I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.

You again? Last time I came across you, you were being racist too. Your username is racist. Is racism just a hobby or a full-time job for you?

They’re calling these people terrorists for holding signs calling for the end of Israel’s genocide. They’re not calling the people who have been committing genocide every day terrorists: they’re valuable allies. This is the UK Government’s morality. I hope it’s not shared by the British people.

2,000 INMATES GLOOMY

I didn’t realize how long the NYT had been like this.

What’s with the suggestion that they’re injuring people at all? Has it happened?

It looks like it would split the Democratic vote too. Which suggests a lot of Democratic voters (like pretty much all Republican voters) don’t have the first clue what’s going on.

Do they realize that without health science there will be no staying alive?

Well yes. I didn’t bring that in but individualism is the propaganda of capitalism, designed to set workers against each other while keeping them preoccupied with “expressing themselves” through consumption. Dress this up as rugged individualism, tell them it’s weakness to need or accept help, add a dash of the American Dream (as you mention), and you get a proudly compliant population who will aggressively resist all attempts to self-organize in their shared interests or redistribute wealth. That’s been the USA at least since Reagan, and probably for most of its history.

Learning the killing doesn’t have to happen is the entire point of socialization, and we just don’t teach that to humans anymore.

We don’t teach it to Americans any more. Some places still understand what society and social responsibility are. But Americans have been subjected to the propaganda of toxic individualism for too long.

This crude recourse to “evolutionary fitness” is the rhetoric of fascists.

I’m almost won over by your charming manners, but…

1. What is your source?
2. What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
3. Tesla’s self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
4. Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla’s, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won’t open without power (not to mention autopilot’s limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don’t share, so again it’s worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla’s safety.

I quite like lane assist in the 2019 Honda I drive, even though it gets it wrong occasionally. It will not function unless it detects that you’re providing some steering input of your own, and it’s easy to override just by steering the way you want to go. That and cruise control are handy on the highway and have worked well for 6 years with no problems. But it’s very far from either functioning or being advertised as “full self driving.”

I see what you mean, but science is objectively beneficial to a country, no matter what they think. Another way to see your point is that defunding science is only an own goal if Trump means to serve the USA. If he means to serve other interests while enriching himself and keeping popular in the short term, then it’s going according to plan.

40% of Americans would support a party founded by the world’s richest man whose very first instinct when Trump won was to triumphantly perform two Nazi salutes. WTF, USA?

Wouldn’t someone have noticed all the traffic on the network? And if the conversations were processed locally, wouldn’t someone notice the energy and cooling needs of the processor in the bulb, not to mention the presence of a load of memory? This seems very implausible.

It seems to be a common thing, couching misogyny in the language of “protecting” or “defending” women. This stuff makes my skin crawl.

We all know that cops will try to charge you with assaulting them if you so much as shrug while being arrested. And they’ll contrive situations just so they can do that. I’d say that makes their statistics meaningless without specific details and proof.

Trump will destroy it because it’s icky stuff relating to women, and it serves to help women.

I find getting the LLM to either generate or rephrase documentation gives a distinctly worse result than doing it myself. I was in a hurry to document a new API from scratch recently and thought I’d try Copilot, but the results were overly verbose and sometimes inaccurate so I ended up rewriting all of it.

The LLM is best for boilerplate code that is easily predictable and verifiable. Beyond that it’s sometimes good for initial suggestions if you don’t know where to start with a tool, after which you can go to the actual documentation. But you’ll need to do that, because half the time the suggestions use nonexistent APIs and methods.

I have always thought that writing code is the easy part of being a developer. The hard parts are the parts management doesn’t appreciate: clarifying requirements, architecting new systems, translating business goals into something codable, letting egotistical know they’re not making sense without offending them, designing effective testing processes, persuading management to prioritize reducing technical debt, and integrating and maintaining existing systems. Maintenance is a huge part of the job that no one gives you credit for. Oh, and if you ever touch the front end, CSS.