> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?
Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'
I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't <x> - it is <y>” like patterns.
It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!
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[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.
The best marketing is indistinguishable from non–marketing, like the label on the side of my Contoso® Widget-like Electrical Machine™ — it feels like a list of ingredients and system requirements but every brand name there was sponsored.
> … the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time …
I don't think it will become significantly less visible⁰ in the near future. The models are going to hit the problem of being trained on LLM generated content which will cause the growth in their effectiveness quite a bit. It is already a concern that people are trying to develop mitigations for, and I expect it to hit hard soon unless some new revolutionary technique pops up¹².
> those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point
I'm betting that us Habsburg Internet predictors will have our little we-told-you-so moment first!
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[0] Though it is already hard to tell when you don't have your thinking head properly on sometimes. I bet it is much harder for non-native speakers, even relatively fluent ones, of the target language. I'm attempting to learn Spanish and there is no way I'd see the difference at my level in the language (A1, low A2 on a good day) given it often isn't immediately obvious in my native language. It might be interesting to study how LLM generated content affects people at different levels (primary language, fluent second, fluent but in a localised creole, etc.).
[1] and that revolution will likely be in detecting generated content, which will make generated content easier to flag for other purposes too, starting an arms race rather than solving the problem overall
[2] such a revolution will pop up, it is inevitable, but I think (hope?) the chance of it happening soon is low
I'll still program. I'm barely touching current "AI" other than certain bits of code completion that are on by default in VS and are the right mix of occasionally useful (saving a few tens of keystrokes) and easy to ignore when not. When it gets to the point where I can't compete without using LLMs heavily, I'll have to do something else. Perhaps wait tables somewhere with Spanish customers as I'm trying to learn the language, it won't be much or a pay cut because by the point where someone of my years can't compete at all, almost anyone will be able to do a shite job with LLMs so programming will be heading towards being a minimum-wage job anyway.
> Everything else is being destroyed by AI: art, music, books, personal websites.
Yours doesn't have to be. I started writing bits to go online again after many years not bothering. It isn't intended for public consumption, I'm deliberately doing nothing that would be called SEO in fact I'm going anti-SE in some ways, though it isn't hidden should I chose to pass a link to someone or if they decide to pass it on further. It is intended for me and a select few, if someone else finds it somehow and likes it then good the them, and much of the point of making it is the joy of making something. Everyone else using LLMs isn't going to take that from me.
> Why read a blog post, when Google AI Summary can just give you the summary?
Because the summary may be wrong, or technically correct but with entirely the wrong tone or missing key details a summary should have. Or because you want to read the post - you don't have to use the summary.
I don't read the summary generated as part of most searches these days, reading them is optional. I don't make effort to stop them being made though (using porn mode, adding “fuck”/“fucking” to search terms, etc.) - hopefully making them waste resources on generating things that are never used will et noticed and they'll ramp that down a bit at least for accounts like mine.
> Why read a book, when you can just get AI summary of it?
Before AI, did you just skip to the last few pages to see what happened? If not, then just keep reading like you did before.
Avoiding the slop books that are flooding the market ATM might be more of a concern, but there was plenty written before the LLM bubble started to keep you in things to read for a lifetime.
> The only thing you are left to do is to eat and take a sht throughout the day.*
Other hobbies. I like trail running (or if in a slower mood, country walking), AI isn't going to stop me doing that. HEMA and other activities with friends too.
> How should people make money? No idea, as in the "prosperous future", everything is replaced by AI.
That is a completely different question to the rest where you are asking about things that you would do for enjoyment, and is a bigger societal and philosophical concern than I have time to chew on right now…
> What's the point anymore?
Same as it was before: do what you need to do to survive, then do what you need to do to enjoy any remaining time after that. Perhaps I'm helped here by being back on the up after a couple of years recovering from proper burnout: I know the way things are going won't make me feel worse than that, and I survived that. Current politics and other social issues away from tech on the other hand…
> Why keep going?
When all hope feels truly lost, at least keep going out of spite.
> When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail.
The point of Rubber Ducking (or talking/praying to the Wooden Indian, to use an older phrase that is steeped in somewhat racist undertones so no longer generally used) is that it is an inanimate object that doesn't talk back. You still talk to it as if you were explaining to another person, so are forcing yourself to get your thoughts in order in a way that would make that possible, but actually talking to another person who is actively listening and actually asking questions is the next level.
