A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.

Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.

What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.

When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.

Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.

???

We can’t vote with anything but our wallets here, so this is a thing we can do to at least reduce their income. And considering they’re losing close to $100 million every day already, I can’t help but suspect nickel and diming them a bit still hurts.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re working on it. He’s destroying their bottom lines.

That said, if you go after the king, you’d best not miss.

Try it on a large screen. Once details are visible everything looks super strange.

It’s very much in the uncanny valley. Hard to point my finger at exactly what’s wrong, but no one looks quite real. I keep expecting their too-rubbery skin to start doing weird shit.

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The AI boom

They misspelled “bubble.” None of the AI providers have a path towards profitability.

Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.

In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.

The challenge is basically twofold:

1. There’s a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
2. As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it’s displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.

As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.

I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.

Long story short:

• Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
• The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
• That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
• So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.

Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

Welcome! Isn’t it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn’t trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it’s a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.

(Obligatory: I use arch BTW)

I won’t be impressed until police officers start actually arresting these fake “federal agents” when they assault someone. Put the fear of the actual law in these lawless motherfuckers.

God, that’s so frustrating. I want to shake them and shout, “No, your code is 100% ass now, but you don’t know it because it passes tests that were written by the same LLM that wrote your code! And you have barely laid eyes on it, so you’re forgetting what good code even looks like!”

So in your case, not only is the LLM coding assistant not making you faster, it’s actively impeding your productivity and the productivity of your stakeholders. That sucks, and I’m sorry you’re having to put up with it.

I’m lucky that in my day job, we’re not (yet) forced to use LLMs, and the “AI coding platform” our upper management is trying to bring on as an option is turning out to be an embarrassing boondoggle that can’t even pass cybersecurity review. My hope is that the VP who signed off on it ends up shit-canned because it’s such a piece of garbage.

“Cognitive amplifier?” Bullshit. It demonstrably makes people who use it stupider and more prone to believing falsehoods.

I’m watching people in my industry (software development) who’ve bought into this crap forget how to code in real-time while they’re producing the shittiest garbage I’ve laid eyes on as a developer. And students who are using it in school aren’t learning, because ChatGPT is doing all their work - badly - for them. The smart ones are avoiding it like the blight on humanity that it is.

Which version of Linux did you install? It supports a lot of them, and most have updaters that are easily configured from the task bar, just like Windows.

Thanks to this crap, the world is being flooded with awful, unmaintainable code, and the thing is, the LLMs that build it promptly forget everything about it as soon as you move on to the next task. Fixing this garbage will be an unending nightmare.

I interview juniors regularly. I can’t wait until the first time I interview a “vibe coder” who thinks they’re a developer, but can’t even tell me what a race condition is or the difference between synchronous and asynchronous execution.

That’s going to be a red letter day, lemme tell ya.

Is that a win for Google, though? They make most of their money from AdSense, because websites want to display ads. If people aren’t clicking through to websites from their search results, that seems like fewer opportunities to display ads, reducing the viability of AdSense.