I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.

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.

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.

Israel has killed 70 healthcare workers in 50 days. And they’ve been doing this for years, every time claiming it’s not a deliberate policy. The world can see what Israel is, and its words are worthless.

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

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

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!

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Very brave of them. I too used to stand up to school bullies privately, at home, in my mind.

I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.

https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_National_Fund

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Polio_Eradication_Initiative

Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he’s in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.