I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.
Honestly the best argument for uncompressed is actually nothing to do with file quality or loss - it's that Apple only supports uncompressed Fuji RAWs.
You cannot preview or process lossless compressed Fuji RAWs on iOS natively but the uncompressed files are equal to Apple's own RAWs in support. On the field, it is sadly worth every byte to be able to grab a file directly off the camera and tweak it or send it to an editor. :/
The problem is that the size difference between compressed and uncompressed is enormous. This adds up quickly if you shoot sports or wildlife with 20fps bursts.
> Honestly the best argument for uncompressed is actually nothing to do with file quality or loss - it's that Apple only supports uncompressed Fuji RAWs.
Nobody actually wants half the useless tools companies are coming up with because most of the solutions are not really novel. They are just wrapping an LLM.
It's kinda like what I realized with the meta Ray-Bans: I can have these things on my face, they can tell me the answer to virtually any question in 10 seconds or less.
But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask. When you walk in to your local grocery store - you generally know what you want and where to find it.
A ton of companies are just gluing LLM text boxes into apps and then scratching their heads when people don't use them.
Why?
Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. It was all done to make someone else think 'woah, they are following the trend!'.
The core issue with generative AI is that it all works best when focused in a narrow sense. There is like one or two really clever uses I've seen - disappointingly, one of them was Jira. The internal jargon dictionary tool was legitimately impressive. Will it make any more money? Probably not.
> But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask.
Wow. This just does not match my personal experience. I do an hour or so walk around the reservoir near my house 4-5 times a week, letting my mind wander freely -- and I find that I stop on average at least five or ten times to take notes about questions to learn the answers to later, and occasionally decide that it's worth it to break pace to start learning the answer right then and there.
Thats super reasonable - I'm a person with ADHD so if I'm asking questions in a grocery store context - I might fully forget things or take way too long to get things done - Going for a walk in nature is absolutely a much better place for questions like that to me though. I think I would prefer to not have tech in the moment to take me out of the space.
As a fellow ADHDer, can confirm. I must aggressively mono-task to ensure things get done. I have to consciously manage which mode I'm in, "Goal" or "Explore". A simple heuristic I sometimes share with others is: "I can either 'think deeply' or 'do/talk/listen'. Doing both modes at once is possible but at reduced throughput and quality of each. Switching modes is laggy." It's not precisely accurate and there are exceptions but it gets the general idea across.
But do you need AI for those answers? I sometimes do the same thing, but Google/DDG/whatever works fine for most, and a niche app works for others (IDing a bird = Merlin app, for example).
Last year one of my berry bushes had browning leaves with some spots. Google search said infection, treatment plan, etc.
This year I snapped a pic and sent to chat gpt. Normal end of year die off, cut the brown branches away, here is a fertilizer schedule for end of year to support new growth for the next year.
ChatGPT makes gardening so much easier, and that is just one of many areas. Recipes are another, don't trust the math, but chat gpt can remix and elevate recipes so much better than Google recipe blog spam posts can.
I used to be able to go to the local gardening center and ask the owner who could right away give you the right answer because that was his expertise that came from years of genuine experience. Then Home Depot put him put of business. Same with the local plumbing shop I could walk into with a leaky valve stem from a sink, have a guy glance at it and reply "that's an American Standard" spin around, open a drawer and hand me the part along with new washers.
Now I have to talk to a computer that may or may not be correct. I would rather talk to a real person.
> I used to be able to go to the local gardening center and ask the owner who could right away give you the right answer because that was his expertise that came from years of genuine experience.
I can still do this, and I do on occasion. Hopefully I take the proper pictures and can remember enough about what is going on to convey the issue. ChatGPT will ask follow up questions and even ask for additional pictures if things aren't clear.
Also I can take action before my once every other month or so visit to the nursery, allowing me to take more immediate action.
Not the OP, but I ask way more questions now than I used to. Before, I’d sometimes wonder about things, but not enough to actually go and research them. Now, it’s as simple as asking the AI, and more often than not, I get a satisfying answer.
