we were getting started and answering a ton of questions, so maybe reach out to them with your specifics and see what they have to say. Some things they helped us do were not obvious in their documentation or UX, so it is worth a chat with them.
It's more likely that he has a browser extension that is doing this. I have DarkReader installed, and I similarly saw a bunch of style tags at the beginning of the page related to DarkReader (which applies some CSS rules to make everything "dark mode"). To the GP, you probably want to double-check your browser extensions (unless you were actually kidding).
This seems to generate mostly word salad. I haven't been able to find an artist (even one of the recommended artists like Drake) that it generates intelligible lyrics for. It seems to grab existing lyrics from other songs and mash them together, but it's not doing a great job of it.
Interesting. I think this is useful if implemented correctly.
I had an idea similar to this a few years ago. Basically, you would be able to bookmark your place on the page and come back to it later or send the link to someone else. I didn't think that using a word or phrase was useful because it could show up multiple times on the page. Instead, I used the scroll distance. Here's a crude demo:
It's an interesting concept. You need more photos - I need to see how the slats interlock, I need to see photos of how the frame works. My immediate thought was that with a long enough desk (de-sk?) it would bow in the middle. A lot of questions I have don't seem to be answered on the landing page. I think overall, the landing page could be simplified and cleaned up so I don't need to go hunting through the "FAQ" and "Why De-sk?" pages to know if this is the desk for me.
As others have pointed out, I think the biggest weakness is the seams. It looks like it would be impossible to write on. I would suggest that you include some sort of optional desk pad as an add-on.
I'm from the US. Although it doesn't look like you're shipping here yet anyway, you might include inch/pound units too if you plan to ship internationally at some point.
Cool concept, good luck.
EDIT: Here's what I meant by a desk pad, in case it wasn't obvious. This one has a lip so that it stays put, and a metal backing so that you wouldn't feel the slats underneath while you were writing: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40246156/
>It's an interesting concept. You need more photos - I need to see how the slats interlock, I need to see photos of how the frame works. My immediate thought was that with a long enough desk (de-sk?) it would bow in the middle.
He doesn't explain it but it seems pretty clear to me how it might work. The slats don't interlock. Underneath each slat are wooden tabs (one on each end) that fit snugly inside the frame. Each frame is sized to fit a certain number of slats.
And a long desk won't bow in the middle because the slats run the short end of the frame, not the long end.
The long axis of the desk still has a load bearing member that can flex. Presumably if you get a longer desk frame the member would be adjusted (in size or thickness or whatnot) to not bow.
> As others have pointed out, I think the biggest weakness is the seams. It looks like it would be impossible to write on. I would suggest that you include some sort of optional desk pad as an add-on.
I wonder why didn't did use flush cut tongue and groove? You would loss some of the hot swappablity of it current 10cm plywood strips, but it would be even, & more table overall.
> As others have pointed out, I think the biggest weakness is the seams. It looks like it would be impossible to write on. I would suggest that you include some sort of optional desk pad as an add-on.
Or possibly a large "slat" you can put into the middle.
I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too.
The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.
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