drw85's comments

On: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

[drw85]

I worked for some large corps and they all had one thing in common.

Tons of middle management that makes no decisions what so ever.

Everytime you ask a question, they delegate, until you end up at person 1 again and they just can't decide anything.

It's like they all have decision paralysis.

On: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

[drw85]

Would it be a human issue, if you type something into a calculator and the calculated result is wrong?

Would anyone use a calculator confidently, if the result was randomly generated?

[allarm → drw85]

Why do you think this analogy is even remotely correct? It’s well-known that LLMs produce non-deterministic results. It’s also well-known that they hallucinate. To make it even clearer, all the top LLM players make sure to remind everyone of that behavior. If calculators had similar effects and warnings, it would have been a valid analogy. Instead, you're comparing apples and oranges.

[drw85 → allarm]

I think it's a valid analogy in some contexts. Like when talking to a person that is not aware of non-determinism and hallucinations. Which happens on this website very frequently.

Many people here tell you to use AI like you use a calculator. With minimal or no oversight, with full access to production systems, etc.

To let a non deterministic tool communicate on your behalf, or give it access to critical systems is evidence enough that a good number of people are not aware of these facts.

On: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

[drw85]

Because you can spend your 100 billion dollars spread over 10 years.

If you build datacenters, you have to spend that money now.

They're also not paying amazon to order GPUs, they're paying for compute usage of whatever hardware they have.

On: All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027

[drw85]

Read a book then?

On: All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027

[drw85]

I don't think it is more desirable, the iPhone Air has reportedly sold way below expectations.

On: Why Is Sherlock Holmes English?

[drw85]

That's a bit like asking 'Why is Harry Potter not a middle aged white woman?'.

Because writers of fiction don't have to write about themselves and readers of fiction don't always have to read about a depiction of themselves.

On: Microsoft Outlook app now showing paid spam/phishing ad's

[drw85]

It's not. This is how the free version of Outlook that comes with Windows displays ads.

On: Microsoft Outlook app now showing paid spam/phishing ad's

[drw85]

I'd argue that this is much worse in a different way.

Imagine the website the ad points to is malicious and manages to install or exploit something.

Outlook happily displays and opens this without confirmation, as long as you pay them for it.

On: Htmx Infinite Scroll

[drw85]

Even worse is the back button. Scroll any store and click on an item on page 10 of infinity and then use the back button. Back to page 1 you go. That’s why I open everything in a new tab pretty much by default.

[orphea → drw85]

Or you click things on some form, it changes query params in the url (that's fine), but then it turns out each change created a new history item, and to actually navigate back to the previous page you need to click Back 300 times >:(

On: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

[drw85]

I just think there are far too many. Sometimes I just want to add a happy face and there are 500 variations. Then I find one which I think looks happy and hover over it for a second and the tooltip says “shivering anxious constipated”.