Posts by ArrZarr

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Re: This is what I keep saying

The two main use-cases I'm working on are creating code systems, with feedback from the model about implementation options and documenting those processes or documenting external processes.

I don't know how a less capable LLM would be with these, but even though they're not complex pieces of code in the grand scheme of things, I am running close to 4o's limits on some of the scripts we're generating.

On your last paragraph, I can definitely see where you're coming from, but there is a flipside. In this situation, there is a single person's (billable) time that's being used in the conversation. The second person is lost (but in my role there never is a second person anyway), but I'm no longer requiring other people's hours to work through these systems step by step.

Re: This is what I keep saying

This is the fundamental difference between LLM-usage horror stories and success stories.

A vague, poorly thought out brief with a wide scope is doomed to failure.

A specific, considered request within a narrow scope is pretty much guaranteed to succeed, as long as there are no external factors that make the task impractical/impossible.

As somebody who often has trouble getting thoughts to paper, I've had a lot of success recently chatting through existing processes and turning them into usable docs with the help of ChatGPT. It's made a huge difference to my ability to get my processes written down, compared to sitting there looking at an empty word doc.

Re: This is what I keep saying

No. Of course they don't, but you knew that before you started typing.

Personally, I'd also hope that those kinds of systems were designed by professional systems architects, rather than an enthusiastic laywoman with a knack for it.

Re: This is what I keep saying

For what it's worth, I work in a dev-adjacent role. I have had to dabble in very basic code but while I'm really good at designing systems, I've always been incredibly weak at writing syntax.

What LLMs have allowed me to do is cover that weakness and get some rather cool projects out the door without needing dev interaction.

There are things I refuse to do (and I use LLMs there as well, to help me organise the thoughts in my head and generate a coherent brief).

The single most important thing to understand with using an LLM is your own limitations. You can raise your ceiling in an field, but it's absolutely not the same thing as being an expert in the field yourself.

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: Good article

I have it on the entirely trustworthy authority of a sentient Tweed Suit that Europe are the devil, and everything coming from the continent is fundamentally evil, however.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: It's a wise dwarf ...

Pff, the Chicago style guide is prescriptivist nonsense.

Icon for irony.

Re: It's a wise dwarf ...

The singular "They" predates the singular "You".

By something like 300 years.

So what's the issue?

EU Chips Act heading for failure, time for Chips Act 2.0

Re: Wrong idea?

Cars are probably the most complicated single item sold in large quantities to consumers. This means that the factories are big and employ lots of people. The infrastructure to support these car factories create even more jobs across many industries. The number I was taught at school was that the Sunderland Nissan plant indirectly created/supported 10,000 jobs. Of course those jobs weren't all UK based, but having the actual car factory in your country increases the chance that other parts of that supply chain create jobs in your region too.

Boeing offloads some software businesses to private equiteer Thoma Bravo

Re: Agreed

Apologies, I didn't think I needed to add the "I do not endorse, nor support Private Equity firms doing anything" clause to my comment.

Is there anything else you'd like me to confirm I don't endorse or support based upon my previous comment?

Re: Agreed

I know you're being sarcastic, but weirdly the Williams F1 team has bounced back to the upper midfield in the last couple of years, after being acquired by Dorilton Capital.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Re: Why??

And I'm certain you must be a joy to work with.

China’s chip champ Loongson teases trio of new processors for lappies, factories, maybe servers too

Are there 4 or 8 physical cores on the chip?

It's difficult to see how these chips are 5 years behind Intel/AMD when their performance is coming through on benchmarks similar to the Intel Xeon E5630 which was released 15 years ago (4 physical cores with hyperthreading at a slightly higher clock).

It seems that Longsoon's IOPS are 300MHz worth of clock ahead of Intel 15 years ago (Yes, I know it doesn't really work like that, sue me), but the whole "5 years behind" claim seems to be missing a digit.

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Built-in Javascript engine?

For what it's worth, Windows 11 was the first time Microsoft increased the minimum system requirements since Windows 7, 12 years previously.

If you're looking at the 32 bit versions, that goes back to Vista, 15 years previously (not that Win11 has a 32 bit version).