I guess I can see where others are coming from (the LLM is different than a literal rubber duck) but I feel like the "can't reply" part was never more than an incidental consequence. To me the "why" of it was always that I need to solve my problem and I don't want to disturb my colleagues (or am unable to contact anyone in the first place for some reason).
So where others see "rubber ducking" as explaining to an object that is incapable of response, I've always seen it as explaining something without turning to others who are steeped in the problem. For example I would consider explaining something to a nontechnical friend to qualify as rubber ducking. The "WTF" interjections definitely make it more effective (the rubber duck consistently fails to notify me if I leave out key details).
The asymmetry of 56k standards was 2:1, so if you got a 56k6 link (the best you could get in theory IIRC) your upload rate would be ~28k3. In my expereience the best you would get in real world use was ~48k (so 48kbpd down, 24kbps up), and 42k (so 21k up) was the most I could guarantee would be stable (baring in mind “unstable” meant the link might completely drop randomly, not that there would be a blip here-or-there and all would be well again PDQ afterwards) for a significant length of time.
To get 33k6 up (or even just 28k8 - some ISPs had banks of modems that supported one the 56k6 standards but would not support more than 28k8 symmetric) you needed to force your modem to connect using the older symmetric standards.
* 56k baud modems but even my USR (the best of the bunch) never got more than half way to 56k throughput*
56k modem standards were asymmetric, the upload rate being half that of the download. In my experience (UK based, calling UK ISPs) 42kbps was usually what I saw, though 46 or even 48k was stable¹ for a while sometimes.
But 42k down was 21k up, so if I was planning to upload anything much I'd set my modem to pretend it as a 36k6 unit: that was more stable and up to that speed things were symmetric (so I got 36k6 up as well as down, better than 24k/23k/21k). I could reliably get a 36k6 link, and it would generally stay up as long as I needed it to.
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[1] sometimes a 48k link would last many minutes then die randomly, forcing my modem to hold back to 42k resulted in much more stable connections
Even then, it required specialized hardware on the ISP side to connect above 33.6kbps at all, and almost never reliably so. I remember telling most of my friends just to get/stick with the 33.6k options. Especially considering the overhead a lot of those higher modems took, most of which were "winmodems" that used a fair amount of CPU overhead insstead of an actual COM/Serial port. It was kind of wild.
Yep. Though I found 42k reliable and a useful boost over 36k6 (14%) if I was planning on downloading something big¹. If you had a 56k capable modem and had a less than ideal line, it was important to force it to 36k6 because failure to connect using the enhanced protocol would usually result in fallback all the way to 28k8 (assuming, of course, that your line wasn't too noisy for even 36k6 to be stable).
I always avoided WinModems, in part because I used Linux a lot, and recommended friends/family do the same. “but it was cheaper!” was a regular refrain when one didn't work well, and I pulled out the good ol' “I told you so”.
> Hold up, does this mean outlook sends your full credentials to Microsoft when you try to set up an outlook account?
Not just an “outlook account” - any account in outlook, with default settings at least.
I run a mail server, mainly for me but a couple of friends have accounts on there too, and a while ago one friend reported apparently being locked out and it turned out that it was due to them switching Outlook versions and it was connecting via a completely different address to those that my whitelists expected sometimes at times when they weren't even actively using Outlook. Not only were active connections due to their interactive activity being proxied, but the IMAP credentials were stored so the MS server could login to check things whenever it wanted (I assume the intended value-add there is being able to send new mail notifications on phones/desktops even when not actively using mail?).
> but this feels like it breaks all sorts of security/privacy expectations.
It most certainly does. The behaviour can be tamed somewhat, but (unless there have been recent changes) is fully enabled by default in newer Outlook variants.
The above-mentioned friend migrated his mail to some other service in a huf as I refused to open my whitelist to “any old host run by MS” and he didn't want to dig in to how to return behaviour back to the previous “local connections only, not sending credentials off elsewhere where they might be stored”.
> I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.
Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.
Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
I would bet that they have. Personally I stopped using eBay because of sniping. I'm a particularly devastating case for them, because had the system not felt rigged to me then I likely would have continued on the site making many purchases. However it immediately made me lose confidence in the system and bail.
Unsure (those reports I read were some time ago). Though that may be another reason why the built-in snipe-like tool was added, so appease those users as well as to decrease the load imposed by external tools.
TBH that sounds more creepy. It (sort of) rules out ads but not the stalking that is inherent in current adtech methods. I'm more bothered by the latter than the former.
Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!
> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'
I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't <x> - it is <y>” like patterns.
It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!
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[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.
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