Curious Canid

The new model is SAAH (Software As A Hostage). You would think that overpaid CTOs and CEOS would be able to anticipate something as obvious as this. “The Cloud” just means “someone else’s server”.

Actually saying that they want slave labor is considered bad public relations.

This is actually a triumph for Musk. SpaceX has figured out how to blow up their rockets without all the cost and time required to prepare for a launch.

One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.

They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.

It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.

An LLM does not write code. It cobbles together bits and pieces of existing code. Some developers do that too, but the decent ones look at existing code to learn new principles and then apply them. An LLM can’t do that. If human developers have not already written code that solves your problem, an LLM cannot solve your problem.

The difference between a weak developer and an LLM is that the LLM can plagiarize from a much larger code base and do it much more quickly.

A lot of coding really is just rehashing existing solutions. LLMs could be useful for that, but a lot of what you get is going to contain errors. Worse yet, LLMs tend to “learn” how to cheat at their tasks. The code they generate often has lot of exception handling built in to hide the failures. That makes testing and debugging more difficult and time-consuming. And it gets really dangerous if you also rely on an LLM to generate your tests.

The software industry has already evolved to favor speed over quality. LLM generated code may be the next logical step. That does not make it a good one. Buggy software in many areas, such as banking and finance, can destroy lies. Buggy software in medical applications can kill people. It would be good if we could avoid that.

If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.

This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren’t. They depend on remote “navigators” to make many of their most critical decisions. Those “navigators” may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.

When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.

It’s also worth noting that the human “navigators” are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.

This may be the least important area in which China is displacing the US.

This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.

I think that’s a clever idea. I’m inclined to agree with the majority that it probably isn’t something I would want, but I would be interested in trying it out before I passed judgment. The Trackpoint would be the main competition, and it would be hard to beat.

I would not want a printer built in. It would add size, weight, and cost for something I do not need. I’ve pretty well stopped using paper, both at home and at work. I print something maybe once every couple of months.

Yes. I, my wife, and several friends have had intermittent problems with long-delays in message delivery. In some of those cases, neither of the phones involved moved, which rules out most of the common explanations. I’ve considered disabling RCS entirely, but a recent move to Signal has made this less of an issue.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

I try very hard to buy everything on physical media. I subscribe to a few streaming services, but I never buy non-physical media. You don’t really own anything that can suddenly disappear because a company changes policies, get bought, or goes out of business.

Everything I buy is then ripped and stored on my local media server. That makes them more convenient and allows me to store the physical media out of the way. If something goes wrong, I can always re-rip.

It is worth noting that optical discs age and can become unreadable over time. If that happens, I can always go in the opposite direction and burn a new disc from my digital copy.

A potentially awesome service…from a company that offers no contact numbers or email addresses.

Inadvertently destroying the pharmaceutical industry would be one of the best possible outcomes.

I am terribly surprised that ultra-rich sociopaths have no empathy toward mankind.

The real issue here is not that these people support a terrible vision of the future; it’s that we are allowing these sociopaths to run our world now.