Yes, the TPM module was a BS move by Microsoft, but I'd argue that a desktop or laptop from the past 10 years which doesn't meet 11's minimum requirements (excluding the TPM) was e-waste as it came out of the factory in the first place.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: Ha

"From what I have read"

Would you care to list your sources, or are we working on the "Trust me, sis" school of thought here?

Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Re: Drama's /crime programmed

Which is why I didn't suggest leaving the phone at home, but passing the phone to a friend [who would be out and about in a different location].

Re: Drama's /crime programmed

Turning tracking off wouldn't present a potential alibi. Having an (otherwise accurate) location tracker show you elsewhere at the time of a crime would be more compelling evidence that the suspect didn't do what they're accused of.

Re: Drama's /crime programmed

Of course, an enterprising ne'er-do-well could never give their phone to somebody else while they're out doing the thing they're accused of.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: Cavalcade of bozos

I've always been partial to the phrase "Cavalcade of incompetents and fuck-ups". Of course I was describing the ruling Tory party in the UK last year at the time, but it still seems to fit (on both sides of the pond)

Boffins 3D-print artificial iris muscle that flexes both ways

Depends on the purpose of the robot. A robot which is exploring a collapsed building, potentially based upon an octopus's ability to squeeze through any hole larger than its beak - but without needing the beak to feed would want as few hard parts as possible. Creating artificial muscle tissue like this is a necessary step to more realistic-feeling prosthetics for those who need them (and further down the line, grafted prosthetics that can be powered by the body's existing systems).

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Re: No surprises here. They're not intelligent.

Honestly, in my dealings with ChatGPT, I've found it to be remarkably human in a lot of situations. Frontloading it with all the information just causes it to miss stuff (human equivalent: "I'm going to ask you a series of questions in the format I need them, despite that wall of text you diligently wrote out for this bug report probably containing this information.").

I get much better results from both Biological and Artificial conversations when working through point by point. It's just easier to parse for both kinds of mind.

Admittedly, I've never tried to do any funky jailbreaking or pushing known-incorrect facts upon the LLM for testing purposes - I don't use it to do thinking for me, I use it to get the syntax correct for systems I've already designed.

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

Re: "human moral decision making"

Don't worry, that's not what I was sassing you about. The film is honestly a travesty considering the source material it draws from - the whole point of Asimov's short stories was to make a world where a robot uprising was fundamentally impossible (since he was so sick of reading speculative fiction about robot uprisings).

And before anybody mentions the Zeroth Law, it's vastly overstated in popular culture compared to Robots and Empire, where the topic is explored by Asimov.

Re: "human moral decision making"

This might be the first time I've heard anybody suggest that the 2004 film that shares a name with I, Robot had any value in the field of robotics/AI.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: why that's...

Hacker:

I thought you'd say that. I looked it up and it turns out that The Noble Order of the Garter was created in 1348. I think it's safe to say that any trial period has completed.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: Maligning Excel

I mean, obviously Excel is the incorrect tool for the job - but most of the shortcomings that were flagged in the article are avoidable by building the spreadsheet correctly in the first place.

Also VBA is cheating. Everything they need to do can be done with raw formulae. That way you don't need to open up the pain of Macro-enabled workbooks.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Viewing his cartoons (without an adblocker) is directly supporting him though since those ads pay him.

Heck, even viewing his cartoons with an adblocker gives supports him to a degree (site visitor numbers taken from the backend which he could use to prove traffic numbers for affiliate deals etc.)

And yes, it's true that the Dilbert site no longer has the strip on it. I think you need to give him money on Patreon or similar to access them.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Re: Nearly there

Jumpin' Jupiter, Alistair, Asimov's rules absolutely worked - the short stories in I, Robot eventually resulted in the Robots running everything, and everything was better for it.

The stories in I, Robot came from the funky interactions between the rules in new & interesting situations. Usually at the expense of Powell and Donovan's sanity.

The Elijah Baley stories came from how the Robots were too good at their jobs, and it screwed up the Spacer societies.

Re: Nearly there

The fundamental design of the documentation is created from the real life experience. Getting an LLM to write the words to fill in the design applies that real life experience indirectly without needing the LLM to understand the deep context.

