jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

38

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734

Joined

3 yr. ago

This is likely because PDF became the "file that everyone can open", just in their web browser. It's the next best thing to a web page for non-techie consumption. Yes, there's no reason people can't open pptx in most cases, but I bet various endpoint protection and just not understanding how to even pick the right program to open the file steps in.

Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn't exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I'm thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.

Well, from Microsoft sure. I have been pretty impressed with Hermes agent, though not the cost. Claude Code was also pretty good, I think a bit easier to control the API costs in my limited testing, and had more repeatable security gates than Hermes seemed to. Then again, I think Hermes could do more.

I question the security and the cost of agents.

Though I'd say there's also a difference between banning phones in school and saying you can't use them during class. We couldn't just read our favorite fiction paperback or comic book in class back in the day either. No one ever (that I recall) suggested banning them from the school. I don't see much compelling evidence that social media is a cause, much more obvious to me is schools having become mostly worthless in the US.

I don't think that argument from Bambu is wrong though? Or I don't know all the details. Are they suing the fork or just blocking it's access? I would think they could just implement a token or credentials you have to supply to access their service like... any other web service?

It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it's doing, then figure out how it's doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.

I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.

Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.

This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we'd have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That'll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let's add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.

I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that's still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn't really a replacement and throughput isn't great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).

Though it's more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.

I feel this also misses something rather big. I find there's a huge negative value of people I have to help through doing a task - I can usually just get it done at least 2x if not 5x or more faster and move on with life. At least with a good intern I can hope they'll learn and eventually actually be able to be assigned tasks and I can ignore those most of the time. Current AI can't learn that way for various reasons, some I think technical, some business model driven, whatever. It's like always having the first day on the job intern to "help".

The other problem is - unless I have 0 data security rules, there's just so much the AI cannot know. Like I thought today I'd have Claude 3.7 thinking write me a bash script. I wanted it to query a system group and make sure the members of that group are in the current users .k5login. (Now, part of this is me not knowing how to prompt, but it's also stuff a decent intern ought to be able to figure out.) One, it's done a lot of code to work out what the realm is - this is useful generically, but is just code that could contain bugs when we know the realm and there's only one it'll ever operate in.

I also had to re-prompt because I realized it misunderstood me the first time, whereas I think an intern would have access to the e-mail context so would have known what I meant.

Though I will say it's better than most scripters in that it actually does a lot of "safety" stuff we would find tedious and usually have to have something go wrong to add in, so ... swings and roundabouts? It did save me time, assuming we all think it's method is good enough - but this is also such a simple task that I think in some ways it's barely above filling out a lot of boilerplate. It's exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see on stack overflow back in the day.

EDIT: I actually had a task that felt 100% AI could have done... if there was any way for it to know lots and lots of context. I had to basically fill out a long docx file with often AI like text describing local IT security standards, processes, responsibilities and delegations. Probably over 60% I had to "just make up" cause I didn't have the context - for higher ups to eventually massage into a final form. But I literally cannot even upload the confidential blank form, forget about have some magic way for AI to get a brain dump from me about the last 10ish years of spoken knowledge and restricted wiki pages. Anything it could have made up mostly would have "been done" by the time I made a functional prompt.

I don't think we solve this till we can run frontier models locally at prices less than a human salary, with integrations into everything a human in that position could access.

Why would Ukraine trust any security guarantee anyway after the history?

Personally I think most of these sorts of things should have a 3 year warranty - but very few offer that. If you can't handle the 1 year you need to plan on the reality in the US IMHO. This isn't a Valve thing, its a USA thing. So ranting against Valve feels a little disengenuous. AFAIK there's no competitior that's better. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would say the same thing.

So - in the future buy with a card that extends the warranty by a year or buy an extended offering from the company or square or whatever, if you can't self insure the 200 repair or 600 ish replacement costs.

I just wonder if we should take single source reporting ...

For home use (and small uses at work) I've found cyberpower to be cheaper than APC and yet work as well. You'd likely need to get a model with a network card option, and that'll cost more I think. I'm not in EU though, so IDK what model would meet your needs and price point (which seems pretty low to me for a network enabled UPS).

Strangely, that generally is how my Linux boxes have been - way less IT guy than when we had WinXP or Win7. You have to use a stable distro however - which TBH is the problem with Win10 and 11 for a lot of people - finding the "stable" version isn't available to home users or is complicated - so you have new OS deployments every 6 months. Windows Updates are now forced and still often have problems or bugs.

That all said, I think we've just got to get used to unstable / rolling release OSs cause "everyone" is doing it. Even Alma is not as stable as previous enterprise linux rebuilds due to Red Hat not releasing point release security updates anymore.

Vacuum sealing meat kind of requires plastic though. And that's by far the best way to keep the meat good / fresh especially for freezing.

Systems don't vote in the US however (at least in the context of this article) - we're talking about individuals voting.

In this case, I think using the term racist here is diluting the term and causing confusion. I think it's better to us the anthropological term here of tribal, at least in your first and last paragraphs. If everyone is racist then I have trouble not considering that a normal part of being human. It seems like railing against people who breath or something. If we're biologically programmed to be this way, then we need to stop trying to claim people are bad for their biology, and at best we're now going to say there's an acceptable and normal level of racism on the spectrum that everyone is on.

I don't think that's a great framing, and avoiding that framing in my mind means not claiming that everyone is racist.

I was assuming the people that are the potential P zombie here are the ones turned off from Trump because of open racism, and therefore NOT voting for him. I implied that these people are taking actions they (at least think) are not racist, like not voting for Trump.

If you made an argument, I could perhaps put some thought into it. My argument is simply that Russia isn't paying our taxes, and is a different country, so there's no comparison I can think of.

People living in an area paying taxes for that school have every right to be on the school board - it's a direct application of "no taxation without representation" in which kind of implied in the US is the right to run for the office and be elected to the office. We fought a revolution over taxes and representation. So, not - I put some thought into this and think I just won the debate right there.