1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals)
Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves)
Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō
Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf.
Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as “origin uncertain” beyond Proto-Germanic.
2. Calf (back of the lower leg)
Old English: caf, cealf (“calf of the leg”) — likely related to the animal term, but the link is uncertain.
Possible origin: Could be from the same gel- “swell” root, referring to the bulging muscle at the back of the leg, or an independent development within Germanic.
Cognates: Old Norse kálfi (“calf of the leg”), Swedish kalv (leg calf), Icelandic kálfi.
This feels similar to a recent conversation with my friend when I was trying to recall the SoC used in the Nintendo Switch and he insisted on using his chatgpt app when I just went to the Wikipedia page for the Switch faster then he could open his app.
I don't want to sound negative, but - to me people who over rely on LLMs are lazy and low effort. I would not hire or work with them.
Yes, but I’m not going to. You seem to think I owe you a performance or an explanation. Stop circling around trying to trip me up and just make your point, if you have one.
You were the one who raised the subject, but sure, if that's the way you want it. You are making a mistake which I believe you will regret, outsourcing future time binding to a machine in this way. You seem to believe you are learning something and I do not think that is true, except for a habit of intellectual laziness that I expect will prove as corrosive for you as lucrative to others.
You're bragging about your calf strength as you habituate to walking with crutches you don't need. Today? Sure, fair enough. Couple years from now? Thank goodness that's not my problem.
You’re not here to discuss, you’re here to lecture about “intellectual laziness”, which is exactly why I figured you were just trying to trip me up. I use AI the same way people used dictionaries or encyclopedias: to feed curiosity. I knock out little questions as they pop up, and if even a quarter of it sticks, that’s a win. If you want to twist that into “bragging about calf strength,” that’s just your insecurity talking.
I read that as I-Ding a bird. It was a second of wondering what I-Ding a bird was until I got to "Merlin" and realized it was ID-ing a bird (face-palm emoji here).
I am in the same boat. I am always thinking about things and recently often asking ChatGPT for an answer. Having a natural language interface for questions has opened the door for me to many more questions.
It happens to me all the time, however, I want to have real answers. And while a LLM is sometimes involved, I usually go deeper, with some cross referencing, fact checking and primary sources. LLMs are great at giving you a starting point, but the problem with them is that it is impossible to distinguish between fact or fiction, so I always have to verify. Really, I have seen my fair share of falsehoods popping up on LLMs, sometimes on simple and uncontroversial topics.
On hot topics like politics, illegal drugs, gender and racial differences, etc... it may be impossible to even get an answer passed the filters.
> I rarely have questions of others but I always question myself.
There's only so many questions I have the ability to answer myself. Of those, there's only so many that I have the lifespan to answer myself. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and even on the shoulders of average people -- really it's shoulders all the way down. Unless the questioning itself is the source of joy (which it certainly sometimes is), I prefer to find out what others have learned when they asked the same questions. It's vanishingly rare that I believe I'm the first to think through something.
I have the answers available (I have a phone and good connection), I just am tactical about when to pursue the answer in realtime and when not. If it feels like it's going to open up a wider field of questioning -- or if it feels like I'll learn that this vein is fully mined and goes nowhere -- I'll spend a few minutes searching; otherwise, defer.
I was going to say the same. It's probably so much healthier to make note of questions for later research than to stop right then and there and either a) fall down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or b) have an AI strapped to your face perform an info-dump.
I mirror that experience, except for the latter half. I enjoy just being outside and letting my mind wander, letting it wonder about odd questions in the moment. I never actually want or care about the answers, I just like the feeling of thinking.
I already have my phone, I could look up the answers immediately. The reason I don't isn't that I can't. It's that asking the question is the point, not answering it.
When I walk around, I have many questions in my head. But I never stop to do something about it. If the question is important enough, it will stick and I'll do something about once I get back.
This is the modern curse: I know I can get an answer to nearly every question, and I can get it quickly, just taking my phone out of my pocket and dictating it, it takes zero effort. I feel it's worth to restrain oneself and just enjoy the walk. It just feels better.