Ah, but surely the act of taking a first draft of the documentation then editing issues with it is a very similar process to double-checking the thought process?

As mentioned above, writing documentation is one of my weakest areas. I need the whole concept to crystallise in my mind (along with how to explain it without the use of a conversation) before I can get the words to paper - and that crystallisation will not be rushed, much to my frustration. Using an LLM to give me that first draft then working through it and editing it to be more accurate will still lead me to think through each aspect of the process.

Current LLMs are junior team members who work quickly but all their work needs checking over.

You can't rely on one to do a task you don't understand yourself, because their work needs checking over.

You also need to have done your reps without the LLM to get the fundamentals internalised - how else will you learn about the edge cases which are going to bite you in the arse?

Assuming you're using them appropriately above, it lets you spend more time working on the knotty problems and how the whole thing will fit together in the complicated system that you're putting together - something that I don't think current LLMs are up to internalising.

(My favourite thing about getting an LLM to do the legwork on a task for me is that it's then capable of banging out reasonable documentation for the process, that gives me something to work from. Writing documentation from scratch on a given process is incredibly painful for me, so getting something close generated that I can tweak is a huge time saver)

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: DG Nova "Jump Through"

For point 2, I would remind everybody of the (modern horror) "Story of Mel".

Have I Been Pwned likely to ban resellers from buying subs, citing 'sh*tty behavior' and onerous support requests

Re: He's worked with resellers to help those who can’t pay by credit card

I didn't read the passage as "The resellers can't pay by credit card", I read it as "The resellers sell to people who can't pay by credit card, allowing them to access the service (and the reseller then pays HIBP by credit card)".

Which is a fair reason for a reseller to exist, imo, if the core provider isn't happy expanding payment options to people in difficult situations when it comes to paying online.

Poland’s 2nd astronaut brings pierogi to the ISS party

While I can't answer your question, I asked the same thing of my Czech colleagues when I was visiting the office in Prague about a decade ago (hence why I've forgotten the names), they were all very disparaging about their national cuisine.

What I do remember of it was lots of meat in sauces.

You might be interested in Kofola which is Czechia's soviet-era Coca-cola replacement. It has a much smoother taste/mouth feel and holds a head like beer. As mentioned above, it's been a long while but it left a mark on me.

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

Re: I’m sure Americans will regret electing a Dictator...

Ugh, obviously I meant 1492, not 1942.

God damn it.

Re: I’m sure Americans will regret electing a Dictator...

"...immigrants (and their USA born descendents)..."

So anybody not of an unbroken Indian American lineage dating back to before 1942 then? Trump himself is the grandson of an Immigrant.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Re: SEP

It's also worth pointing out that damage is caused by kinetic energy (MV^2). I don't care how fast a cyclist is going, they'd need to be near the sound barrier to deal anywhere near as much wear and tear on a road as a lorry.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: And we skip over Musks real reason he's now involved

"Ah, the if you don't support us you are against us argument."

Under Johnson, the proposed blanket conversion therapy ban was modified to specifically exclude transgender conversion therapy from the ban.

Truss won the Tory party leadership contest partly due to her harder anti-trans stance than Sunak (look at how Sunak's position changed on the subject as he fell behind in the latter stages of the contest)

Truss still blames "transgender activists" for how quickly she was ousted as leader of the Tory party, despite the fact that she lost any confidence the parliamentary Tory party had following her mini budget.

My (Tory) MP has voted against any sort of LGBTQ+ rights since he got into parliament in 2010.

These are the actions of a group who *are* actively hostile to trans rights (or LGBTQ+ rights in general), and that's before we look at how the NHS GICs have been systematically starved of resources under the recent Tory governments.

Re: And we skip over Musks real reason he's now involved

Yes, Let's cite examples from how atrociously TERF island runs its trans health clinics as worth the paper they're written on. It was sponsored by a government actively hostile to trans people and the outcome was written for Cass to make her way to, rather than come to a proper independent conclusion.

The *only* useful purpose that the Cass review has for anybody is for people like you who can trot it out and claim that it's good science when trying to make the case that people learn to be trans because they learned of gender identies.

I was trans 15 years before I knew that trans was a thing - I just didn't have a word for it at the time.

