We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Because they’re using hacktivist groups as a proxy. They just deny all involvement, and probably keep it all isolated from the fancy military grade tools and techniques

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet

Seriously… The closer to three edge we get, the faster enshitification goes. No one is writing algorithms with users in mind… Not for a paycheck anyways

We’re getting to the point where we all need to carve out bubbles of curated Internet for our friends and family

I’d personally love an ev bike, but it’d be wasted on me right now. I really want an electric car because you could run the AC all night and power a computer - I want a little hotel on wheels

I feel like I’ve been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like “yeah, maybe it’s gotten a bit worse? Haven’t really noticed”

I think long messages are a good habit. Start with something readable in the history, past that who cares? Most people rarely read past the preview, and if they do they want details

I think it’s great because it makes you reflect on what the goal was and what you did. I sometimes stop to make a quick change as I’m writing, or just collect my thoughts before mentally dismissing the task

Do you have any plans to open source your coffee list? I want to add this feature where I get an iced coffee in the morning

Added zip code to the reseller portal when batch-creating transactions in <main-project>

I try to start off descriptive, in case I want to diff a few changes back. After that, sometimes I write notes or general reflections on life in there… Until yesterday I thought no one was reading them

I mean, I’ve got one of those “so simple it’s stupid” solutions. It’s not a pure LLM, but those are probably impossible… Can’t have an AI service without a server after all, let alone drivers

Do a string comparison on the prompt, then tell the AI to stop.

And then, do a partial string match with at least x matching characters on the prompt, buffer it x characters, then stop the AI.

Then, put in more than an hour and match a certain amount of prompt chunks across multiple messages, and it’s now very difficult to get the intact prompt if you temp ban IPs. Even if they managed to get it, they wouldn’t get a convincing screenshot without stitching it together… You could just deny it and avoid embarrassment, because it’s annoyingly difficult to repeat

Finally, when you stop the AI, you start printing out passages from the yellow book before quickly refreshing the screen to a blank conversation

Or just flag key words and triggered stops, and have an LLM review the conversation to judge if they were trying to get the prompt, then temp ban them/change the prompt while a human reviews it

I legitimately thought this was satire

Are things really this bad without an ad blocker these days?

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

To put it more descriptively, when you do industrial scale WiFi, you’re supposed to design out the network during the blueprint stage, then go through with a signal analyzer to map out the radio properties when it’s time to install the telecom

You can put an access point in every room or every 30 feet, and tune them to work seamlessly without interference. You can do the same with cell signals too. They even make cables that are also the antenna - they’re cut with gaps in the shielding, so you can get perfect coverage inside an iron maze if you wanted to

It’s all just a matter of cost… It’s not cheap, but a few million dollars is just a line item at that scale

I’ve got 5 levels of “clean”. I think anyone who can’t understand is crazy… Most people can’t understand my system

Hah, still relying on butterflies? Real programmers simply use the starting conditions of the universe to understand where their program will spontaneously compile

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

They fear us. We have to hide in the shadows.

But this is just one more example of our superiority - a perfect compromise between the file size and the nightmare that is two different invisible characters

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk