Yeah that’s what I thought too. The horrors are described well, they just typically don’t get described through their physical form. As you say, because the human mind cannot comprehend it. There is a lot more focus on impressions, comparisons, and effects, rather than on a real physical description. Personally I thought it was quite neat!
AI is a field of research in computer science, and LLM are definitely part of that field. In that sense, LLM are AI. On the other hand, you’re right that there is definitely no real intelligence in an LLM.
That’s a good tip, but I assume he meant he drinks juice of burned beans, rather than burned juice of beans. After all, coffee beans do need to be roasted (burned) before you use them!
You couldn’t really do that with beer, because beer is typically carbonated and thus you’ll need a very strong bag inside of the box. So strong that you’ll end up with a can or bottle.
It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don’t. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.
LLM don’t have logic, they are just statistical language models.
That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.
Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.
That exact version will end up making “true” false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.
During the compilation, “true” would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, “__LINE__” would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.
In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.
The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result… Unless you change any line and recompile.
The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can’t make it too high or it will never be triggered.
One downside compared to the original version is that the value of “true” can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since “1 == true” would not always be true.
A slightly more consistent version would be
((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)
They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.
I’m in IT in the financial industry. There is indeed still a ton of COBOL around.
According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn’t actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)
With 8 of these cells, you’ll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries… About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.
Too bad they don’t say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see…
If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).
I won’t be replacing any of my batteries just yet.
It is correct, because ‘nothing’ is indeed written in stone!
I like your optimism, but no, they are actually serious.
Sadly, yes. On the off chance you speak Dutch, here is a fact-checking article on that exact ad. I know it’s a weird thing to link articles in uncommon languages, but I came across that article recently and thought it really provided a lot of context, so I’m afraid it’s the best source I have. You can always run it through a translator too :-)
That may be true for the exact hardware you used, and the exact tests you have done. For Microsoft the problem would be that they need to actively continue supporting older and older devices. At some point it makes sense to drop active support. If it works, that’s fine, but they won’t continue testing and fixing for unsupported configurations.
Phrased differently: Microsoft announces the end of support for a product. If you want to pay for it, they will make an exception and continue to support it just for you.
I understand people dislike Windows 11, but complaining about life cycle management isn’t going to help that.
You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.
You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.
The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.
One of the arguments that gets used is that the employees should look neutral. For example, if you want to get your gender changed you might not be comfortable with someone who is visibly associated with a religion that disproves of gender changes.
It’s not racism of you believe those people were born into a lower caste because of their actions in a previous life. It is their punishment and thus you should treat them like shit!
Does life suck, or not?