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tomgp

1,511 karmajoined hace 15 años
London based computer user. https://www.2x2.graphics

Submissions

It's Giving Enron: On the AI bubble, and the various echoes of the dotcom crash

davekarpf.substack.com
5 points·by tomgp·hace 9 meses·1 comments

comments

tomgp
·hace 3 días·discuss
I think the issue is that the prose on the homepage gives off AI marketing BS "Everything you'd expect. Nothing you don't." "Native down to the pixels" etc. in an age where the web is stuffed full of low value llm generated content this is a strong negative signal for me (and i suspect others). No reflection on the app itself which I've yet to try but seems like a great idea
tomgp
·el mes pasado·discuss
60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.
tomgp
·hace 2 meses·discuss
I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...
tomgp
·hace 2 meses·discuss
So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!
tomgp
·hace 2 meses·discuss
I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion
tomgp
·hace 3 meses·discuss
What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.
tomgp
·hace 3 meses·discuss
Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.
tomgp
·hace 4 meses·discuss
That's what science is though * our intuition/ hunch/ guess is X * now let's design an experiment which can falsify X
tomgp
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Interstingly a paper was published today which confirms accelerated warming whislt accounting for the effects of natural fluctations (el nino, volcanism and solar radiation etc) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025...

>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
tomgp
·hace 4 meses·discuss
This feels lovely! The fact that it reacts to the pressure on my Wacom tablet puts it above many desktop tools and streets ahead of most stuff on the web. Fantastic work.
tomgp
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.
tomgp
·hace 5 meses·discuss
Yeah, this matches my experience, line by line I can probably write code quicker but producing lines of code has never really been the bottle neck, nor infact the point, in software development.
tomgp
·hace 5 meses·discuss
The issue is that whilst the warning exists and is there front and centre, the marketing around ChatGPT etc - which is absolutely deafening in volume and enthusiasm - is that they're PHD level experts and can do anything.

This marketing obscures what the software is _actually_ good at and gives users a poor mental model of what's going on under the hood. Dumping years worth of un-differentiated health data into a generic chatGPT chat window seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths of large language models.

A reasonable approach would be to try to explain what kind of tasks these models do well at and what kind of situations they behave poorly in.
tomgp
·hace 6 meses·discuss
>Accept that most people flake

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.
tomgp
·hace 7 meses·discuss
HTML, CSS, Javascript?
tomgp
·hace 9 meses·discuss
As a customer I often look for the data model without a "moat". I want to be able to move my data to a different supplier without too much hassle
tomgp
·hace 9 meses·discuss
I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true)

[edited to correct a couple of typos]
tomgp
·hace 3 años·discuss
stores are nice (i’ve found the transitions especially useful) but very much optional. i’ve used redux with svelte with good results and as the article says, it’s easy to get svelte to work with any pure js libraries