I’ve always been uncomfortable, honestly, with calling software developers “engineers”. Partly that’s because it’s actually illegal to call a non-PEng role an “engineer” in some jurisdictions (most of Canada), but I think this comment is an excellent point of distinction to make between PEng and other roles.

Legal responsibility along with regulatory requirements. There’s a reason everyone* trusts elevators and airplanes but shouldn’t trust most software.

And I ask you - if those same trillions of dollars were instead spent on materially improving the lives of average people, how much more progress would we make as a society? This is an absolutely absurd sum of money were talking about here.

A lot of LLM hype is wrapped up in how well it can write code. This hype is being used by corporations to justify pouring mind boggling amounts of money into the tech in the hopes that they can lay off all their staff.

I reserve the right to hate this state of affairs and enjoy seeing every headline that shows just how much of a pipe dream it is.

I saw one where the program ran a busy loop on startup to calculate how long it took. Then it used that as an iterations-to-seconds conversion for busy loops between scheduled actions.

100%. Unit conversion is a solved problem, and it is impossible for an AI to be faster or more accurate than any of the existing converters.

I do not need an AI calculator, because I have no desire to need to double check my calculator.

Pretty sure they’re using “design” to mean “aesthetics” in that sentence. I do think we need to less often use “design” to refer specifically to aesthetics or graphic design; every object and system that humans have made are designed.

== vs === is easy: == is wrong and bad, don’t use it. :D

I’ve never had an issue with webp on Samsung devices, either in Discord or not.

Dunno about the user you asked, but I’ve used Bandcamp for that.

It’s certainly lower than the 20-30% game distribution platforms take.

I can pretty much guarantee the server & staff costs are more than 1% of sticker price, especially since BC includes streaming services.

This, tbh. I did not have this on my 2025 bingo card…

I think that’s a bad idea, both legally and ethically. Vehicles cause tens of thousands of deaths - not to mention injuries - per year in North America. You’re proposing that a company who can meet that standard is absolved of liability? Meet, not improve.

In that case, you’ve given these companies license to literally make money off of removing responsibility for those deaths. The driver’s not responsible, and neither is the company. That seems pretty terrible to me, and I’m sure to the loved ones of anyone who has been killed in a vehicle collision.

Part of this is a debate on what the definition of intelligence and/or consciousness is, which I am not qualified to discuss. (I say “discuss” instead of “answer” because there is not an agreed upon answer to either of those.)

That said, one of the main purposes of AGI would be able to learn novel subject matter, and to come up with solutions to novel problems. No machine learning tool we have created so far is capable of that, on a fundamental level. They require humans to frame their training data by defining what the success criteria is, or they spit out the statistically likely human-like response based on all of the human-generated content they’ve consumed.

In short, they cannot understand a concept that humans haven’t yet understood, and can only echo solutions that humans have already tried.

That graph is hilarious. Enormous error bars, totally arbitrary quantization of complexity, and it’s title? “Task time for a human that an AI model completes with a 50 percent success rate”. 50 percent success is useless, lmao.

On a more sober note, I’m very disappointed that IEEE is publishing this kind of trash.

While I’m sure the obvious systemic issues contribute to not looking for alternatives, that does sound like largely an issue inherent to optical pulse oximeters. Engineers aren’t miracle workers, they can’t change physics to their liking.

I’m sure pulse oximeters now are more accurate than they were 20 years ago. The fact we’re still using them is because no alternatives have been found which are as easy to use, reliable, and non-invasive as pulse oximeters, even with the known downsides.

Repository: a collection of computer code for a software program (or app if you insist).

Fork: a copy of a repository so you can edit it without affecting the original.

Pull request: a request to the owner of a repo to bring in some changes you made in a fork.

I think I even got the word count down.

Kind of splitting hairs, but a company that can let go of “scores” of employees and still exist is not a small business.

Yes, you’re anthropomorphizing far too much. An LLM can’t understand, or recall (in the common sense of the word, i.e. have a memory), and is not aware.

Those are all things that intelligent, thinking things do. LLMs are none of that. They are a giant black box of math that predicts text. It doesn’t even understand what a word is, orthe meaning of anything it vomits out. All it knows is what is the statistically most likely text to come next, with a little randomization to add “creativity”.

You’re completely right, if the goal is good customer support and decent working conditions for the operators.

It’s not. The goal is like 1rre said - make people get fed up and stop trying to get their stuff fixed, just buy a new one. Oh, and they could fire half the operators too, since less people would be willing to wade through the pile of shit to talk to them.

Money and profit, screw the rest.

And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.