Oh, but you do use them! Because the services you interact with use them. Even the ones that don’t, frequently use alternatives that have been influenced by their existence.

This might be a surprise to you, my liege; but the world does not, in fact, revolve around you and your preferences. Shockingly, the world seems to exist wholly independent of your uninformed and shortsighted opinions.

This is like being mad that acetylene welding exists, and saying that it’s pointless because you’ve never personally used it. Obviously if it was good or important, you would have used that technology directly yourself, riiiight? So the world and history would obviously be no different if it had never existed.

0 out of 10.

Ever heard of a tiny little thing called React? GraphQL and relay? Presto? Folly? Zstd? Hack? RocksDB? Btrfs?

PyTorch is crazy big in ML/AI and has been for a while now.

And specifically in Linux: https://engineering.fb.com/2015/10/05/open-source/improving-the-linux-kernel-with-upstream-contributions/

And that’s not even mentioning things that aren’t just their tech, like open compute and funding foss and the Linux foundations, crap ton of open source projects, testing, bug fixes, and miscellaneous contributions… Let alone all the tech that tries to compete with their tech; all the alternatives to react et al that are ‘next gen’

Like it or not, the facebooks and googles of the world have contributed significantly to things you probably interact with every day.

I got bad news for you if you use the modern web

As a user of zram, I am excited

Alright, look, I don’t think AI is sentient. I don’t think it’s capable of feeling emotions, LLMs are just prediction engines on steroids, etc…

But if you want to get reductive about it, Mr waveforms in a clump of cells,…

I can only talk from personal experience, but it absolutely does speed up things. I know because I went from working away at one project to progressing many projects at the same time. Starting up new projects I never would have bothered to do in the first place just because the work would have been so tedious and I wouldn’t have enough time in the day. Mind you, I don’t vibe code things for public consumption. These are all for my personal use, but the fact that they exist at all is evidence contrary to your points.

(Important note: how I use AI in important software is very different from how I use AI for slop projects; the speedups are not as dramatic when you aren’t vibrcoding and you actually need good quality; I suspect most AI usage would actually be a slight downgrade for speed unless I delegated them strictly to review and menial implementation; but that actually assumes that I know the language I’m working in very well, which isn’t always the case for vibecoded projects: In those cases, the AI slop is probably equal to or better than what I would write by hand because I’m not as competent in elixir or javascript as I am in C or C++)

I feel like this is dishwasher discourse… Washing by hand is faster than the dishwasher by the wallclock; but you don’t actually need to rinse as much as you probably do, and you can walk away and do other stuff while the dishwasher is working. If you just sit there and stare at the dishwasher, yes, it’s slower, but that’s not how people should use it, and that’s what most of those studies are showing. Again, that level of sloppiness isn’t applicable for all use cases, but for where it is useful, it is very useful.

That is not at all what he just said

I think people really need to understand the “it just took a bunch of public work and connected the pieces” isn’t a gotcha for LLMs: it’s one of the sales pitches. The cross-discipline general knowledge combined with the ability to churn huge datasets to find connections across already-known work, and extrapolate to or derive novel findings, is exactly one mode of superhuman success that AI companies have been trying to achieve.

The bigger issue is that they may be camping human efforts then kill-stealing the last hit on the boss by burning millions of dollars to get a proof a few days/weeks/months earlier than when it would have happened without AI. Basically, waiting for problems to be all-but-formally solved, then beating the researchers to the punch; like the recent Millenium controversy

Unfortunately, just because a proof holds doesn’t mean the problem is solved. It just means that the proof proofs. The proof can still be utter nonsense if it isn’t structured properly and actually modeling the right thing. Moreover, even if it is a real proof, that doesn’t actually do anything for us until we understand it.

Nonsense

It’s not gambling if you know or control the outcome :p

It would be an impressive example of a practical AI use case for the average person — if it were really, truly, AI. Behind the scenes, Meta is having some of these calls being handled by humans in call centers, 404 Media reports, despite employees practically begging the company not to go through with the charade.

A(ctual) I(ndians) strikes again

It’s finally the year of the Linux Desktop! And all it took was an apocalypse, the rise of the fourth reich, (soon to be) two global recessions, and continuing unprecedented damage to the world order / faith in international law.

Oh, and Windows actively trying its absolute hardest to make everyone hate it for about a decade.

But hey,… progess! The more penguins, the better.