While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
Who's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.
Reich can't prove what happened? Slaves being prohibited from education? Books being burned?
Reich can't prove the internal working of the president's mind, so statements of intent are speculative to a degree, but if you interacted with a person in such a way that you projected feelings of animosity and hatred towards him, I wouldn't need your explicit admission to determine that you hate him or that you are consistently behaving in ways that appear hateful.
The president's actions have certainly shown a disdain for the education system. Vance has explicitly expressed taking issue with universities and wanting to implement government control. Trump has mandated that universities allow review for their curriculum if they want to receive funding.
This article isn't alarmist, because the actions that anyone would need to be alarmed about have already happened. The only question at this point is whether or not you like the results.
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
What twisted agenda? The kicked article is about his hopes for new Alzheimer's treatments. The article after that is about his goal to give away his money.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News. We don't care what you personally think about vaccines or Alzheimer’s, you just can't write comments in this flamey style.
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future if you're going to comment here.
The main issues for problems like this fall into 3 categories
- Things that prevent you from starting the job. Org silos, security, and permissions
- Things that prevent you from doing the job. This is primarily data cleaning.
- Things that make the job more difficult. This involves poor tooling, and you'll struggle to break the stranglehold that SQL and python-pandas have in this area. I'll also add plotting libraries to this. Many of them suck in a seemingly unavoidable way.
On the second and third points llms will most likely own these soon enough, though maybe there's room to build something small and local that's more efficient if the scope of the agent is reduced?
The first point is organizational generally, and it's very difficult to solve outside of integrating your system into an environment which is the strategy pursued by companies like snowflake and databricks.
Compare output from a spoctrometer (or spectrograph) vs. eliminating outliers from an almost linear process. One will wreck your data and the other is the only correct thing to do.
Honestly, it does make me wonder what they're thinking. Given the nature of what they're doing, the stable coin reference doesn't seem like it's necessary. Even for purposes of hype.
Telling investors you're going to make your own currency to bypass transactions fees from financial institutions seems like a fairly straightforward way to boost investor interest.
Wouldn't adding crypto mechanics to a virtual credit system just make for a costlier system due to mining?
If the transactions are maintained within an Amazon or Walmart ecosystem, there's no need for trustless verification, because you own the ecosystem. What's the point?
They're thinking that they want their own currency that won't run a foul of the laws that prohibit that and company scrip.
> Oh, our employees may make minimum wage, but they get (the speculative asset) Walmart Coin as a benefit that can be redeemed at any Walmart, equivalent to an extra 50% income! It's like stock options, but useful!!! Why, yes, we do still teach them how to apply for welfare programs!
Since, of course, cryptocurrency is not a currency somehow.
"cosmic sidekick for navigating life with the power of the stars...with a fresh, no-BS approach."
There's a great deal of humor here. Astrology is conceptually interesting, in the same way that me summoning a Greek, Norse, or Hindu deity in old school final fantasy is interesting. I get the feeling this place isn't filled with your target audience though.
Anyway, consider allowing users to type in their birth day in addition to (or maybe even entirely replacing) the day widgets. It's not immediately obvious where to click to navigate to a year only selection for instance.
And even though it may seem obvious, a prompt that says "enter your birthdate" or something similar oriented around the entry fields would be a good idea for the uninitiated but curious.
I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees.
It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns.
CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.
>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good
As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.
That's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure.
The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea.
If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy?
Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon.
Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.
If you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running.
Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down.
I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything.
And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.
Are people still experiencing llms getting stuck in knowledge and comprehension loops? I used them but not excessively, and I'm not heavily tracking their performance either.
For example, if you ask an llm a question, and it produces a hallucination then you try to correct it or explain to it that it is incorrect; and it produces a near identical hallucination while implying that it has produced a new, correct result, this suggests that it does not understand its own understanding (or pseudo-understanding if you like).
Without this level of introspection, directing any notion of true understanding, intelligence, or anything similar seems premature.
Llms need to be able to consistently and accurately say, some variation on the phrase "I don't know," or "I'm uncertain." This indicates knowledge of self. It's like a mirror test for minds.
Like the article says... I feel it's counter-productive to picture an LLM as "learning" or "thinking". It's just a text generator. If it's producing code that calls non-existent APIs for instance, it's kind of a waste of time to try to explain to the LLM that so-and-so doesn't exist. Better just try again and dump an OpenAPI doc or some sample code into it to influence the text generator towards correct output.
That's the difference between bias and logic. A statistical model is applied bias, just like computation is applied logic/arithmetic. Once you realize that, it's pretty easy to understand the potential strengths and limitations of a model.
Both approaches are missing a critical piece: objectivity. They work directly with the data, and not about the data.
Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.
I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.
All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.