Skip Navigation
Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky
  • This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they're still fine.

    Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you're printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.

    The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It's all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.

  • Is there something better than SQL?
  • The point about a binary protocol is interesting, because it would inherently solve the injection issue.

    However, constructing an ad-hoc query becomes tedious, as you're now dealing with bytes and text together. Doing so in a terminal can be pretty tedious, and most people would require a tool to do so. Compare this against SQL, where you can easily build a query in your terminal. I think the tradeoff is similar to protobuf vs json.

    You could do a text representation (like textproto), but guess what? Now injection is an issue again.

    Another thing would be the complexity of client libraries. With SQL client libraries, the library doesn't need to parse or know SQL - it can send off the prepared statement as-is. With a binary protocol, the client libraries will likely need to include a query builder that builds the byte representation since no developers are going to be concatenating bytes by hand, which makes the bar higher for open-source libraries. This also means that if you add a new query feature to your DB, all client libraries will likely need to be updated to use the feature.

    And you're still going to need to tune and optimize queries for this new DB. That's just the nature of the beast: scaling is hard especially when you can't throw money at the problem.

    Quite frankly, it's a lot of hard tradeoffs to not need to use prepared statements or query builders. Injection is still is an issue for SQL today, but it's been "solved" as much as it possibly can.

  • Is there something better than SQL?
  • I've been using Jooq to build my queries (and run them). Beats the hell out of writing prepared statements in strings.

    Not sure what power I'm missing though, I've been able to do everything via Jooq that I want to do.

  • [meme] Trains -- not driverless cars -- are the future of transportation
  • Quite frankly as an American, I think it's very American to even consider the timetable as out of your control. For a lot of places, the trains come so fast that you're not even waiting for a few minutes - like most drivers take longer to get settled into their car seat before driving. The sorry state of American transit is absolutely not the pinnacle of transit.

  • Studios Advertise $1 Million AI Jobs While Hollywood Writers Remain on Strike
  • Is it just me or is the article super misleading? None of the roles are for generative AI for making movies. It looks like the roles are for either research or generic product personalization stuff, none of which is necessarily generative AI. I'm not quite sure why they juxtaposed those AI roles with the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, because they have nothing to do with each other.

    Quite frankly, I think the current crop of AI products have yet to take away from the real creative process.

  • Writing Python like it’s Rust
  • I had a mixed experience adding types to a large enterprise Python codebase.

    I think the thing that really kills it is the (relative) lack of community support. Whereas with TS, almost every package big or small usually has types, I've found a lot of pip packages wouldn't be typed out of the box, which means you gotta generate them automatically or use escape hatches like Any.

    Using escape hatches like Any basically kill the point of typing, as the static checker basically stops checking after it sees an Any. If your static checker is configured to ignore certain files because they aren't typed yet, then any code that refers to those files also get ignored. You basically need to hit a threshold of your codebase and dependencies to get the benefits of typing. Until then, my experience was finding bugs that the type checker should've caught but didn't.

    And obviously, to get the full power of types, you must buy in as a team, and that means really buy-in, without resorting to escape hatches like Any. Any reluctance, and you're likely in for an uphill battle.

    Another thing that really hurt adoption, was that before using typing, a lot of the code just clearly broke type rules, eg a function that returns a string or a number, but the caller assumes the output is a number. Especially if it's lower level code, those may take a nontrivial refactor to fix.

    All of this is assuming it's trivial to enforce a static check on the codebase through CI/CD.

    This leads to my conclusion, that not being forced to use types is a BENEFIT of Python, not a downside. You are able to write code a lot faster and more expressively if you don't need to worry about typing, for small scripts or whatnot. I think if you're starting a project of any size and already know you want typing, consider using another language that has typing built in.

  • Abandoned Bay Area land will be developed into housing
  • Good stuff, but really wish it didn't come to this.

    As the Mercury News states, it's really not a long-term solution to find state-owned abandoned land to build. Ideally, it doesn't take state intervention at all to get new housing started, the initiative should come from the city governments themselves. But it doesn't and it likely won't for a while.

  • Controversial S.F. Whole Foods to open in 2025, site owner says

    What do y'all think? Personally wouldn't mind, as I go to that area all the time for Target since it's on the 38 route.

    1
    r/place extension going as expected
  • We can please not bring the "we did it Reddit!" culture to Lemmy?

    Reddit is a privately held company. Their valuation is falling because someone at Fidelity arbitrarily said so. Right now, given the current economic trends, almost every consumer tech company is taking a beating (Discord, Substack, etc), so in the larger context Reedit's drop in valuation is expected and smart money is expecting it to rise once the economy becomes hot and more investors have money to risk on consumer companies.

    The biggest value of a social media is the influence it has on culture and society as a whole, which is why advertisers want to get in on the action (think of Facebook influencing elections). Engaging on the platform and even constantly talking about the platform is a great sign of it's lasting influence.

