The thing is, that broadly these sorts of hiccups happen all the time, but every time one of them escalates to ‘meme’ status, they can institute covering for it in pretty short order.

When you use them routinely, you see them do the hiccups regularly on random things you weren’t expecting, but if one of those hiccups goes viral, then it stops working.

I managed to get in barely in time to see the seahorse emoji before the meme became self-defeating.

The viral instances only work very briefly to illustrate a behavior, as very well known specific examples will get covered. In your case, at one point suddenly all the LLMs were really good at knowing the letters in strawberry, but you ask about other words they would fall over because they only had that specific thing there. By now, I suspect most have implemented a scheme to ensure a more appropriate mechanism handles counting letters in a word, to spare the embarassment.

Not just jobs, but:

• Scammers that make convincing fakes
• Knock-offs that get your views before you realize that it’s hollow slop instead of what you were expecting for
• Flooding the field of creative content with hollow stuff devoid of actual creative intent, mistaking verbosity and detail for quality creative content.
• Exploiting small communities that either let big tech walk over them in general, or they just have to bribe a few city managers at pretty modest prices.

I suppose the scammers are about the only arguably common downside between the AI boom and the dot-com boom, but it was at the time less compelling because it was such an ‘alien’ medium that people weren’t trusted, whereas AI is corrupting a familiar medium with even more scam than people are used to.

The sorts of folks that get invited and accept these sorts of engagements are frequently self absorbed and out of touch. The hubris needed to think some randos want to hear you speak… Only hope is if the person has some particular reason they would make sense (e.g. if they are an alumni, then at least they might feel like they have a connection).

The same general phenomenon as when they thought a centerpiece of the Xbox One release should be… DVRing the Price is Right… The same as when blizzard said “Do you guys not have phones?”

If you are lucky, a speaker will just say nothing vaguely specifically.

Importantly, the dot-com reaction ranged from “wow this is cool and revolutionary” to, at worst, “ehh… I don’t get it, seems pointless?” No one would have booed someone for praising the good old “information superhighway” back in the day, but many might have scoffed.

For the GenAI, people just actively despise it. It amplifies slop-happy humans to insane degrees, the infrastructure build-out strains local grids and water. Even as a community comes out to say in unison they don’t want a datacenter, somehow community governments green light it anyway, over their objections. And so many people are swearing up and down it’ll get rid of jobs.

For a new graduate from an Arts and Humanities college especially… There’s like zero reason to cheer and only reason to boo.

Problem is the targe is not the competent experts, but the managers of the competent experts, who have basically eternally been inherently skeptical of those experts and looking for the flimsiest hope to discard them.

Many of the best and most important people let themselves be subordinate to some idiots.

Not pertinent to AI, but just had one of these ‘leaders’ laying out how some project was going to go and why we didn’t even need to bother with any contingencies and that folks would be wasting their time. Every one with a whiff of experience knows these projects don’t go as described 90% of the time, and prepping the usual contingencies is less than an hour as long as you just plan to do it in advance. However, the very expensive partner service says they have it in hand, and despite this same partner boffing the last 6 of these in a row, the idiot still has absolute confidence in them…

In short, these guys get put in charge and are idiots and folks let them stay “in charge” because they don’t have the will to fight it.

That was such a “don’t you have phones” moment.

Amazing how horribly out of touch these folks are.

A Simpsons treehouse of horrors special.

Certainly they knew, but did the same people who saw that knew it wasn’t supposed to be going there? Like you see millions going to a datacenter, but maybe you just assume that’s normal and have no idea that they aren’t being billed for it?

Closed loop is often relative.

The water in a rack, closed loop, it gets recirculated.

However, the closed loop will run through a liquid to liquid heat exchanger, and that second loop is usually going to a tower to get evaporated.

The plumbing in the rack can be very picky about water quality and want additives that would be very bad in an open loop scenario.

So you end up with people at the rack level talking about ‘closed loop’, but they run through a CDU that is open loop. Basically closed loop when picky about the water, moving heat to open loop where they can actually get rid of the heat effectively.

I suppose he should have said “gay ewes would be hobbled” and lesbian sheep would be incapable of coupling up".

His quote shows that people say there’s no way of knowing one way or another, like you say, but Doctorow changed the language to be a bit more suggestive of certainty that the phenomenon exists.

While CATL has done work and has made real world solutions, I wouldn’t take their marketing material over the broader scientific consensus.

