Posts by Michael Hoffmann 1411 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
... I was thinking about who those might be.
I know of 2 major corporate clients who might throw their weight around like this. One is Gitlab.
The other is Amazon/AWS. I can say from first had experience that unless they've made a major migration off the ecosystem in the last 5 years, giant chunks of their builder systems are Ruby based.
Having recently gotten myself a Claude sub as well, I thought I'd give Claude Code a serious try.
First, a little project I hacked in years ago to extract info from Steam. It worked well, until one library was no longer supported, attempts to fix it failed in the horror that was the original source, Steam change its API and I left it with a shrug of regret. Enter Claude, which "figured out" a work-around and got it to work again (because it was able to scour the insane amount of HTML and JS and embedded div blocks and all the stuff I had no clue about, because I never got into the web dev and though HTML should have stopped at b1 and a tags)
It worked so well I had it integrate a number of external scrips I used to mangle the output, and then a few nice-to-haves. Wow! Great!
Emboldened, I thought I'd go for something more involved: and actual RAG and document analysis system for our ancient archive of statements, bills, what-not. I didn't want that out there, so use Claude to build the code for the local running of one of the freely available LLMs. Might make my old GPU melt, but let's see what happens.
Oh dear. Turns out that just reading in and scanning/OCR-ing the thousands of docs was the easy bit - there's a great CUDA enhanced tool for that. OK, shove that into a RAG and let's run queries over it, just like they advertise is sooooo simples.
The results were laughable. And as of writing this, still not working, after days and days of "vibe coding". Code that worked suddenly regresses. Queries returning information that isn't even close to correct - despite it "telling me" that it found and is accessing the right information. It's just doing LLM things which is random prediction and which is about as likely to be correct as me picking the Powerball numbers. It forgets instructions and prompts, so I have to constantly inject them again, because it doesn't have enough "memory". Ingestion of data can take an entire day with the hardware I have available - and it will happily make some minor change of a few lines of code and have me do the whole thing again, no matter what I prompt it. (and gods I want to murder a techbro when I get that "you're absolutely right, I'm sorry" nonsense. You're a fucking machine! Not Marvin the paranoid android!
So, small chicken feed? Yeah, not bad. Anything serious? Tell em, they're dreamin! Not without an army of elves to hand-massage the output. Oh wait, you just fired all your elves, did you? Good luck, then! And even more good luck to the customers who paid money for that vibe coded swamp.
Unsurprisingly a lot of snark about real books not suffering from this problem.
Until you look at some of them and see what the use of acidic paper has wrought. A lot of my old faves are now yellowed and browned and I worry if the paper will finally just crack.
We should never have stopped using papyrus, vellum, clay and stone!
1.5 trillion dollars in military spending don't just pay for themselves (*), gotta cut somewhere!
(*) actually they do pay for themselves, as fast as the printers can keep up, or the computers spit out funny numbers. If countries weren't still auto-buying US bonds, they'd have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
... a slew of Dr Evil scale techbros undermining democracy and civilisation...
... and it's "for entertainment only"?!
At the risk of ElReg mods censoring this, but I increasingly do not understand why these people aren't already being carted to the Place de la Bastille for a very, VERY close shave...
"Don't worry a quick 'chkdsk /f' ... followed by a 'DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth' then 'sfc /scannow' should fix everything !!!"
... and all communication and contact was lost. They were never heard from again.
Though one of these was seen briefly: --->
Years ago, SWMBO worked at a shop that was borgified by DXC Aus. According to her, one of the fastest drops off a cliff in terms of company culture ever. Came in like buldozers "our way or the highway". Then were shocked when most said "highway, it is!" Whole place went to the absolute shits in a short time. She too got out (had been holding on, hoping to land a payout, but it got too bad, so sanity and health was higher priority)
Previous place had a rep for being one of the highest rated places to work for. Why they sold out? Who knows. Hostile? Leadership just being dazzled by the sheer offer (which of course DXC then wanted to make up).
Yeah, that.can only be a matter of time, before the hypertechs and their bro bajillionares start building those. We've all played those RPGs.
Frankly, I'm sometimes surprised it hasn't happened. Maybe they don't have the cash right now because they're burning it on the AI bonfire? Mercenaries won't accept "stock option" funny money.
My condolences! As someone who is the opposite: I got tested it turned out I process caffeine at a prolific rate. Espresso half an hour before I go to bed? No problem!
OTOH, I need a large mug to get going enough in the morning (which I am NOT a person of, to use today's proper PC speak) to drive the distance to the train station.It gets the fog out, I can work through on most days without further injection (unlike my self-declared "can do with 5 hours of sleep" moronic coworkers, who might as well be on a permanent drip to remain conscious).
Sorry, didn't mean to sidetrack with a rant. As sometimes happens one particular colleague suddenly popped into my brain and it was type or work on my ulcer.
Why do they even bother with making these statements?
Lies, damn lies, statistics - and CEO bullshit. Who even believes this crap except for that Kramer moron on CNBC?
Or is it just for the marketing and PR people to justify their existence, knowing they picked a job where they are regarded so low that even former friends have to kneel down to spit on them?
At time of writing, we are about a week or so into the new "age verification" laws for porn sites in Australia.
Within days, every media outlet was reporting on the insane jump of VPN subs down under.
Waiting for the next round of "VPN age verification" ending in "use of computer verification with permanently actrivated webcam, comrade!"
Orwell was wrong: it's not the boot in the face forever, it's the mouth-breathing moron of a politician drooling their nonsense on your forever and ever. Voted in by people who watch reality TV shows. How about voter verification laws? Do you watch MAFS? You're banned from voting!
Uhm, sorry got a bit sidetracked there...
Leaving our the rest of the story: Caesar wasn't emperor, but his assassination led to the civil war the *resulted* in the centuries of what we like to call empire, but was really a military dictatorship with a warlord calling himself princeps and then dominus.
The age verification should extend to corporations, in that case to the highest levels in charge - CEO, CFO, CIOI.
Verify their ages at every installation. At. EVERY. Installation. VM, container, on-prem, in-cloud, doesn't matter. I mean, you never know, right?
Do this for one week, no excuses.
Everybody else just lean back and enjoy the show!
You saved me from writing the same thing. I didn't get the "fraudster" accusation.
It's not like you can buy up DDR3 and relabel it to sell as DDR5, unless out right not delivering the goods - in which case why even buy up that old stock? Just sell non-existent RAM, now that would be fraud.
I wonder if this will slow the cycle of new models and really, the cycle of when older phones drop out of support.
While the fruity company has generally been pretty decent with how far back they support phone models, the slowdowns experienced often made that moot.
Now they may have to dig out the old virtue of *gasp* optimisation and trying to fit more into less memory, like we did in the 80s, or even early 90s.When we still knew there was a "register". The C language option, not that obscure, irreverent tech website.
Wasn't it only yesterday that we had an article that contained "nobody is handing over the nuclear launch coded to ChatGPT" or some such?
And here #drunksec wants "AI" for autonomous weapons systems and will threaten, bluster and bully any LLM peddler that doesn't toe the line.
Oh, silly me, autonomous weapons systems would *never* include nukes, of course, never, ever, pinky-swear and hope to die. That hope may come true...
Final outcome in the icon ->
So, what subscription price DO they need per user for it to be profitable?
Supposedly even the $200 ones aren't. I can't get my company to pay for my dev tools sub, you think they'll shell out $300 (make that AU$500) or more per MONTH for "AI"?
Never mind home usage. Who's going to go "rent or AI sub, hmmm? Meaning, it doesn't matter even if there's only one hypester left standing, nobody will pay, never mind can afford, what they need to charge. For the *current* offerings, to say nothing of what they need to pay for their insane data centres and power plants they're waffling on about.
Oh, I first hoped they were talking Hellfire armed drones with lingering capability. Catch them in flagranti delicto.
So they can take care of those bogans who regularly dump their shit 500m(!) before the tip, because they can't be arsed to bring it the rest of they way when they're told of the fees (which is free if you live in the shire, but they come from who knows where)
In 10,000 years who will be able to read the data when knowledge and tools to do so will itself be lost? Will what's left of humanity (never mind some alien) decorate their walls with "this pretty engraved glassy stuff"? Or will there be bootstrapping instructions engraved on granite slabs: "first, create a civilisation able to read these tablets".
""Claude Code was instrumental in my learning process, especially since I came into the project with very little experience in the programming languages used in the repository [including TypeScript and Node.js]," said Hood."
Aright, show us what you've learned *without* an LLM.
We all know the answer of course. Even Corporal Schultz knew the answer!
"I know nothing! NOTHING!"
