[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I like the format of this video except for that mid-plug for Patreon. Leave it for the end.

As to the actual text of the video:

At the end of my short adventure at MSFT I realised I organically obtained the abiity to read through Satya's emails. He had the uncanny ability to take a single sentence and extend it into a 3-paragraph email. Like, he would send a message whose actual information content was "we're cancelling the annual base salary increase" but it would take up your entire fucking screen. However, after receiving so many of those, after some time I was able to read it effectively -- skip the first paragraph, there's never anything of worth there; if the sentence starts as if it weren't leading anywhere then it's not, don't bother; read every second word -- there, you just saved 5 minutes and learnt exactly the same thing.

I never considered language ability to be any indicator of smarts. I've learnt your godawful language from scratch, literally anyone can do this, Elon Musk spoke reasonable English (before drugs and 4chan ate his brain). I don't mean it as something virtuous, as if I was better by not having this "flaw", but rather as... I never realised just how much of your image comes from that. So you're telling me people think this guy is smart because he uses four-syllable words? Wow. One of the best engineers I've met speaks like B1 English, makes constant grammar mistakes, and speaks with an accent thicker than Yud's skull, who the fuck cares, everything he says about software is pure gold. And now I realise he probably never got that promotion he was aiming at because some dipshit above him thought he sounded dumb?

There's no wonder the managerial class loves genAI so much, their entire shtick depends on copious amounts of form hiding the roughly five words of substance they come up with monthly. At least Satya doesn't have to spend so much time writing that slop I ignored anyway...

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 22 points 1 year ago

Who tf is this?

"How Batman Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" by Penguin's Henchman #37, like dude, I spend way too much time sneering on yall and I've still never heard of mr Turdgrains or whatever.

In any case, whoever this is, @dgerard, you should start charging him rent for the priviledge of having you live in his head.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago

Texas counties can’t pass their own ordinances, only cities can

We hate central big government so we have eliminated all the local small governments as a precaution.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago
  1. Sure, I'm not even going to verify this one since it's so low stakes.
  2. This is ill-defined.
  3. Again ill-defined, and I need dates on this, we've been sequencing DNA for like 50yrs at this point.
  4. Lol, Neuralink kills monkeys, there's zero indication of its "inevitability".
  5. Lol^2, none of that shit works mate. Name one person whose life was extended with cryonics.
  6. AI is ill-defined, plus dates please.
  7. And how well did that go?
  8. First of all, that's called Moore's Law after the actual guy who made this prediction, you can't credit someone else than Moore for Moore's Law, wtf. Second, this hasn't held for at least a decade now; we've been focusing on completely different things than raw CPU speed to actually increase compute.
  9. "Answer questions" there is a load-bearing term. Did he mean search engines? Is this deriberately vague?
  10. I'm sorry? First, a 3D printed prosthetic is not an exoskeleton, what kind of a logic leap is that. Second, citation needed on "3D printable prosthetic limbs" actually being in use right now on any scale.
[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago

It's called a function plot for a reason!

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago

If we grow AIs too big, say, bigger than the Moon, then well, the Moon could get jealous and mad at us.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 22 points 1 year ago

Also, speaking from experience trying to do any database work for large corporate clients, no data house is in order. It's basically saying "assume a spherical cow, then AI works".

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 22 points 1 year ago

Google Cloud Chief Evangelist

That cannot be an official title someone has, can it?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not even going to engage in this thread cause it's a tar pit, but I do think I have the appropriate analogy.

When taking certain exams in my CS programme you were allowed to have notes but with two restrictions:

  1. Have to be handwritten;
  2. have to fit on a single A4 page.

The idea was that you needed to actually put a lot of work into making it, since the entire material was obviously the size of a fucking book and not an A4 page, and you couldn't just print/copy it from somewhere. So you really needed to distill the information and make a thought map or an index for yourself.

Compare that to an ML model that is allowed to train on data however long it wants, as long as the result is a fixed-dimension matrix with parameters that helps it answer questions with high reliability.

It's not the same as an open book, but it's definitely not closed book either. And the LLMs have billions of parameters in the matrix, literal gigabytes of data on their notes. The entire text of War and Peace is ~3MB for comparison. An LLM is a library of trained notes.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Browse the web sites of Notion, Figma, or Slack

I did out of curiosity, especially since I've never heard about the first two and "Figma" sounds like a bad attempt at a Ligma joke.

Notion

Tagline:

Write, plan, organize, play Turn ideas into action with Notion’s AI-powered workspace.

Plus this gem

"Your AI everything app." ~ Forbes

Wait I thought X was the everything app.

I scrolled through and I have no idea why anyone would pay for this. It doesn't seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can't and "AI" here just looks like a hook to ChatGPT.

Figma

balls! haha

How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.

What the hell does "align" mean here? Align like a div to be centered? It seems to be a design tool so that's what I assume, but it's a weird thing to focus on.

Co-create in one space Work together in real time and empower designers to create in new ways.

Okay, this at least gives me a product pitch - design tool with real-time sharing like in Google Docs. That sounds actually useful.

Keep workflows efficient with tools that give every team visibility throughout the process.

... aaand this is just word salad, you lost me.

The rest looks like a regular pitch for a prototype tool for UX, which I think is a pretty specific and useful tool though, so I'm not 100% sure why it'd fit with the theme of the blogpost. Maybe I'm missing something, I never actually dealt with serious UX design.

Slack

This one was I surprised by since I thought I knew what the entire Slack product is - it's a chat. You have channels, direct messages, and pings. That's about it, right?

Move faster with your tools in one place Automate away routine tasks with the power of generative AI and simplify your workflow with all your favourite apps ready to go in Slack.

God what.

The rest is a normal pitch, flexible communications, remote work, channels, etc. But why would you start with AI? Again, Slack is a chat app why would you want gen AI in a chat app?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago

Wytham abbey was technically a manor house but “EA gets a castle” is objectively a funnier meme.

My "My non-profit castle is actually a manor house" t-shirt provokes a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.

Also I'm sorry, but "EA buys a castle, but akchualy it's a manor house so it's cool" is objectively the funniest meme.

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V0ldek

joined 2 years ago