"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
The government is faaaaaaaaaaaar too invested in Azure and AWS for Microsoft or Amazon to give even half a shit. The DOD has no where else to go and the companies know it. They'll sit on their hands until the legal maneuvers play out, which will take longer than this administration will be in office.
I'm sure Alex Karp and Palantir are already charging into the breach, promising to deliver things they don't have the capability to deliver! (Otherwise known as just another day for them)
The point I'm trying to make is that this thing we're calling a 'VUI' is shit. There's no reason speech has to be this boring one dimensional thing. It's like the people that designed these things have never had a real conversation in their lives. When you're speaking with another person, or multiple other people, you're constantly exchanging cues that allow the other person to understand and re-calibrate what they're saying. These are verbal sounds, non-verbal sounds and physical movements. A crinkle of the forehead, a shake of the head, an uttered 'aaaaah' or a quiet verbal affirmation in support of what's being stated. It's not a single uni-directional stream of information, it's a multi-directional stream coming from multiple multi-modal sources at the same time.
None of these basic realities are accounted for in current technology. Instead we have these dumb robot voices reading us results from a preprocessed script that it thinks answers our question. No wonder the monkey part of our brain immediately picks up on the fact that this whole facade isn't just a lie, but an excruciating lie. It's excruciating because it's immediately obvious that there's nothing else 'there' to interact with. Even when speaking to another person over the phone, there's a huge amount of nuance you can pick up on. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they frazzled? Are they in a rush? Are they relaxed? And you automatically calibrate your responses and what you say in the conversation based on all of these perfectly obvious things. Normal humans automatically calibrate what they say, how they sound, what they suggest based on these cues. It works really well!
There's no reason voice stuff has to suck. It has worked pretty great for humans for thousands of years. We're evolutionarily tuned to it. It's just that all the technology we've created around it totally sucks and people are delusional if they think it's anywhere near prime time.
The core problem is that these systems are just so incorrect in fundamental ways that they're effectively useless.
Imagine a buddy of yours tells you about an event he's pretty sure you'll be interested in. Why does he tell you about this event? Well, he knows your interests, what kind of things you enjoy, when you're free, who you might want to go to the event with, how much money you're willing to spend, how far you're willing to travel, when you like to go out... So when you're on the receiving end of such a suggestion it often feels great! It's like you've struck gold.
Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events. It doesn't feel magical. It doesn't even feel like it knows what the hell you enjoy doing half the time. Forget about knowing about your free time, budgetary restrictions, family restrictions, who you'd be able to go with; None of that stuff is even sort of in the picture. And it's all delivered to you in a voice that sounds like it would be as happy to kill you as give you advice. There's no lively back and forth on the logistics of the event. No feeling of discovery as you two talk it out, honing the plan that brings it from an abstract concept to reality.
My best guess is they turn off the commercial operations that are costing them the most money (And that they didn't want Sam to push in the first place) and pump up the prices on the ones they can actually earn a profit from and then try to coast for awhile.
Or they'll do something hilarious like sell VCs on a world wide cryptocurrency that is uniquely joined to an individual by their biometrics and somehow involves AI. I'm sure they could wrangle a few hundred million out of the VC class with a braindead scheme like that.
You need to remember that most people on this site subscribe to the ideology that growth is the only thing that matters. They're Michael Douglas 'greed is good' type of people wrapped up in a spiffy technological veneer.
Any decision that doesn't make the 'line go up' is considered a dumb decision. So to most people on this site, kicking Sam out of the company was a bad idea because it meant the company's future earning potential had cratered.
I was able to visit this place last year, it was great! I spent all day wandering around and playing. I would have stayed even longer if they weren't closing, hah.
I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale. I don't often run across software that feels so right and when I do it's a great surprise. Every time I see a new feature they're releasing I'm always impressed at how adept they are at targeting modern pain points.
I grew up and got into software by messing around with self-hosting web servers and game communities as a kid. As time has gone on I felt like we had lost some of the magic of easily sharing your machines and your creations with other people. We have a ton of services where you can now deploy and share your creations, but we've moved further and further away from direct sharing. There were plenty of good reasons why this has happened, with security being the most obvious factor, but it still makes me a little sad. I want my things to be able to talk to each other no matter where I am. I want to be able to invite my friends in and have access to my stuff.
Tailscale makes all of that quick, easy and awesome. I think it's really neat, makes me feel like a little nerdy kid again.
The examples in the article seem to be making the point that even when the AI cites the correct context (ie: financial reports) it still produces completely hallucinated information.
So even if you were to white-list the context to train the engine against, it would still make up information because that's just what LLMs do. They make stuff up to fit certain patterns.
They look different because they ARE different. One was shot on film and the other was shot digital and then they used Filmbox to apply the film effect. It's two different pieces of source material, which means they had to act/film the scene twice.
Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix.
The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts."
Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform.
The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site.
As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.
I guess the question is: What's the alternative to defining models? Just passing around DB cursors directly or maybe pulling the results out of a cursor and storing them in a dynamic collection?
I don't disagree that models are pointless if they're not doing anything other than aping the DB. Why waste your time creating another layer of required translation if it doesn't buy you anything?
With that said, I do think there are some benefits to using statically typed models in languages line C# with larger codebases. It seems like it makes it easier to refactor the application code.
The rules nurses have to deal with around things as asinine as taking PTO are AMAZING. They’re required to put in PTO requests months in advance and the hospital can and will say “Sorry, denied. We don’t have enough people…” As they are intentionally creating skeleton crews of nurses to wring every ounce of profit out of the business.
My mom was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my sister is a nurse and my best friend’s mom is a nurse. I really can’t believe anyone continues to be a nurse given the insane working conditions these folks have to put up with. Twelve hour shifts, overflowing with patients, watching newcomers earn more than seasoned veterans… When I compare it to my laid back software engineering job it’s like I’m living in an entirely different universe. The hospital industry is a hugely demoralizing place.
Powershell is so weird to me. It never does what I expect it to do but it’s also full of powerful features. When looked at as a programming/scripting language it feels totally insane and disjointed. I just jump into C# or Python instead of dealing with it, because it just doesn’t make any sense to me as an engineer. But whenever I’m looking up how to manipulate some obscure bit of Windows, a cut and paste powershell one liner always makes an appearance.
Does anyone know if there’s any sort of reflective documentation or anything in powershell? Like, is there a way to ask it what arguments exist for a command?