I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.

I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.

Wouldn’t someone have noticed all the traffic on the network? And if the conversations were processed locally, wouldn’t someone notice the energy and cooling needs of the processor in the bulb, not to mention the presence of a load of memory? This seems very implausible.

If it gets wrong enough, people will stop using it. So it would be in the interests of AI companies to pay for good sources of data.

Or at least you’d hope that. In actual fact they’ll be thinking: let’s keep stealing because most people don’t know or care whether what the AI says is true. Besides, they can make money by turning it into a tool for disseminating the views of those who can pay the most.

deleted by creator

I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.

https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_National_Fund

Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he’s in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.

All you need to know is that toilet stalls in the USA (and Canada) have huge gaps around the doors, unlike other countries. You have to carefully position your head so you’re not making accidental eye contact with people outside, and somehow relax knowing everyone can see you taking a shit.

As a man, can I just say that I have never enjoyed peeing shoulder to shoulder with other men.

He ripped off the font, and some are saying it’s a slightly tweaked REVVL 7 Pro 5G, which is a midrange Chinese phone T-Mobile already sells for $170 with a T on the back. Trump’s T is a bit bigger. Would be fun to see T-Mobile take legal action…

If by “everyone” you mean the people stupid enough to buy a made-in-China Trump phone.

Dyson was dead to me when James Dyson campaigned for Brexit on the grounds that it would be better for British jobs, and then, once Brexit was done, moved his whole operation out of the UK to Singapore. After which he whined to the media about how people were being hard on him, calling him things like “hypocrite”, “traitor” or “weasly greedy little Farage-fellating wanker the country would be better off without.”

EU referendum: Sir James Dyson says Britain better off out

Leave campaign’s tweet about Dyson staying in the UK has aged terribly

Brexit backer Dyson says hypocrisy claim over HQ move abroad ‘incredibly harmful’

Better get on it quickly, becuase RFK just appointed a new CDC vaccine committee full of antivax idiots, after firing everyone who understood anything.

Raising all boats makes a much more fun world.

Billionaires are pathologically selfish, often it seems with actual personality disorders that make them unable to understand a world of mutual support and sharing, or to appreciate how much they benefit from others’ support. Unfortunately we let these people become far too powerful.

The same people who do everything they can to obstruct actual science, including research into vaccines and other medicines. ChatGPT can surely do what actual scientists and experienced health professionals can do. After all, ChatGPT can predict what word a person is likely to say next, so do a convincing impression of someone who knows about medicine. It’s probably no coincidence that many of these people are grifters in their own right, and those who aren’t are suckers for grifters. They have basic problems appreciating or caring about the difference between real and fake.

Yeah, and this particular vulnerability is pretty obvious for even a moderately experienced developer. You’d really have to be pasting without thinking to let this one slip by.

That’s the point though: LLMs recycle junk information, including some potentially dangerous information, without any indication of the context. In a regular search of the web or of Stack Overflow, you’d probably see people commenting on how the code is vulnerable, but when you ask an LLM it doesn’t necessarily communicate that while still delivering the code.

I suppose it’s an interesting experiment, but it’s not that surprising that a word prediction machine can’t play chess.

What a horrible thing to do to Linux.