I am totally willing to buy that the market ends up between NMC and Sodium with LFP left behind despite having some advantages over sodium. Of course as solid state becomes a thing, that will be more of a factor than Na v. LFP v. NMC.

I think I’ll need a citation, from what I can find, the LFP chemistry still is more dense than CATL sodium, which makes sense because, well, the physics are what they are, sodium is about three times more massive than lithium. The best argument I could see on this point is debating whether there’s a space in the market between sodium and NMC for LFP (if you are already compromising on density, then what’s another further compromise to get the other qualities you mention for sodium).

We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn…

less performant

Well this is a matter of how you define “performant”.

It’s got lower energy density, which is generally considered a critical measure.

Well, in this case those profits might be modeling a real world situation. If Del Monte was pushing canned Peaches more than people needed/wanted, then changing the farms from one crop to another isn’t necessarily a horrible thing.

I can absolutely guarantee you the peaches would mostly just rot in that approach.

Their problem is that people just flat out aren’t interested/need as many peaches we are growing. So it totally makes sense to change much of that land to do another crop. Peaches are not necessarily the most efficient, or healthy nutritious option that the land could possible support.

The people who might be in need of that fruit are likely no where near the orchards. So the direct approach is right out.

Now this is where organizations like food banks can and do step in as able. They have people who are intrinsically dedicated to make it work out for people to have food even if the capitalist concerns don’t make sense. Sure, they can take over logistics when no one else wants them (my family has volunteered and dealt with all sorts of farmer surplus, including separating rot from viable food). Ultimately even they wouldn’t want an oversupply of any particular crop, as the hungry need diverse nutrition, not just a ton of peaches. As it stands a fair amount of the food is ruined before it can be distributed even with food bank efforts already.

I can kind of see where both of you are coming from.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we are going to be compromising feeding humans, it simply means they are backing away from peaches, specifically. If people don’t even want to eat that many peaches, then we might be wasting farming capacity and we should be growing different crops. Maybe a more dense crop, maybe with other nutritional properties. If you insist on continuing to grow peaches that people don’t even want to bother eating, then you aren’t helping people get the food and nutrition they need, you are just generating rotting fruit. It says they are giving money to farmers to help them pivot to different crops.

But we might have too many peaches in the first place because of capitalist flaws. Some del monte leadership mismanages things and wastes valuable cropland on trees that aren’t really what people want or need.

Or it could have darker outcomes, like ‘poors’ are hungry but we don’t think it’s worth it so we just convert acres and acres of arable land to datacenters for the tech bros.

But, by itself, cutting back on one crop does not necessarily mean it’s some capitalist disaster.

Yeah, but the real developers regard it with disdain. I guess he thinks its only an image problem and a rebrand will fix it.

I’ll say “vibe coding” to me implies the operator has zero awareness of the actual code, and there is something wrong.

They treat the actual program logic in the same way folks treat assembly code as some arcane black magic they don’t have to think about. Problem is the tooling is not nearly so deterministic as a compiler, and the output is just too bad to be relied upon.

For certain clasesses of tasks, it may do a serviceable job, maybe at first. If you have ongoing evolution requirements, it can dig itself a whole that it can’t really dig out of. It can’t process the code that had been generated to extrapolate a code change to match the change request.

The GenAI coding needs supervision, and ‘vibe coding’ implies opting out of careful supervision.

This is just so fitting.

I keep getting merge requests now from people that their whole job to date had been too scared by the syntax to try coding.

It’s almost always a shotgun of way too many lines of code changed for a small thing, often with horrible side effects that would be unacceptable.

Someone wanted to tweak the CSS layout of one element, what should have been a one line change. The pull request had hundreds of css changes, basically touching everything. Clearly the model had started changing things and he kept saying it didn’t do it yet until finally it did and it never rolled back anything it did, including many of the rules being repeated 5 times in a row in the same place…

They felt like AI was making them so helpful because they could submit a code change directly instead of just asking for what they want. They proudly said “AI told me:” and then explain the brilliance of the AI finding. One time the AI finding was addressed over 6 months prior, the AI never thought to update the software, but instead proposed a really crap workaround that would have failed to cover a whole class of similar scenarios while simultaneously imposing crazy side effects on scenarios that weren’t tested.

I can use AI too, please just send me what you would have sent to the AI, and if AI can do it, I could use the AI. If you think the AI will figure out how you are using something wrong and don’t want to bother/wait for a human to help, fine, but if it gets to what it thinks is a software bug, just rewind and start from your problem statement when you come to me…