Posts by gweedo

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Rockets that can land and be reusable? Madness. What a colossal waste of time and resources. The incredible hubris of someone to think they can do something never done before.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: It's a TRAAAAAP!

Rust is quite clear on what expectations are for code marked as 'unsafe'. From the Rust language reference: "the intent is that as the programmer, you’ll ensure the code inside an unsafe block will access memory in a valid way." https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html

Says more about this profs reading comprehension.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

The problem isn't the methodology (waterfall, agile, etc.), it boils down to not understanding the problem you are trying to solve and then trying to design/build/operate it with inexperienced teams.

ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay

Can we please be done writing meaningless articles about how wrong gen AI tools get things? They simply reformulate and regurgitate content. You can get them to spew out all kinds of idiotic stuff with the right prompt. This isn't news or interesting.

The Pentagon has the worst IT helpdesk in the US govt

Re: security

Nothing wrong with a physical smart card. There are more options now days, but smartcards work perfectly well and have proven over the years to be a very effective and reliable. Read up on authentication and common factors used. I.e. something you know, something you have, something you are (biometric).

Failed response to systemic problems

I love how the response to systemic government failures is to form an additional organization... This basically means leadership has zero clue what to do to fix the problems and no vision. They only know how to create more bureaucracy and kick the ball down the road a bit further. This happens in most large private organizations as well. Sad.

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

Re: Ladder

"One theory is that employers don't want workers to stay over 2 years, so they don't acquire more employment rights and lack of pay incentives is designed to nudge people to quit before 2 year mark."

That would require too much forethought and planning. It is due to lazy HR and business leaders who don't have the energy to argue with HR who are the "experts" in these things.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Ridiculous timeline. LLM will be helpful for knowledge workers for those big businesses willing to pay the high price for adding these features. I've used many of the co-pilot solutions available today, and they are for sure helpful, but in no way are they actual AI. There is no intelligence or thinking going on, they are just really good uses for the LLM to summarize, reconstruct words & materials, etc. They all need someone knowledgeable and time/effort to get something of value from them. They are great at getting something started, but you still have to bring it all together into something that is useful. AI that everyone thinks of when raving away on this subject are decades (at least) away. That doesn't take away from the usefulness of the LLM tools coming.

Clients turn to Indian IT outsourcers for AI faster than industry can train staff

Re: Hey Companies

100%, you get what you pay for. GOOD architects, software engineers, data scientists, etc. are just as rare and difficult to find in India as they are everywhere else. Don't believe a CV. Rigorously interview everyone, and don't lower your standards. If you do you will hire 10 people and be six months down the road with nothing but a mess to show for it.

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

100%, this is nothing but an attempted money grab by a bunch of lawyers. That has to be so annoying to deal with... but I guess it keeps all the lawyers making big $.

Biden lines up $42.5B for US broadband boost

I'm in one of the largest cities in the USA and we have only one real high-speed option in my area (cable), no fiber... and I pay a ton for 300mb down. My in-laws live way out in a rural community with 150 people and they have gigabit fiber (multiple sources) for far less than I'm paying. I don't think urban communities are where the problems are honestly.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

You just don't understand what ChatGPT is...

You simply do not understand at all chat what ChatGPT is, and what its underlying natural language model are doing to construct these responses. There is no intelligence here... it is just statistically looking at what words which are commonly found near each other (based off a LOT of material) and using that to construct a reply. It looks super impressive, but there is nothing here that understands what you are asking, no intelligence, no "thinking", just a big natural language model (math) constructing a textual response based on statistical models of words, sentences, language syntax, etc. Garbage in garbage out ultimately. You can get it to come up with some wild responses... they mean nothing. It is just stitching together a bunch of words that mathematically (based on a lot of input material) often go along together.

But I don't blame you for being ignorant, the media is just as clueless in how they are reporting on it. Go watch one of the many youtube videos on how this technology works, educate yourself vs. emotionally responding to generated words that just look like more is happening there.

Microsoft open-sources its emojis as part of new design philosophy

Easily one of the ugliest collections of emoji in existence. They rolled these out to teams not long back and everyone recoiled in horror. Looks like they were drawn with crayons.