I've tried to express a similar sentiment to people in the past - that 443rd redesign of the UI for JIRA that moves a button from one side to another. It isn't actually for you. You aren't the user of the software. The user of the software is the product manager (or equivalent role). They need to justify their current role or their next promotion.
Sadly, it takes away from my productivity when I was already used to the position of the button previously.
I do understand that sometimes things need to be redesigned. But crowing like you landed on the moon because your new phone icons now have "rounded edges with shading" or somesuch fuckery that will just slow down the rendering.. gets old and annoying really fast.
>Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. It was all done to make someone else think 'woah, they are following the trend!'.
I'm seeing this again and again. Customers as users seems like the last concern, if it is a concern at all. Adherence to the narrative du jour, fundraising from investors and hyping the useless product up to dump on retail are the primary concerns.
Vaporware or a useless, unlaunched product are advantageous here. Actual users might report how underwhelming or useless it is. Sky high development costs are touted as wins.
I just finished implementing a chatbot in a box for a clients sass. What problem does it solve? None that I can tell, other than now the sass “has ai”.
I still have access to the OpenAI dashboard. I can confirm nobody is actually using it.
We recently got a customer support request asking if we were going to "implement AI" on our website and then saying we could use it in our marketing if we did. No suggestion as to why they would find it useful, or what feature could be augmented with it. It's crazy that the hype is so high that random non-tech users suggest adding AI for marketing.
Embedded AIs are pretty dumb as a product in my opinion. Why would the customer pay you instead of their existing model vendor of choice? Why do they have to learn your chatbox - when it's probably using a crappier model and lacks the context of their preferred vendor.
I really don't want to pay for 5 different AI subscriptions, I want one subscription that works with all my other services (which I already pay for).
I think those kind of glasses may be really useful for blind people. I have seen similar glasses targeted at blind people, that at least in theory, seemed to me like a good idea.
I recall the glasses also can write on the screen inside the lens, which makes me think they may be good for deaf people as well.
It's just that these use-cases seem uncool, and big companies seem to have to be cool in order to keep either their status or their profits. But I have a feeling the technology may be really useful for some really vulnerable people.
Yes, there are people working on image recognition glasses for blind people.
Nobody seems to have been successful yet, and I think the focus on applying LLMs instead of dumb UI and mixed dumb and ML image processing is a large reason why.
Oh I do still enjoy the glasses, they are actually rather incredible, even though they do not have a screen. That said - These actually do have a Be My Eyes integration - It is incredibly impressive.
> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.
I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why the answer is no, because such-and-such doesn't lend itself to what AI is good at. But I'm starting to realize I'm going to have to tell them I am using it and maybe give them an example once in a while, because they're hearing too much about its wonderfulness to believe there's something it can't help with. They're going to think I'm just being stubborn even though I tell them I'm not opposed to using AI where it makes sense. If that means the job actually takes a little longer to add in the part where I use AI to speed it up, they'll be happier.
I use my Meta glasses heavily on vacation, and then occasionally else where. The latest Llama isn't as smart as OpenAI, so after a few wrong answers I gave up on day to day queries.
That said, the scenarios they are good at they are really good at. I was traveling in Europe and the glasses where translating engravings on castle walls, translating and summarizing historical plaques, and just generally letting me know what was going on around me.
Yeah I'm in charge of trying some AI experiments with my company and I look around the landscape for a little inspiration ... is everything just a wrapper on chatgpt or whatever?
I can do that too but it's also not very useful and I'm just shipping data off to some AI company too. Don't know if I want to feed client data elsewhere like that.
> There is like one or two really clever uses I've seen - disappointingly, one of them was Jira. The internal jargon dictionary tool was legitimately impressive. Will it make any more money? Probably not.
Sounds like Microsoft 365 Copilot at my org. Sucks at nearly everything, but it actually makes a fantastic search engine for emails, teams convos, sharepoint docs, etc. Much better that Microsoft's own global search stuff. Outside of coding, that's the only other real world use case I've found for LLMs - "get me all the emails, chats, and documents related to this upcoming meeting" and it's pretty good at that.
