harryf · HackerTrans

23 giorni fadiscuss

Could go nicely with https://auge.franzai.com/ ( CLI on Apple Vision frameworks ) - do the first pass locally. If needed call their API for a more detailed analysis and then _finally_ we produce meaningful alt texts for images in HTML at a reasonable price ;)

harryf

5 mesi fadiscuss

Google: USD CHF … set graph to max … it’s right there but it’s a slooooow rot.

Swiss Franc is generally very stable so a good yard stick for other currencies over the long term

harryf

8 mesi fadiscuss

It’s not being driven by the UK. Check out all the other countries in the West rolling out Digital ID and it’s clearly coordinated just from the timing

harryf

8 mesi fadiscuss

We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.

Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.

It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.

The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.

Which may be the whole goal …

> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.

— Sam Altman - https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

harryf

8 mesi fadiscuss

There needs to a financial equivalent to the Mythical Man Month.

harryf

8 mesi fadiscuss

What I love about the words enshitification is it’s _almost_ autological. It takes a nice crisp on syllable word like “shit” and ruins it by adding 5 extra syllables. It just doesn’t worse over time, to be truly autological

harryf

9 mesi fadiscuss

It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU

Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous

harryf

9 mesi fadiscuss

> Good version control habits.

Feel like there's more to this point (plus the documentation). By now we've all see the inverted-U-shaped performance curve when coding with LLMs within a single thread / context: the model starts strong, plateaus as the context fills up, and eventually declines as semantic drift sets in.

Sometimes in this situation, it works better to throw away the current code and re-implement, using what's been learnt so far, than continue working with the current context of having new contexts try to salvage the current state of some code.

Documentation is great as a reflect of the current state of some code but I've had good experiences "re-constructing" the steps taken to arrive at a current implementation by writing commit messages that are intended for an LLM, extract that later, have an LLM use it as a basis for writing a fresh "spec" for some code, that yet another LLM uses to actually write that code.

Git history is a natural place to store that...

harryf

10 mesi fadiscuss

Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as;

- Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training

- Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones

- 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping

Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."

harryf

10 mesi fadiscuss

We need to take the focus off cost savings. None of this tech is anywhere near mature enough to replace humans yet.

Far better to focus on enhancing human capabilities with agents.

For example while a human talks to a customer on the phone, AI is fetching useful context about the customer and suggesting talking points to improve the human conversation.

One example of a direct benefit for business using AI this way is reducing onboarding times for new employees

harryf

10 anni fadiscuss

Very interesting. Makes me wonder if the same techniques which get people hooked to current forms of distracting social media could be used to encourage better habits, focus etc?

Have see some humorous attempts such as http://www.chorewars.com/ and http://code.rpgify.com/ but usually with a focus on motivating groups of people.

harryf

10 anni fadiscuss

> I've read claims that social media is addictive but not that it is engineered to be so.

Recommend reading up on the "Hook Model" - http://www.nirandfar.com/hooked - or watch this video - https://youtu.be/oQBsnSC_TRM - the techniques for building addictive products are well known, with a history that goes back to Las Vegas and the gambling industry.

Most social media companies - with the exception of one or two like Zynga - of course aren't overly announcing "we're building stuff to get you addicted" but their business depends on audience numbers so guess what: try searching LinkedIn jobs for "Facebook" and "psychology" and it's pretty clear

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