Well, yes, that was the 'doing what it's told', just by the system prompt hopefully more than the enduser prompt (though we have plenty of examples of prompts that supersede the system prompt).

His assessment is right and largely we try to affect that through prompt stuffing, but none of that is "agency", and it's wobbly enough that it's very hard to provide absolute guarantees of anything in any of the prompts being effective under all scenarios.

I feel fortunate, all layoffs at my company as far as I can recall came with one month's notice and then a severence.

Having a disused phone in a bag is no big deal, and is extra handy in case of an emergency. There's no reason to be particularly limiting, other than 'back in my day' bullshit.

In terms of coordinating pickup, I said explicitly that it's a bus and the bus timing is a bit unpredictable based on traffic and getting out of the school. So instead of sitting in a parking lot for an hour just in case the bus left on time versus the usual delay, I can just start when the bus is like 10 minutes out. Don't say bullshit when you have no clue what the hell you are talking about.

At least my district allows the phones to be around so long as they stay in bags in do-not-disturb and do not come out during the day. Enough for potential emergencies and allowing to coordinate pickup better (the nearest bus stop is about 4 miles out across some pretty pedestrian hostile roads, so still needs to be picked up).

It really depends.

Sometimes, it's a shorthand with concrete meaning.

Sometimes, it may have concrete meaning, but is not really any shorter than plain language, and there's a sort of elitism associated with it.

With the examples given though, this is the 'need words to say nothing' jargon. Often there's some compelling reason why the speaker *should* respond or really *wants* to speak, but either has nothing they can say or else has nothing they *should* say. Executives commonly say this. At my work there's currently some executives very excitedly spewing out all sorts of hollow buzzwords and pretending we all should feel like something concrete is happening.

I suppose if you *know* you will get exposed, then you could have a window where you could be in a state of inflammation, get infected, and come out the other side with a durable immune response and discontinue.

Problem being that if you don't know when you'll have been infected, hard to say when it stops. As we saw with COVID-19, it can be a *long* time of active pandemic to try to get through. I guess if this, hypothetically, worked as promised you get to get treated, then have something like a 'COVID party' like they used to do with kids and chicken pox to be more confident about getting infected...

That's fine if it's something actually important, or even 'officially' important. However the vast majority of the time was just the manager wanting to ramble about whatever they were thinking on such important subjects as the new boat they got.

Note the 'for days'. This doesn't sound too promising.

Sounds like they would achieve this by making people 'pre-sick' by having their immune system in a sustained inflammatory state, for a while. This points to both an inability to keep it going, and likely not a very pleasant experience for the relatively short while it is effective. You'd have to know within a few days when you are *going* to get exposed to a virus..

Practically speaking, any pandemic will be bouncing around long enough for this likely to be unsafe to keep going. Even if you did ship out doses, the inconsistency of usage will prevent you from squashing it in a short order.

I remember before COVID, I had this manager that would for whatever reason or another hold an hour long meeting most days.

Now it was pretty much universally a waste of time like many meetings, but at least usually I sit on my laptop doing real work even as I'm in the conference room. Not ideal, but workable. However with this manager, the first sentence in every meeting was "ok everyone, laptops closed, phones in pockets". The manager felt it a sign of unforgivable disrespect to look at any screen while the manager talked about whatever stupid thing they were thinking that day.

At least COVID does seem to have killed off conference room meetings for me, even if I'm in the office sometime.

I am signed up for my employer's 'optional' AI subscriptions and have even enabled it so they can see that my environment is touching the LLM.

However, the more I tried to use it, the less confident I have become in it being a particularly good help.So I get the suggestions and make my employer thing I'm a good little LLM user, but pretty much discard the suggestions. For some very very boilerplate stuff, it can help, but even for tasks today that I thought "oh, this is boilerplate, the LLM can whip this up no problem", it totally botched it.

So while the hiring managers say "we need LLM use by our employees because they are more productive", they end up getting lied to by those of use that are told you'll be laid off if you aren't using LLM. The fact that they can't tell except by taking our word for it speaks volumes to me..

Speaking as someone who works with a large python codebase and everyone prepares for the annoyance of migrating when we decide to support another python release, it's kind of the opposite.

Every python release breaks backwards compatibility in a few ways. This is why people run old versions, this is why a number of pypi modules get abandoned as python revs.

There's broad agreement in the organization over time that python was ultimately not the best choice. It might have been pretty good, if not for the core and ecosystem changing things and driving a non-trivial amount of our effort to just be on a treadmill.

Particularly aggravating because we have users demanding python 3.6, 3.9, 3.12, 3.13, all at the same time so we have to curate things with a broad level of compatibility. It took *forever* before the users stopped demanding python 2.7.

They don't so much as stand for things as they stand against certain classes of people...

The Tea Party won and consumed the GOP.

Yes you have that report, you have another about how terribly overvalued Palantir is, and you have the general reaction to GPT-5, which was amazingly underwhelming.

Lots of signs that the 'march to AGI' actually isn't going to get more fundamentally capable than we've managed so far without some sort of unpredictable breakthrough that can't just be guaranteed through more funding. Still lots of area for LLMs to be more useful as they are already, but that's not what the investors were betting on.

'GPU' is whatever nVidia wants it to be and however many of whatever type of compute element they want can be in a 'GPU'. Unlike the crypto boom, where nVidia didn't really embrace it and largely got left behind, nVidia has fully embraced their AI role and so long as the market will reward it, they are all in on whatever makes a 'GPU' competitive for the solution. In some fields the high end Blackwell GPUs actually represented a retreat in performance, largely owing to the architecture catering to AI sensibilities.

Problem being that the imagined replacement is still all the badness of SaaS, subscription model with shifting capabilities and content. Just without the traditional UI, and instead having a chat-style interface.