• 2 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.


  • That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.


  • Thanks, that’s actually the one I’m using but I mistakenly called it “Android Pass” originally. I’ve edited my post now to reflect this correction. Unfortuantely, at least in the only 2 situations I’ve ever tried to use a wallet which was now twice in days, I was receiving emails from organisations, one with an auto club membership digital card and one with a ticket to an event, on both occasions, I was given a link to add to my google wallet or a link to add my apple wallet and neither link actually leads to a pkpass file or any downloadable file. In the case of one of them at least I saw it links to some unrelated company that I guess they teamed up with for distributing these passes called urban air ship. I assume if you go ahead an sign-in it eventually goes on to give you a pkpass file or something similar that a google wallet app deals with but I obviously wasn’t going to do that. I was wondering if there was any commonly known way to just get the pkpass file from links like those since both seemed to work in much the same way and I assume somewhere at the end of the hoops you jump through you get an actual file.



  • I think I’d be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it’s on my local machine. That’s because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation’s name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn’t actually that word or things like “the email where they mention they’ve had a kid” but I can’t actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example “What’s Dave’s kid’s name again?” and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like “how long has it been since we moved out of that house?” and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.

    Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don’t always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they’d likely be more effort than just asking directly like you’d ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it’s too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it…


  • Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.





  • I ended up at the practice after I first started cooking for myself and didn’t think to do this and wondered why the carrots were so unpleasant. The peel is just too… carrotty. It’s just super intense carrot taste to the point of unpleasantness, also even with a good wash it kind of tastes like dirt. I only really like it when it’s those little carrots sometimes referred to as ‘dutch carrots’ and they’re roasted so you get some blackened char on that skin.





  • I guess if, as this person says, the intended use is made clear then presumably so long as the original logs from which the report was generated are retained then there shouldn’t really be an issue. Make your nice, digestible reports that normalise over a workday and give a more grand overview of progress, and if they smell a bit too rosy or you just sometimes need a more granular accounting of time then clients/bosses can request the original raw data from the contractor/employee. Maybe this software itself should include some ability to retain a log of the processing that was done so that the relationship between its generated reports and the source data can be more clearly audited if some kind of a trust issue arises.

    The hope I guess would be that you make it clear that this is a more executive summary style of report that you’ve added as a courtesy because it’s more useful in context and that’s hopefully enough for whoever you’re reporting to but if they want more transparency or detail it’s all there for them too.