    So no, spending an hour putting pixels on r/place is not a great way to stick it to Reddit. Constantly talking about Reddit and basically giving it free ad-space and mind share on Lemmy also does not stick it to Reddit. The original poster is correct: best thing is a blank canvas.

    And ignore all the click-bait articles about how Reddit is going to fall any day now. They all basically play on your wishful thinking for clicks, they aren't based on reality.

  • 'FUCK SPEZ': Reddit Users Unite to Turn r/Place Mural Into a Protest
  • If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO.

    Isn't this just wishful thinking? Let's be 100% real for a moment, those people posting fuck spez on r/place aren't doing it because they're moving or have moved to an alternative, they're doing it because they are addicted to Reddit and can't stop using it. The true protest is moving to an alternative like Lemmy.

    If I'm an advertiser, all I see is a very captive audience. This isn't like the Twitter situation, where your ads will be shown to increasingly objectionable content. In fact, with all the users begrudgingly downloading the official Reddit app, the value of advertising on Reddit may be going up not down.

    That being said, Reddit has never been a good place for advertising outside of a few niches, and that hasn't changed, so in the long run Reddit most likely won't survive. But in the short run, I don't think this is the victory lap.

  • what roads should SF pedestrianize?
  • Valencia being more pedestrianized would be amazing.

    Personally not too happy with the center bike lane, though I do have hopes it eventually turns into something better with the extension and adding of bollards once it actually opens.

    Probably a hard sell for the community at large though, moreso than Market St.

  • Bay Area restaurants take home top honors at 2023 Michelin Guide ceremony
  • Looks like the winners of stars this year are:

    • Kin Khao
    • Nari
    • Aphotic
    • Auro
    • Commis

    I've had Kin Khao a while ago, but my biggest memory from that was it took us forever to get seated because of how popular it was.

  • Sourcery
    Investors come forward in hopes to save Anchor Brewing Company
  • There's more content in SF Chronicle. One interesting tidbit is doing something like a reality show to derisk the venture.

    It looks like Anchor is going through ABC, so there's no guarantee the brand will be bought with the land and equipment. Hopefully someone doesn't scoop up the brand and just sit on it.

  • SF: Both the 49-Van Ness and 22-Fillmore Have Seen Their Ridership Surge Beyond Pre-Pandemic Levels
    sfist.com Both the 49-Van Ness and 22-Fillmore Have Seen Their Ridership Surge Beyond Pre-Pandemic Levels

    No “fiscal cliff” for these two Muni bus lines, as both the 22-Fillmore and 49-Van Ness are rocking ridership levels even higher than before the pandemic. The trouble is that it may be because like many San Franciscans, these lines don’t go downtown.

    Both the 49-Van Ness and 22-Fillmore Have Seen Their Ridership Surge Beyond Pre-Pandemic Levels

    The new Van Ness bus lane that the 49 uses is super nice. I personally use both the 49 and 22.

    Gotta say, other than the headline and main message, there's some shitty parts of this article:

    > But we will yuck on your yum, Muni fans, because the reason for these bus lines’ touted rebounds may be a depressing flip side. As the Chronicle points out, “Neither route serves San Francisco’s downtown core.” So these anomalies do not indicate any kind of broader ridership recovery across the Muni system.

    In case you weren't reminded that San Francisco is in a "doom loop," SFist is here to remind you and hopefully scare you into clicking on more of their links.

    0
    www.nbcbayarea.com Community celebrates San Jose man's 100th birthday with dog parade

    A California man celebrated a milestone birthday with a parade of furry friends over the weekend. Organizers expected 20 to 30 dogs to show up. The total count wound up being close to 200.

    Community celebrates San Jose man's 100th birthday with dog parade
    0
    sfist.com Another Planet Entertainment Gets Their Way On Castro Theatre Renovations In Decisive City Hall Vote

    Concert promoter Another Planet Entertainment got their wish on their proposed Castro Theatre renovations Thursday, though also agreed to a laundry list of compromises dictating their film and LGBTQ programming, and even what concessions they sell at the snack bar.

    Another Planet Entertainment Gets Their Way On Castro Theatre Renovations In Decisive City Hall Vote

    Not sure if anyone else was following this, but looks like there finally moving ahead with the Castro Theatre.

    A lot of conditions. Kind of a reflection of local politics today IMO.

    1
    NEON - New coworking space in Cow Hollow, SF
    www.globenewswire.com NEON Opens First On-Demand Neighborhood Hub in San Francisco's Cow Hollow

    On-Demand Hybrid Workspace Redefines Where We Work and Connect, Offering Seamless Transition Between Professional Productivity and Community Engagement...

    I saw this on the SF subreddit (lol, I know). Seemed pretty cool. At $5 an hour, $25 for a whole day, it's a bit expensive compared to WeWork, but might be cool to drop by for a day or two.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BI
    bill_1992 @lemmy.world
    Posts 7
    Comments 79