Posts by Pascal Monett 19505 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
We don't need AI to stop thinking for ourselves.
Do you still know someone's phone number by heart, or do you just click on the Contact entry ?
Do you know their birthday, or do you rely on FaceBook to send you a reminder ?
We are conveniencing ourselves to death.
With the best of intentions, of course . . .
What the fuck is wrong with the US Government ?
Government devices should only have government-approved applications on them.
Or am I supposed to infer that every government employee has admin access to his PC/phone and can install whatever he wants ?
Does that mean that there are furious games of Call of Duty happening during work hours ?
Either government employees only have the stuff IT lets them, or it's a free-for-all and DeepSeek is just another layer of insecurity on top of FaceBook, TikTok and a raft of other things that having absolutely nothing to do on a work computer/phone.
So, which is it ?
We don't do that anymore. It's too expensive, plus our bright young engineers don't have the expertise to predict what might happen if a capacitor is blown.
In my experience, if your electronic thingamajig gives you a puff of smoke, it's done.
And forget repairing. We've lost that as well.
Ah, progress . . .
Yeah, right. They have the required experience to decide that, even though they're, in the best case, just a bunch of billionnaires with henchmen who've never had to actually screw in a lightbulb on their own.
Yeah, I'm really reassured.
"Microsoft's intention for the initial launch was to pit the machines against Apple Macs 'in terms of performance and efficiency,' "
Bunch of morons. Redmond cannot fight Cupertino in terms of hardware because Apple doesn't have the same customer market.
Apple's market is artists, composers and other assorted artistic types.
Borkzilla's market is businessmen, Fortune 1000, bankers and home users.
Trying to pin the advantage on hardware just demontrates that you haven't evolved sine Y2K.
Hmmm. That explains a lot actually.
This nonsense needs to be stopped.
Pseudo-AI should not be allowed to publish anything anywhere.
It's not an opinion if it was generated by a hallucinating data center.
I actually prefer reading nonsense from AManFromMars (not that I do, with the years, I have developed a very efficient visual filter, but still).
I live in France.
If I wished to buy a Tesla (spoiler : I don't), apparently I have to go near Strasbourg to get it.
That's a 2-hour drive, which someone else has to do because I'm supposed to come back with my car. So that's two people saddled with four hours of their life just shuttling to and back from a given point.
Then, there's the fact that there are absolutely zero Tesla garages. There's nowhere I near me I can bring the car if I find a problem. If the problem is serious enough, that means that I have to pay to get the car transported back to Strasbourg.
Are you kidding me ?
Not to mention the price of replacing the batteries when they're worn out.
Not to mention that, if ever the car gets into an accident, there's a fair chance that the insurance inspector will declare that it is totalled, and I've lost everything. Insurance be damned, they won't buy me a new one.
Meanwhile, Toyota does great hybrid cars, and there's BYD that has an impressive lineup - and dealerships across France which also do repairs.
I'm very happy that Tesla has had such a success, but when I pay over €50K for a car, I prefer to be able to get it within 30 minutes, and have it serviced within 30 minutes.
My Audi works fine because my garage is 30 minutes away and they have the parts required and the expertise to handle it.
And the battery only costs €120 to replace.
That's kind of important at a time when we all appear to being going to war with China, which is the only country making batteries at this point.
When I was contracting for a rather important company in Luxembourg, I was part of the IT team and thus part of the Helpdesk ticket system.
What I always adored was the guy filing a ticket at quarter to five on a Friday and, of course, there were never enough details to fully understand the problem and correct it.
Invariably, when I called his desk to ask some questions about the issue, he was already gone.
Well if he doesn't care that much about his ticket, it can wait for Monday.
Where he always is when the shit hits the fan : behind an impenetrable legal wall that prevents him from being implicated in any way.
He is responsible for more bankruptcies than a Mafia don, but he has never lost money because of that since it was always the schmucks who trusted him that paid out of their pockets (eh, Giuliani ?).
I find it curious how, just when we've learned that the Chinese have apparently a better AI solution than the West does, there is a sudden acute interest in ChatGPT and associated AI products at the government level.
Um, guys, it was there last year.
Is this a harbringer of a massive pork barrel in the making ?
There is nothing there that couldn't be patched into the supposedly last ever version, except that the Board needs to see its pile of cash increasing and has imagined these totally artificial excuses to enforce it.
The problem is that Redmond is not a government, and users will see their own interests before the Boards' desire to acquire yet more money.
I'm sure the 3.3 million Soviet POWs (scroll down to Table 3) and the 1.8 million Poles that were killed as well (among many others) would slightly disagree with that assessment.
But hey, what's a little fact to stand in the way of ignorance ?
That doesn't mean that people will actually want to use said "AI" silicon.
Clippy was largely ignored. There's no reason, except the expectations of Redmond's Board, that people will flock to this new AI Clippy.
But hey, go on throwing money and resources at this abomination. Since when had Borkzilla ever learned from experience ?
Indeed.
Beancounters are not the ones to think of successful new products.
Meanwhile, "The board remains intensely focused ". Gosh, what a surprise. That bunch of suits needs to find someone that will give them their next quarter of share returns.
They don't give a flying one about the tens of thousands of people who are trying to work at their company . . .
We can't be. The Hubble Deep Fields experiment proves that, whatever point in the sky you look at, there's a galaxy somewhere out there.
A galaxy. Millions upon millions of star systems. And we now know that most stars have planets.
There is life out there. It's just that there is a vanishingly small chance that we ever communicate with it, let alone meet it.
It would seem that there is a wealth of knowledge about what is insufficient, and no drive to correct the issue.
I guess it's normal : civil servants are there to generate reports, not work, and ministers are certainly not there to stick their necks out and take risks (cf Yes Minister).
. . has now met reality. And it bites.
An interesting article.
I will have no legacy to leave, I am but a mere business programmer. In the best case, in twenty years from now, someone will be tasked with reviewing some code and find my name in the author string.
I don't care. I have a loving wife and a daughter that adores me, and that is what is important to me.
If, however, I were an artist, I might have some issue with the legacy of my work. That said, if the Internet Archive is a Good Thing(TM), apparently YouTube does a great job keeping artists' work alive, so all is not lost.
The UI for any car is pretty simple : there's the steering wheel, blinkers, lights, gas pedal and brake. The rest is fluff.
Managing a computer, installing programs, managing disk data and folders, that is an entire other ball game.
I know a lot of people who can't manage sorting out their Inbox, for Pete's sake.
