this “cameras for everything!” idiocy.

That’s why I’m so impressed with how well it’s actually working. When they get off that really weird self-imposed restriction, it could be an interesting technology.

Not great performance at all.

That’s better than I was expecting to be perfectly honest.

I’m pretty impressed with the technology, but clearly it’s not ready for field use.

They’re prepping the next Cornel West

Maybe, but at least Cornel West is a legitimate intellectual who has actual political opinions, fringe as they may be. This dude is just some TV personality.

I hate that this is even a story. Are we as Americans so stupid that the only people who can win the “undecided” or “centrist” vote (read uninformed stupid people) are just TV personalities?

I see both points. You’re totally right that for a company, it’s just the result that matters. However, to Bradley’s, since he’s specifically talking about art direction, the journey is important in so much as getting a passable result. I’ve only dabbled with 2D and 3D art, but converting to 3D requires an understanding of the geometries of things and how they look from different angles. Some things look cool from one angle and really bad from another. Doing the real work allows you to figure that out and abandon a design before too much work is put in or modify it so it works better.

When it comes to software, though, I’m kinda on the fence. I like to use AI for small bits of code and knocking out boilerplate so that I can focus on making the “real” part of the code good. I hope the real, creative, and hard parts of a project aren’t being LLM’d away, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a mandate from some MBA.

Zog yes? Zog no?

Yeah, it’s not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it’s difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers’ and caching services’ IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org’s scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.

That said, I’m all for fighting ICE, even if it’s futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.

Easier and more painless to just pay another company to do that and not have to worry about server security, spam, the endless SSH requests for ‘admin’, etc etc

Definitely. I do it for fun though. I’m kind of a masochist 😂

Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you’re not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven’t done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.

Damn, don’t go giving them ideas!

But there are different types of temporary. Temporary because the code got updated/upgraded or new and better software got implemented feels fine. It feels like your work was part of the never ending march of technical progress. Temporary because it gets ripped out if favor of a different, inferior suite hits hard.

If my code gets superseded by someone else’s complete rewrite that is better, then I’m all for it. If my code gets thrown out because we’re switching to a different, inferior system that is completely incompatible with my work, then that just hits like a ton of bricks.

It’s not the most practical thing in the universe, but I have a small VPS that I host my email on for myself and a couple others (5 addresses in total). It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but once it’s working, it is really nice to have that kind of control.

To be fair, that’s how some of the nazi concentration camps started. A lot of countries wouldn’t take the deported Jewish people, so the nazis had to come up with another “solution.” Unless something changes, this is where we’re heading, and it is beyond frightening.

Same here. My desktop is in a controlled environment, so I don’t see a need. Plus, if I do have some sort of issue, I will still be able to access those files.

Since I actually take my laptop places, I have that encrypted for sure.

This is why I am dreading when my 2017 dumb TV dies. It’s really telling that dumb TVs, which should be cheaper to produce and sell, are either not available or very expensive (as in commercial displays). Really proves the point that the consumer is really the product.

The thing I’m heartened by is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs among the MBA/“leadership” group. They actually think these models are intelligent. I’ve heard people say, “Well, just ask the AI,” meaning asking ChatGPT. Anyone who actually does that and thinks they have a leg up are insane and kidding themselves. If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly, but they will then fall behind just as quickly because the quality will be middling at best. They don’t understand how to best use the technology, and they will end up hanging themselves with it.

At the end of the day, all AI is just stupid number tricks. They’re very fancy, impressive number tricks, but it’s just a number trick that just happens to be useful. Solely relying on AI will lead to the downfall of an organization.

Congratulations! Enjoy the journey! You’ll look back in a few years and wonder how you ever managed with a Windows set up while you slip into the comfy-ness of your customized system.

And their web apps are nearly unusable (especially with Firefox and its variants)

Admittedly, I use LibreOffice, and it works for almost all of my needs. However, I’ve never encountered the above issue, and the web versions have worked for me on Firefox. What’s your particular issue? The solution could be pretty simple; I have my user-agent string reporting Windows, and I’ve never had an issue. Maybe worth a try?

Changing the user agent shouldn’t work, but there’s a stupid amount of times that it does, and so I’ve just kept it permanent.

Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

Yeah, they’ll probably have to check everything. Though, I wonder if even just checking that everything is good to go would save time from manually re-writing it all. While it may not be a smashing success, it could still prove useful.

I dunno, I’m interested to see how this plays out.