However, many times getting a carrier unlocked phone carries a price premium.

That’s a good point. I’ve started advocating for buying phones lightly used (1-2 generations behind). Until just a couple of months ago, I was rocking a phone from 2019 with no issues. When I upgraded recently, I bought a Pixel 9 from a reseller selling one with an open box and a slight scuff on the bezel (that gets covered by a case anyway). Now I have an almost new phone that works like a dream for almost 75% of what I would get buying it directly from Google.

Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…

Yep, I also have a directory for my programming projects on each of my machines, but mine is Programming. On my main desktop, I also have an ISOs folder to hold my OS ISOs for VMs and old CD-ROM game ISOs.

If God’s mind were a soup of linear algebra doing stupid number tricks, then sure (with the assumption we’re just talking about LLMs).

In reality, no.

Source: I study AI and work on it professionally.

Yeah, I’ve found AI generated code to be hit or miss. It’s been fine to good for boilerplate stuff that I’m too lazy to do myself, but is super easy CS 101 type stuff. Anything that’s more specialized requires the LLM to be hand-held in the best case. More often than not, though, I just take the wheel and code the thing myself.

By the way, I think it’s cool that you use Old English characters in your writing. In school I used to do the same in my notes to write faster and smaller.

I really like Open-Meteo. It’s worked really well for my weather-related projects.

100% agreed. It should not be used as a replacement but rather as an augmentation to get the real benefits.

I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren’t detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I’ll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It’s nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution–a silver bullet–and it’s not.

This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won’t live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.

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.

Great article! For a few years, I was always deterred from projects because they had already been done and better, so there was no reason to do it. Now, though, I just enjoy implementing things in my own janky way and learning a bit along the way.

It’s also not all-or-none. Someone who otherwise is really interested in learning the material may just skate through using AI in a class that is uninteresting to them but required. Or someone might have life come up with a particularly strict instructor who doesn’t accept late work, and using AI is just a means to not fall behind.

The ones who are running everything through an LLM are stupid and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot. The others may just be taking a shortcut through some busy work or ensuring a life event doesn’t tank their grade.

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.

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.

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.

Ah, gotcha. I didn’t go too deep into the code, just did a cursory look. I think it’s still an interesting concept.

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. It seems like an interesting concept for certain use cases, and it looks like it’s just a tiny team.

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.