The people who don't understand how computers work are certain that the next LLM they try will make them rich.
The people who mostly understand how computers work are hopeful that there is some application of LLMs that doesn't suck.
The people who have been there and done that are aware that all technology impersonally and objectively hates each and every one of us; no pleading with the djinni has ever worked.
All those people told me that it was silly to use anything except cloud services, why don't we move to the cloud, when are we moving to the cloud?
But we are never going to be big enough to be any cloud vendor's primary concern. Reliability? We should have spent more. Costs? We should hire a dedicated consultant to suggest ways to reduce your bill. Security? Hey, it's about the same as everyone else's!
In retrospect, by not moving stuff to clouds, I kept our costs down, availability better than the average cloud user, and security much tighter.
Now the same people are asking me what our AI strategy is.
Somewhere in between they were asking what we were going to do with the blockchain.
Mock it, that's what we did.
One of the benefits of working with computers is that you (or at least, I) grow to understand that computers are not always right. This is occasionally because of hardware issues, but usually because the software was written by humans and inadequately tested.
Corollary: if the results of a procedure look or sound wrong, it might be a failure of your intuition about what "right" is -- but it is quite likely to be a real problem.
Example: the Wiim Mini (a network audio streaming device) recently gained room calibration equalization capabilities. If that sounds esoteric to you, well: it can play a set of tones in your room, figure out what diverges from a perfect playback, and try to correct that in future playback. Requires an Android or Apple phone.
The first attempt on my bedroom system worked so well that I bought a second Wiim Mini for the living room.
Listening to the living room, everything was awful. Much worse than uncalibrated. So I wiped the measurement and started again.
Much better but not perfect. I dialed in a sub-bass boost and killed everything over 17kHz rather than try to isolate a spike. Much, much better.
(Incidentally, this is the cheapest way I know of to do room calibration. Not the best, but pretty good. A Wiim Mini goes for about US$90.)
(and also about #devops and my job)
People like to say that programming computers is like music, and they are right and they are wrong. Computers are instruments… but they are also the players of the instruments. Programming a computer is not like being a musician. You do not have to hit keys in the right sequence and the right timing, you do not have to achieve perfection in realtime. Programming a computer is like writing music, being a composer. You take an idea in your head and you turn it into instructions - via a programming language, a notation -- for the players to perform.
I am not much of a composer-programmer. I have never written a symphony. Instead, I write little ditties that express one theme. They get the job done.
What I mostly do, in fact, is conduct. Systems administration is conducting an orchestra of computers. You take music programs written by other people, and arrange them to be played by the computers you have, and then you practice with them to get the effect you desire. Conducting, though, is too much like a performance. You need to have good timing. You need to understand the whole system and do the right things at the right time – conducting is a form of dance. Dancers use their bodies as instruments…
I avoid conducting whenever possible. Instead, I write and test out choreography for conductors that works with the music written by composers to get a performance out of the players.*
Or, if you prefer, we use DevOps techniques to automate our system administration tasks in order to get software to run on computer networks.
*and then I have other musician-computers listen to the performance and tell me if mistakes happened; then I go back and fix mistakes or ask composers to fix them.
At long last, I have discovered step 2.
It is a multi-part process of finding an angel investor, then attracting series A funding and repeatedly pivoting to find market fit while burning the runway on nonliquid assets and ramen salaries adjusted for local conditions.
There is still a small matter of explaining that the profit in step 3 doesn't go to the gnomes, but I'm sure marketing will get an LLM to clarify it when appropriated.
One of the nice things that Firefox can do is allow you to select a particular set of serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts as the default... and then lock them in so that they are the only fonts being used.
For me, this has drastically improved daily surfing, with the sole exception of the days when I specifically want to look at fonts. It takes me a moment to remember that I turned this on.
In addition to readability, it modestly improves speed (no font download time, no font re-rendering time) and memory consumption (only three fonts loaded across all websites) and network usage.
Really bad at building useful products and services, really good at announcing how awesome they are at everything:
My kid, home from college, is talking about writing a book and using a nom de plume.
"Maybe Ephedrine", he said. "That's a good pseudo."
... also, Jonathan mumble did not even suggest this his company could help with the spam problem. Curious.
I get phone calls.
Phone: ringy! ringy!
Me: $WORK, this is $NAME.
Phone: Hi! I know you weren't expecting this call, but my name is Jonathan mumble from mumble. We specialize in solving tough IT problems. What would you say your top problem is?
Me: Spammers.
The phone call did not go well from there. No hints, however broad, were taken.
In case it becomes relevant:
I am not a lawyer.
But I do believe I know the law, and especially the Constitution, better than this President.
I can also balance a household budget, which I'm pretty sure he could not do. And I can tell at sight the difference between a Mauser rifle and a javelin.
Every discussion of "Agents" is based either in the reality that they do not exist yet or in the fantasy of having an infinite number of loyal machine slaves.
The University of Zurich's IRB approved a blatantly unethical social manipulation experiment involving LLMs pretending to be victims of rape and also therapists.
It's okay, somehow, if your secondary-world fantasy has chickens and cows along with the chimerae and giant demonic wolves.
But! You should not have a dish called "chicken marsala" without establishing that there is a place called Marsala.
Did you know that you can follow any public Fedi account by RSS?
Opinions I hold:
* cats are chaotic neutral and lovable.
* all software sucks, but Debian makes things better
* I spend too much money on LEGO
* High quality audio is more affordable now than ever before. I need more music.
* People are the problem, but I can't think of a better solution than to treat them the way I would want to be treated
* 200 books is a comfortable number to read in a year
* I'm happy to be married to the person I love, and whoever you love, you should be able to marry or not as y'all desire.
* I'm happy to have kids, and nobody who doesn't want kids should have them.
By American political standards I'm a commie. By local Boston political standards, I'm a commie. By my own standards, I'm just in favor of government being used for good instead of evil.