Re: Distraction tactics—that's all

Why are you putting transition in quote marks there?

Are you somehow averse to the idea of people transitioning?

Re: Insane troll logic budget

Won't stop them blaming the next president when they need to make the painful decisions in '28-'32, assuming the next president is blue, of course.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Not Syntax, but

We used to develop our own in-house tech where I work, and that tech was thrown out the door by competent developers who were never given anywhere near enough time to make something even approximate user-friendly.

Sadly I was the only person anybody trusted to do anything scary in the UI. For about 18 months, this was all well and good but one fateful day, the toggle switch to the Include list was left on so I reduced the size of an important feed file from ~70k rows down to 10. Not 10k, 10.

This has left me with strong opinions (TM) about any tool's ability to check for weird changes in core systems. Needless to say, my feedback on how to prevent this happening again was never implemented until the tech was shut down a few years later.

Jimmy Carter set the solar, space, and environmental pace

Memories of Mass Effect

"This, recruits, is a 20 kilo ferous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one, to one-point-three percent of lightspeed. It impacts with the force a 38 kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means, Sir Isacc Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! Now! Serviceman Burnside, what is Newton's First Law?

Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!

No credit for partial answers maggot!

Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'til it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in 10,000 years! If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day! Somewhere and sometime! That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait 'til the computer gives you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not 'eyeball it'. This is a weapon of Mass Destruction! You are NOT a cowboy, shooting from the hip!

Sir, yes sir!"

Re: A loss no doubt

Ah yes. Carter and Biden, vying for "Worst President" between them. Let's ignore Hoover.

Although given your apparent preferences, you probably think he did a good job in office. The seventies were just a bad time to be in power. Too many global crises making the government look bad. The same thing happened in the UK a few years later with Thatcher getting into power over the Labour incumbents. Fifty years later and we're in a similar place. Many global crises firing off at the same time. 2024 had a bumper crop of elections and every developed democracy which went to the polls this year had its incumbent lose vote share. This is the first time that's happened since records began in 1905.

But go off blaming the democratic presidents for being bad, I guess.

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Re: Not just parallel ...

So what you're saying is that the inner brain is functionally the CEO, with a high opinion of itself and little capacity to do anything useful, while the rest of the brain works incalculably more efficiently and quickly without getting any of the recognition?

Re: We have built in autocorrect while reading

Accordion to a recent study, 90% of people don't notice when a word in a sentence has been replaced with a musical instrument.

Re: Thought experiment.

It's about the userspace of the brain, rather than the kernelspace that we're not allowed to futz with. With hard work, you can mess with some kernelspace attributes (training into or out of reactions, for e.g.), but there are things you just are not permitted to do - or would you rather have to remember to keep your heart beating while asleep? ;)

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

I've started to wonder when the last truly clean-sheet ground-up new aeroplane design happened

I'd put money on the year starting with a "1".

The whole "Systems layered upon systems" thing will be a direct consequence of the time and effort it takes to get these core systems certified (for more examples of taking shortcuts to avoid recertifying, just look at the 737-MAX and all the issues that faced). The difference between getting a whole new unified stack certified compared to building a new system on top of an existing stack will be utterly vast, so if the existing stack already has the kinks worked out, why change it?

The other issue is that when somebody does go about making a whole new software stack for their planes, you'll just end up with a similar problem in 20-30 years.

Fully agree on the horrid UX that pilots need to deal with. I've always found business software to be markedly inferior to consumer software in terms of usability. Personally I think that this is because the people using the software tend not to be the people paying for the software - a situation that happens much less in the consumer space.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Microsoft should add copilot to...

Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Then, us loners doing long simulated flights from the good seats will have somebody to chat to.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

I mean, it's not like they let just anybody run for a parliamentary seat.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

The peter principle is where a competent employee gets promoted a level too far.

What's being discussed is promoting incompetent employees to a position where they can't break anything.

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can't send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

Re: I have to admit

It turns out everything that the USSR told us about communism was wrong.

Sadly, it turns out that everything they told us about capitalism was correct.

Realistically, the problem with Socialism is that people are involved, and the problem with Capitalism is that Corporations are involved.