None of that shit matters when we don't have a country anymore. So yes my PATRIOTISM trumps all of those lesser concerns. You'll have no freedoms left under Sharia law.

You tried to pass off a fake picture and you think I'll still feel you are worth the time to argue?

It saw your comment and immediately surrendered.

Well, initial stupidity can come at a very high price.

Yes. Funny thing: There is a regulatory requirement here for any financial service provider here to have a cloud replacement strategy. That includes cloud providers. Would be a good thing for everybody to have that, but people are stupid, full of themselves and greedy.

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

I would have though that by now they are all gone. Probably those left are the ones that stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about exist strategies.

Why should that make someone think of lice instead of chickens? Besides, an infestation doesn't hatch; it's a result of many hatchings. It would make sense if coming from somewhere so lousy that they call a new infestation a "hatch", but otherwise it seems like a non sequitur.

Okay... it doesn't. IL and AI don't sound very similar.

I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.

You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model and the office suite. How much better a job it actually does is disputable. The experience is different, and a no-knowledge user can get started immediately. There is value there in both aspects. I don't see people who get paid access thru and employer etc to claude, gpt, etc stop using it or ignore it.

You're asking a deeper question though, how does that no-knowledge user become someone who understands the system when the system is getting bigger all the time and the short term incentives to learn anything about it get smaller smaller. I don't know. There is a lot of scifi on the subject, dated from before 2020, so thinking without being colored by recent economic interests, probably worth reading.

I've been on both sides of public data requests, but not in Texas. My first thought was "malformed request" because people typically throw everything they have into these requests - they want all documents, communications, etc., and they want it going back forever, and to/from every employee. And they typically attach several pages of "about" topics. In a few years, LLMs might make "about" searches easy, but for right now, they just ensure that your request is going to take 10x the amount of work that it should.

Once the request is in, some poor IT guy gets tasked with finding every possible piece of data in the entire organization that is "about" flock abuse, but the tools they have are (at best) doing stemmed rootword searches, so they have to get out the thesaurus to find synonyms like misuse, inappropriate, unauthorized, personal, stalking, following, etc.

So now, you've got half of the org's emails and a quarter of their files, going back for however long they've got, and someone has to actually read each of them and decide is this "about" flock abuse? Or did it just get caught in the dragnet? (This step probably shouldn't be done by low level hourly employees.)

And finally, after all of that, you still have thousands of documents that need to go to a lawyer, usually outside counsel, who can determine if any of it is privileged in any way and not eligible for release. And... oh, look, two more requests came in, slightly different, everyone start over at the beginning.

Broken clocks are still broken, even when they occasionally tell the time correctly.

I love when the jackals start fighting each other..

That's a new one on me. Is that some sort of regional slang? Where does the word "hatch" have something to do with lice?

Exactly, my top use of AI is probably, this prompt:

Please review the document below for typographical and grammatical errors and make the required edits. Do not suggest edits that simply alter style or tone. You may make clarity changes, such as splitting a compound sentence into two separate thoughts or exchanging a pronoun for the proper noun it references. Replacing a less specific nouns such as 'thing' and 'it', with a more concrete noun being referenced; as long as it will not read as overly verbose is appropriate. Finally suggest verb replacements where there is a more appropriate term of art, as and example it would be reasonable to rewrite "Next run the code." with "Next execute the code." Make all your changes with tracking enabled so I can review and accept any proposed edits.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.