IHeartBadCode

Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on...

Good times.

I mean all of that looked cool I'm sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

This patent is likely a "we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn't someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs." This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It's to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.

This kind of highlights how AI isn't the issue. The reason there's not a robot that does your laundry and dishes is because the margin for such a robot wouldn't make anyone insanely rich, just well off. Especially in say the consumer market. Getting rid of say 50% of your employees and making the other 50% "Prompt Engineers" without any pay increase provides an instant two fold increase in profit.

The issue is how much money can a particular tool make someone. Before Photoshop came around, the larger magazines used to have at least three dozen airbrush and cover artist on staff, not to mention the photographers, film processors, etc... Today, with Photoshop, those six to seven dozen jobs have been consolidated into maybe a dozen folks. Some head of the magazine got to keep churning out stories with 80% less staff. It wasn't that Photoshop is good or bad, it was that someone saw dollar signs and ran with it.

Companies pay for technology with the expectation of paying it off down the road. So if 10 licenses of Photoshop cost $X, but they save Y number of employees * $r/yr rate of pay, then the licenses pay for themselves down the road. Consumer markets aren't like that. If a consumer has $X and something costs more than that money on-hand, there's just not a "pay for it down the road" for consumers. At least one that doesn't come with a lot of headache and trouble down the road as well.

The thing is, companies are going to use any excuse they can to fire people, especially senior staff people. If the technology doesn't work, oh well, they hire younger and newer folks back at greatly reduced pay compared to the folks who got laid off. AI is just the most recent MacGuffin in that shuffle and they're willing to put ludicrous amounts of money into that thing because "down the road, one way or another, it'll save us cash". That's why there's no dish washing or laundry robot, there's no serious money to be made from it. But over-hyped AI that could provide the same kind of massive layoff benefit that say Photoshop or CGI provided, these C-Staff folks can not shovel enough money into that fire.

Usually, there's a coupon that lets you get a medium 1 topping pizza and a stuffed cheese bread (+1 free dip), for $7 each item. That said, I absolutely recommend making your own pizza dough if you have the time for it. Way better tasting pizza.

Oracle is just adopting the mafia mentality

What do you mean "just"? This has always been Oracle.

But, but, that would be ... ˢᵒᶜⁱᵃˡⁱˢᵐ

GASP

How about cutting foreign defense spending

We could, but remember that a lot of that defense spending are people in the US' job. About 2M would be on the block for chopping.

Or getting rid of insanely wasteful farm subsidies

I mean don't stop there. Especially at just that point. Relax the restrictions for crop insurance. Reduce the barriers between farmers and grocers. Literally break up the giant grocery stores. Kroger's is a fucking bitch ass. One of the reasons we have to pay massive subsidies is because there's distinctly a lack of a free market in the farming and grocery business.

And while we're at it. Tell John Deere to fuck off.

Refusing a subpoena by Congress isn't what Bannon is hoping for. If you believe that Congress is investigating is outside their scope, it's too political to be a lawful investigation, you still have to answer the subpoena and then testify under oath your belief as such. This was something pointed out in Watkins.

So the only way SCOTUS can overturn the conviction is finding some new ability to ignore a subpoena, which I'm not sure how they can justify a new power without it also coming off as SCOTUS removing Congressional power, a clear violation of the separation of power.

You can walk into a hearing and literally sit there and not answer. You can indicate that they're full of themselves. Your 5th Amendment right overrides government oversight in personal matters. They were seeking Bannon's involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, he literally could have gotten up there, gave them the middle finger, indicated his fifth amendment right, and sat there with arms crossed the rest of the time. And he totally could have had SCOTUS get him off scotfree with a Watkins argument, the end.

But if you DO NOT even fucking go, well you've just shot yourself in the foot. Because now, SCOTUS has to invent something to save your dumbass, and reasons to invent a new thing that could potentially backfire are based on how much it's worth it to them to do such.

Literally guy could have done all kinds of things to make this easier for him. Just not showing was quite possibly the dumbest way to do it.

Maybe that's faulty, as I haven't tried it myself

Nah perfectly fine take. Each their own I say. I would absolutely say that where it is, not bothering with it is completely fine. You aren't missing all that much really. At the end of the day it might have saved me ten-fifteen minutes here and there. Nothing that's a tectonic shift in productivity.

Similar story, I had a junior dev put in a PR for SQL that gets lat and long and gives back distance. The request was using the Haversine formula but was using the km coefficient, rather than the one for miles.

I asked where they got it and they indicated AI. I sighed and pointed out why it was wrong and that we had PostGIS and that's there is literally scalar functions available that will do the calculations way faster and they should use those.

There's a clear over reliance on code generation. That said, it's pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that's what I would have typed anyway. But I've found it suggesting things I wouldn't remotely permit to things that are "sort of" correct. I'll let it pop on the latter case and go back and clean it up. But yeah, anyone blind trusting AI shouldn't be allowed to make final commits.

In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn't know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that's been over hyped. A few choice hits like:

• Crypto
• Blockchain
• Quantum
• Cloud
• WS-I
• LAMP
• XML
• P2P
• WORA
• OOP

Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There's just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.

I mean, at least it's been this way since I've been in the industry.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

Because you can't hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don't get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

It's good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

The level of "sky is falling and we're all going to be enslaved by AI" is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn't guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.