AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.
Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.
It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
All that time and effort that went into forcing Google+ everywhere and its legacy is just lots of people accidentally ending up with 2 YouTube accounts from when they were messing with that
The difference was that Google Plus was actually kind of cool. I'm not excusing them shoving it down your throat, but at least it was well designed.
Most of the AI efforts currently represent misadventures in software design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?
I remember believing Google+ will win because it was quite nicely done. But I guess it never caught on with the masses to be successful in Google's definition of success (Adsense?).
PS: I was thinking that I didn't notice it being shoved down because I was high on the Koolaid. But I do remember when they shoved it in YouTube comments.
Google+ lost because when they launched, they didn't let everyone join. That means that people joined and couldn't bring their friends over, so they bounced off of it. By the time they opened it up to everyone it had a bad reputation of being "dead". And then of being obnoxious when Google refused to allow it natural growth.
I think they intended to be like Facebook and have a selective group of people join, but they just allowed any random set of people to join and then said tou can bring 5 or some low number with you. That was never going to work for the rapid growth they wanted.
I liked Google+, but it Google really mismanaged it.
The other issue is that the dumbass at Google behind it isolated the Google+ team in their own building with their own cafeteria expecting it to be a really big deal, forgetting and abandoning the rest of the company he needed for that to happen. I figured it was dead at the Friday TGIF where they announced the annual bonus for most googlers wouldn't be relative to the success of google+ in any way.
I remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?"
What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.
Not just the ads. They are likely tracking your location, and drive events. These can be sold to your insurance company who may adjust your rates, or even drop you if they consider your driving patterns to be risky. When we got our Ford Maverick, first thing I did was disable this. Kudos to Ford for making this easy.
Downside is that we got a recall notice about the software for the backup camera needing an update. I scheduled an appointment, and it took over 3 hours. Asked the service guy why it was taking so long to flash to software, and he said our system needed an update because we had not enabled over-the-air connection with Ford which allows this to be done in the background. Evidently the download speed for this was incredibly slow according to the SG, so it took over two hours before our Mav was current, and they could apply the backup camera fix. Note: I was very suspicious about this claim. I thought it was more likely we were being purposely held captive in the service waiting area -- which has a big screen constantly running Ford ads. I guess that is OK. I had my Kindle, and was into a great book at the time, so I actually was not too put out.
I highly doubt the overworked service center employees were wasting your time, they probably were just as annoyed as you were that your car was sitting in a service bay longer than expected.
Do you really think that a dealership would tie up a service bay to keep you captive?
Service is where dealers make their money. You’re convinced that manufacturers will sell data to insurance companies yet believe that dealers will sacrifice hours of profit. That doesn’t work out.
We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.
Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.
Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.
The dealer is paid per job for warrentee work so they still want you out quick.
even for non warrantee service they are generally paid based on how long the job is expected to take not how long it takes them. The only reason to not hurryitoo much is they warrantee their own work and so if you bring it back that costs them.
Of course I do? Across all my utilitarian devices, e.g. phone, desktop, laptop, I already find updates to be a large net negative except for the vague and nebulus 'security'. If a car 'needs' updates then it isn't doing its job.
I can't imagine the expletives that'll come out of my mouth the day I'm running late for a meeting and my car won't start because its in the middle of an update.
I consider OTA updates to be of negative value, actually. If my car needs fixing, I'll bring it in for servicing. If it's not broken, I don't want my car tampered with.
Come back to me when there's a punitive liability model for OTA updates. If the garage manages to break something during, that's on the garage, not me. It should be the same for OTA updates: the company pushing the update should be liable for any failure and for providing replacement transportation if they manage to break my car with an update.
Hence why folks should be pushing right to repair and similar legislation through to prevent this before it happens. Technical hacks are tactical solutions, good policy implementation is the strategic, long term solution.
Now the question is, what time is it in voyager 1? With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now. I was watching star wars recently and when Han Solo casually say "we should be in Alderaan at 0200 hours", I paused for a second. What does that even mean [0]? Traveling through space is challenging today, but after we figure that out, we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy.
> With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now
A couple minutes [1].
> we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy
Not really. Barring relativistic travel, it’s not dissimilar from the problem seagoing voyagers faced on long trade routes. Ship time is set based on the convenience of the passengers and the route.
…because that’s what the math says? Based on Voyager’s relative velocity it’s expected to be about 2 seconds younger than it would have been had it stayed on Earth.
I have been using zipbombs and they were effective to some extent. Then I had the smart idea to write about it on HN [0]. The result was a flood of new types of bots that overwhelmed my $6 server. For ~100k daily request, it wasn't sustainable to serve 1 to 10MB payloads.
I've updated my heuristic to only serve the worst offenders, and created honeypots to collect ips and repond with 403s. After a few months, and some other spam tricks I'll keep to myself this time, my traffic is back to something reasonable again.
I had to revisit my strategy after posting about my zipbombs on HN [0]. My server traffic went from tens of thousands to ~100k daily, hosted on a $6 vps. It was not sustainable.
Now I target only the most aggressive bots with zipbombs and the rest get a 403. My new spam strategy seems to work, but I don't know if I should post it on HN again...
Neat! Let's take this at face value for a second. The generated code, and html can be written to disk. This way as the application progresses it is built. Plus you only ever build the parts that are needed.
Somehow it will also help you decide what is needed as an mvp. Instead of building everything you think you will need, you get only what you need. But if I use someone elses application running this repo, the first thing I'll do is go to /admin/users/all
Most companies using AI are just paying for a subscription. They aren't actually building LLMs or other machine learning applications that take over a known task. You could easily replace the term AI with just subscription.
When they say they are laying off workers, they are saying "we signed up for Cursor, and enabled some AI features on Jira and Salesforce"
The layoff is just an excuse until they realize that just because Jira can write a summary of the ticket, doesn't mean the ticket gets done any faster.
And keep in mind that while the company may care about its overall efficiency, its individual organs only care about their internal incentives. If the LLM gets the ticket out of someone's area of responsibility faster, why do they care if that makes it harder for someone else?
The AI doesn't make anything harder for the people downstream.
If anything it gives all the people downstream more power. The power to justifiably ignore the AI summary and do whatever they originally wanted as they see fit. This makes the people upstream even more obviously redundant than they already were before all the AI slop. The downstream people picking up the slack are effectively promoted.
This is pretty much the definition of a layoff. It's just a different and much more streamlined way this time to weed out the losers. The top AI users within an organization hang themselves by proving they're not needed. The system works.
Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.
It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
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