Not just that. An LLM is an universal middleman for anything creative. Books, code, music. Everything written, spoken or performed can be accessed as digested and mixed by the LLM. It breaks all content-relates business models by inserting a middleman, that seeks to capture as much value as possible while actively arguing the source of mediated content is not entitled to anything. This is not sustainable, as the content source will loose motivation, including non-monetary motivation. This in turn will stop the middleman being able to capture value created by them. But the ability to combine existing content without anything new being added is likely to be too little to offset the enormous costs involved. Whatever the outcome for the AI-bros, human content generation will decrease massively for a long while. Which has a massive detrimental effect on culture globally.
What ticks me off in this is the statement, that a certain body shape is “unattainable for most”. I’m pretty sure the author does not have the data to back this up. Difficult? Yes. Requiring commitment? Absolutely. Unattainable? No. I really don’t care what body shape anyone is comfortable with. But as someone, who has struggled hard all his life not to be obese, I find it irresponsible to outright declare something that’s absolutely doable by anyone as “unattainable”. Being able to attain it might be someone’s only hope and it’s just wrong to take it away.
You're wrong. They even explicitly call out that it's not about weight. Everyone has different proportions.
> Once I compared my personalized sloper to commercial patterns and retail garments, I had a revelation: clothes were never made to fit bodies like mine. It didn’t matter how much weight I gained or lost, whether I contorted my body or tried to buy my way into styles that “flatter” my silhouette, there was no chance that clothes would ever fit perfectly on their own. Finally I understood why.
Later they show how J.Crew has a certain ration between hip/waist for all sizes. Even if you had the same sized waist, chances are you wouldn't have the same sized hips as they expect. Most bodies just aren't that shape.
There is the fundamental thing of skeletal structure and build though - people naturally are entirely different shapes, regardless of fat or excess weight, wich is what the comment is mostly referring to in my eyes.
I'm built very tall and very spindly, so there are certain body shapes that I will never have (or want, but that's a different question) purely from the point of view that my body just isn't the right base shape to produce them.
True but nobody changes shape fundamentally after puberty. The only change is fat and, to a much smaller extent, muscle (not including anabolic steroid use).
It's not just about that, though. Have you looked at many women's bodies? Some are almost like men: broad shoulders, narrow hips. Some are like boys: narrow everything. There are "hourglass" shapes, "pear" shapes, big boobs... so many different shapes.
It might be possible to have a one-dimensional sizing scale for men's clothing, but it seems impossible for women's. There's at least 3 or 4 dimensions that are independent and nothing to do with being fat.
It's true, everyone can be not fat. But I don't blame people for this. I blame fast food and us not cracking down on food addiction as a society.
There’s an old saying: if civil engineers built houses the way software people build software, the first woodpecker to appear would destroy the civilization. With Tesla, we build cars. That, as told in court documents, absolutely should continue accelerating while in cruise control despite the driver pressing the brakes. There’s a century of institutional knowledge on system safety built into most cars. And (looking at you, Pinto), the carmakers are not even especially good at it. As a former software engineer, I’d rather rely on some actual engineers rather than a bunch of tech bros led by a deranged sociopath.
The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.
These are objectively awful instruments. They were so bad (and hard to get), that it was a common practice to make your own. For these purposes, the public phone booths were frequently vandalized as the pnones contained mics, that could be turned into pickups. Yet, much of the punk and rock stuff of the former USSR has been and, in some cases, are still made with them. E.g. Villu Tamme, legendary Estonian punk still plays a Musima Lead Star and it’s a key part of his sound.
Musima Lead Star is a musical instrument, Ural "guitars" were not. I played and owned several ones during eighties. The moment I could finally afford Musima Lead Star and finally get a sound I had in my head, was one of happiest moments of my life.
Musima means Musik marktneukirchen, a place with a long tradition of instrument manufacture. The Martin family emigrated from there to America and the rest is history..
I see Villu Tamme, mentioned here, of all places. His bansds concept album Külmale maale has its 40 year anniversary. It is about the atrocities of the soviet union, deportations, Beria, kgb, etc.
I’m not an AI evangelical, but I think it remains to be seen what the size of that subset is. Those that write crypto and hardware drivers are certainly a small subset of programmers. Most of us are pumping out enterprise crud and arguing with our PMs.
Depends on the problem. If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right. Manually coding a signup flow #875 is not my idea of fun either. But if the complexity is in the implementation, it’s different. Doing complex cryptography, doing performance optimization or near-hardware stuff is just a different class of problems.
> If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right.
The problem is rather that programmers who work on business logic often hate programmers who are actually capable of seeing (often mathematical) patterns in the business logic that could be abstracted away; in other words: many business logic programmers hate abstract mathematical stuff.
So, in my opinion/experience this is a very self-inflected problem that arises from the whole culture around business logic and business logic programming.
Coding signup flow #875 should as easy as using a snippet tool or a code generator. Everyone that explains why using an LLM is a good idea always sound like living in the stone age of programming. There are already industrial level tools to get things done faster. Often so fast that I feel time being wasted describing it in english.
In my experience AI is pretty good at performance optimizations as long as you know what to ask for.
Can't speak to firmware code or complex cryptography but my hunch is if it's in it's training dataset and you know enough to guide it, it's generally pretty useful.
Most optimizations are making sure you do not do work that is unnecessary or that you use the hardware effectively. The standard techniques are all you need 99% of the time you are doing performance work. The hard part about performance is dedicating the time towards it and not letting it regress as you scale the team. With AI you can have agents constantly profiling the codebase identifying and optimizing hotspots as they get introduced.
Fundamentally, Amazon will not promise you they will break the law. They are subject to US regulations as well as German ones (in this case). If these regulations demand your data be accessed or removed or keys compromised, it will happen. Not because of US, Germany or Amazon but because that’s how jurisdictions work. Beaides, there is no reasonably feasible method for learning what these regulations actually say on a given day, a lot of it is in bylaws and you just can’t keep track of all ministerial orders of all the applicable jurisdictions. Amazon does have an algorithm to determine course of action in case of compliance conflict, but they will not publish it for obvious reasons.
Some internal Skype versions had cat detection. When the client discovered cat-like key presses, the other side would see a cat walking animation instead of typing animation. Don’t think this feature ever made it to a public release.
If that is true, and a given history of prompts combined with a given mosel always gives the same code, then you have invented what’s called a compiler. Take human-readable text and convert it into machine code. Which means we have a much higher level language, than before and your prompts become your code.
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