“Copy” is essentially 200-OK

I remember hearing how Truman had a “the buck stops here” sign on his desk. One is very hard pressed to find that kind of accountability and ownership anywhere in today’s world, especially among executive leadership, be it corporate or political.

And not a single one of them paused and went “wait, maybe the choices we’re making are the problem here?” Instead, it was “keep being evil, but now with bodyguards!”

“We conjured 10,000 gibbering mouthers into boxes and just pipe their outputs over runes and components all day; we figure that eventually, we’ll come up with some pretty incredible spells, though most so far have been pretty weak, buggy, and weirdly horny.”

Remember when Trump said he was going to end this war even before taking office? Then proceeded to try and extort Ukraine, whined at Putin, and gave up when neither of those worked?

Elon’s going to lose this fight. All the other rich people backing Trump still think the snake won’t bite them, and Elon doesn’t have the same cult of personality Trump does. He had some good will for a while, but he’s been burning that ever since the weird pedo guy thing, and that’s nowhere near Trump’s fucking cult energy. Forty years from now there’s still going to be dumbasses and edgy teens talking about how they heard a rumor that Trump is still alive out there in the wastes that used to be middle America.

Yes, actually. I probably could have stepped up to be an admin, but tbh, my plate is already overfull.

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Now I know she was an even bigger piece of shit than I thought.

Yeah, I’m in California’s central valley, which is a lot like the Serengeti in that it’s a grassy desert-ish thing that’s seasonally wetted by snowpack melt. It’s actually pretty swampy in its natural state. Used to be that you couldn’t drive forty minutes here without your car being a hopeless mess, especially in the late winter/spring. Now, I almost never hit a bug at all. It’s been that way for years. I pointed it out to my nature-loving MAGA mom and it freaked her the fuck out.

Well, the thing is that we’re hitting diminishing returns with current approaches. There’s a growing suspicion that LLMs simply won’t be able to bring us to AGI, but that they could be a part of or stepping stone to it. The quality of the outputs are pretty good for AI, and sometimes even just pretty good without the qualifier, but the only reason it’s being used so aggressively right now is that it’s being subsidized with investor money in the hopes that it will be too heavily adopted and too hard to walk away from by the time it’s time to start charging full price. I’m not seeing that. I work in comp sci, I use AI coding assistants and so do my co-workers. The general consensus is that it’s good for boilerplate and tests, but even that needs to be double checked and the AI gets it wrong a decent enough amount. If it actually involves real reasoning to satisfy requirements, the AI’s going to shit its pants. If we were paying the real cost of these coding assistants, there is NO WAY leadership would agree to pay for those licenses.

US be like: sorry, we simply have no money for bike lanes or sidewalk repairs :(

Follow up: I called the IT dept and spoke with them. Apparently they already get the “low cost” licenses with Microsoft for users who don’t need access to office (which is the overwhelming majority of them) and just basically get them an email address. The cost increase is really down to the city having added more staff, which means more licenses, since they’ve got a fixed rate contract locked in with MS. It sounds like moving non-power-users into LibreOffice would have negligible benefit and cause more disruption than not. Ah, well, swing and a miss. Thanks for the support, everyone!

Oh, yikes, that’s problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn’t feel good to look at that and say “and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel”, but I guess I get it.

Is LibreOffice calc much worse? And, again, I feel that most users of office suite software are fairly basic users. I want to specifically leave MS Office power users alone, let them keep their licenses, but if people are just using the basic features, there’s no reason for us to be paying outrageous amounts for MS Office licenses for them. Yeah, I’m aware that this is going to increase the load on the IT dept, but I’m hoping that the targeted user base are basic enough users that they can be onboard with an orientation video for most cases.

They’re pretty okay for shallow understanding on a subject, but Wendover (not on the list), Economics Explained (not on the list), and CGP gray all get stuff pretty wrong once you get past shallow depth. I know because I’m a huge transit/urbanism nerd. If these channels haven’t wronged you in some minor way, they just haven’t talked about something you’re a subject matter expert in yet. The point here isn’t that they’re bad, just understand that these are shallow explainers, the next step in from like a news article, Wikipedia, or a blog, and take them with a grain of salt.

My personal list is Kurzgesagt, XKCD explained, and The Action Lab.

How well? Bet your life on it well, or “fewer hallucinations than we would have guessed” well? I’ve considered and toyed around with openAI models for logging supply room check offs in a JSON format and it went better than I hoped but worse than I needed.

The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3