Eh. It’s useful for finding what I want to know. The result to a query which goes like “Based on this paragraph from some documentation written in 2005 (link) the answer is <bunch of generated text rehashing the information I wanted to find in the first place>” is a whole lot more useful than “Here is a list of thousands and thousands of irrelevant and incoherently sorted results, of which one is probably what you were looking for. Good luck.” which was, unfortunately, the state of the art up to this point.

I lived through the dotcom hype cycle, the 5G cycle, the crypto cycle, etc. The useful (boring!) bits of technology remain and something new and shiny becomes the target of hype and speculation a few years later. Nothing new really.

Yeah the AI hype levels are insane, but at the same time I think there is some interesting and actually useful technology there. That’s my 2c anyway.

The search thing is specific to internal data sets btw. Anyone who has used intranet search engines at large companies would probably relate just how terrible they are. Much worse than Google is at searching the internet.

Sure, you can’t trust LLMs and just copy-paste whatever comes out of it. But it’s very effective as a way to find something in very large mixed datasets when you may not know which exact keywords to use for a traditional search engine.

Perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology. But being able to ask in natural language “why is something the way it is” and it returns references to code, bugs, and documentation along with a small summary is pretty cool. It works better than any of the half-baked corporate search engines I’ve used before. Is this not “knowledge retrieval”? In any case I can see the utility.

AI can be a useful tool and I think it will slowly become more common in the workplace, for example it can be very convenient for knowledge retrieval, but it’s laughable to think that it can replace humans. I’d wager any time “AI” can replace a human the job could’ve already been automated through other means.

I’ve been looking at possible phone options too. There are several degoogled Android options but it’s still Android of course. And switching to a Linux phone seems like it would be really limiting without access to Android/iOS apps. Do Linux phone users just use the browser to replace all those apps? I guess it could work, though it seems less ergonomic.

I don’t have an Android phone currently but I thought I’d check on iOS and, yep, Google Drive has access to all files. Well that’s a bit hypocritical.

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I had forgotten about Misery Index. I think I saw them live many years ago, good show 🤘

Total Annihilation

Some memorable moments in no particular order:

• Outer Wilds when you reach the Sun Station
• Descending into the Lost River biome in Subnautica
• Alan Wake 2: The Musical

The movie and the comics seem well aware that it’s a horrible dystopia. But I agree making it “cool” can be problematic.

Yeah, the incredible footage compelled me to share.

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”

A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.

I visited Europe recently and used a rideshare service, the guy was driving a new BYD compact SUV. I was surprised at how nice it was. The interior styling was still a little eccentric, which is something I noticed before with Chinese cars, but the build quality appeared to be very good. It was definitely a vehicle I would consider if they were for sale here in the US. American car manufacturers must be relieved to be protected by arbitrary trade barriers.

The same with Lightroom sadly. The open source alternatives are either too buggy or have UX designed by very “opinionated” people, making them painful and frustrating to use. I currently want to get rid of Lightroom but can’t.

Ah, thanks. That was entirely unclear from this article.