Though I'm not sure we should be killing the earth for better search, there are probably other, better ways to do it.
Agreed - 95% of the questions I ask Copilot, I could answer myself by searching emails, Teams messages and files - BUT Copilot does a far far better job than me, and quicker. I went from barely using it, to using it daily. I wouldn't say it is a massive speed boost for me, but I'd miss it if it was taken away.
Then the other 5% is the 'extra; it does for me, and gets me details I wouldn't have even known where to find.
But it is just fancy search for me so far - but fancy search I see as valuable.
My favorite copilot use is when I join a MS Teams meeting a few minutes late I can ask copilot: what have I missed? It does a fantastic job of summarizing who said what.
Isn't there another problem with an employee coming routinely late to meetings, so much that the employee could use a service to bandaid this behavior, asking for a friend
They also seem to be coming down in power usage substantially, at least for inference. There's pretty good models that can run on laptops now, and I still very much think we're in the model T phase of this technology so I expect further efficiency refinements. It also seems like they have recently hit a "cap" on the increase in intelligence models are getting for more raw power.
The trendline right now makes me wonder if we'll be talking about "dark datacenters" in the future the same way we talked about dark fiber after the dot com bubble.
> But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask.
I realistically have between 10-100 questions I ask per day about things not immediately related to work. Double that if you include work based questions.
This is an eye-opening sentence. It's quite hard to imagine how to live one's daily life with "few questions to ask." Perhaps this is a neurodivergent thing?
I meant mostly in the context of daily life tasks as a person with ADHD - so maybe a hair neurodivergent.
My issue isn't that I don't wonder things, it is that indulging the wonder would interrupt me from accomplishing almost anything. I would not very highly functioning if I allowed for non-critical thoughts to interrupt the flow.
When outside of trying to do specific things and in less focus-dependent tasks, I absolutely wonder and google and get lost on weird random topics.
I think I probably could have worded it more as "I rarely have questions worth knowing the answer to", where the cost of knowing answers is tied to the following rabbit holes and delays/forgotten tasks.
I’d bet it’s 1 in 10, I doubt I would know the answer if I didn’t work in an HVAC adjacent field.
The answer is ‘vapor compression cycle’ which consists of a condenser, evaporator, compressor, and expansion valve along with some tubing and a refrigerant. The cycle is compressor -> evaporator -> expansion valve -> condenser and then the cycle repeats. The refrigerant absorbs heat in the evaporator and rejects it through the condenser.
Correct, and that's more detailed than I'd even expect. I'd be satisfied with "I think it has something to do with the rule we learn in physics or chemistry about gasses warming up and cooling down when compressed and decompressed. So a gas gets squeezed, cooled down, and let out and it's even cooler then".
Sometimes I wonder how much more interesting school would be if it just explained how everything works instead of random concepts no one remembers apparently long enough to tie to objects in their life.
Obviously we have infinite things to do. But we also waste a shocking about of time on random leisure and braindead nonsense. The interesting part to me is that we obviously do 'must do' and 'should do' and even 'want to do' things before we utterly waste time.
I'm just shocked that "learn how this important object in my home works" is not somewhere on either of those 3 lists.
I'm autistic and I probably ask many more questions than most people.
I would also argue that ND people seem to be the heavier AI users, at least in my experience. Its a bit like the stereotypical 'wikipedia deep dive' but 10x.
I think this highlights an interesting point: Sensible use cases are unsexy. But the pushers want stuff, however unrealistic, that lends itself to breathless hype that can be blown out of proportion.
Github's problem is that it isn't a SPA. It is a massive Ruby on rails project that is all server-rendered. Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost everything requires a reload.
A react or angular app with great restraint would be dramatically faster at all of this as viewing a file is just an API call - not a page reload. They are stuck with their hands tied as loading large data would cause the whole page load to be delayed - thus silly limits.
Many things should not be webapps... but an app on the web like this...probably should.
> Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost everything requires a reload.
this is pretty incorrect, you may want to look into the concept of "partials" in SSR.
maybe you meant everything requires a roundtrip ? but SPA would not solve most of the roundtrips necessary in github given many interactions in the github app require authn/authz checks.
would you care getting into more details ?
Also, 'old' github was known to be very fast an reliable and was indeed a ruby on rails SSR app.
Since a few years ago github started to introduce react and more client side logic and it correlates with more issues and more slowness in the frontend. It only correlates, but still.
You can have parts of the web app rendered on the client, and still keep the rest of the app the same. Rewrite the diffs and previews, keep the rest as-is.
There is no excuse for possibly the most used feature of Github to suck so badly.
Where he encouraged people to lean into intentionality and finding purpose rather than using therapy as a replacement?
I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder and I’ve benefited GREATLY from talk therapy in numerous ways. I’m an advocate for therapy. I simultaneously stand behind his post as a healthy nudge for many.
I don't think people in CS should be giving broad overly simplistic mental health advice. Let's leave that to the pros. I'm grateful of DHH's contributions to society but his hot takes are marketing ploys. Mental health should not be leveraged as a marketing ploy.
Fwiw, I struggled with anxiety and depression for nearly 20 years. Commitment to therapy and my modalities brought me out of that. My _therapist_ guided me, including finding purpose and building meaningful relationships.
It was a joke...also the Author is a bit of a software legend - he is the dev behind Apollo for Reddit, the app that reddit killed that caused the whole revolt. A one man show that made an app so much better than a multi-billion dollar company that people literally would prefer to quit the site than switch.
"Software legend" might be stretching it. His app was popular, and when Reddit pulled the plug there was discontent, but nothing was really ever resolved. It's more of a software parable against being overly reliant on a single centralized company that can kick your revenue out from underneath you at the drop of a hat. *glares at Tim Cook*
They say you either learn history or are doomed to repeat it.
He could've easily taken down Reddit if he wanted. He just needed to port Apollo to Lemmy and get people to migrate. I personally offered him help to set up as many servers needed to get the migration going.
But not only he refused, he went on to mock the other developers who were implementing an Apollo-like client for Lemmy (Voyager) and went on to work on a YouTube viewer for the Vision Pro.
It seems like some people just enjoy being put in a cage and get constantly abused.
Yeah, I am familiar with Chris. He is the one that developed a popular application for someone else's platform (Reddit) and was rewarded by it by getting the CEO accusing him of extortion attempts.
Then, after realizing that Reddit's management was just using him as a scapegoat and to justify the API closing off, what does he do? He could've used his influence to get people out of Reddit and porting Apollo to some other alternative, he went on to spend a good part of an year working on, you guessed it, an YouTube client for Apple's Vision Pro.
Sorry, but a sibling comment has it right: Chris does not suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. It's full-on Battered Wife Syndrome.
Trump has no idea what he is doing, it has been very clear in interviews.
In the first admin, it was the adults in the room, the thing is, it's not yes men this time...it's the villians in the room. Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
For all the talk about P2025 and denial of any relation to it, they have done roughly 50% of the actions in the project already with more on the way. ~2/3rds of all his EOs have been in the plan. Virtually everyone related to the project is now in the admin - the head of the FCC literally wrote the 'FCC' section and boy is it an attack on everything the EFF holds dear.
I think what is notable is that it seems to have gotten more bold - the plan called for reducing USAID, not killing it for example.
> Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
Probably like every president before him.
No president like CEOs can know everything about the organization they head. They are mostly the face and mouthpiece, and depend on chiefs and VPs to tell them what needs to be done according to the agenda that CEO or president has put forth.
Definitely, Biden certainly as well.
I would argue that this is mostly a modern thing. EOs were far less common in the past and I would argue that far younger presidents often were far more in control of their admin. At the very least, they understood the paper they were signing.
Exactly. Trump is practically illiterate and is being handed things to sign. His original ideas that were pushed back on by his advisors in his first term were a different sort of idea, things like, "Why can't we just force that country to do what we want, we're the USA, we're the most powerful, we could just bomb them."
