Another security nightmare - securing your llm against malicious prompts attempting to DDoS it by getting it to consume resources, or to divulge privileged information it has access to. This is like putting a sociopathic teenager in charge of customer support (aka the DOGE methodology)

I work on a code base that is, in parts, 40 years old. There is nothing more satisfying that digging into some bizarre lockup or slowness, discovering it's because of assumptions or constraints from the 80s that no longer hold, ripping out or rejigging a load of code and seeing the problem go away not just in one application but in all the applications. Yes of course you need to maintain code without breaking things, and the damage footprint is higher the more dependents the code has, but there are well-established techniques by which you mitigate that risk (i.e. automated testing).

Libraries can have their issues but they are also absolutely a part of the answer to improving performance. Any library you include will be used by more than just you, and is therefore statistically more likely to have encountered, had reported, and fixed any performance issues before your application encountered them. Plus it will have been written by someone who cares more about the problem than you (after all, they bothered to write the code whereas you wanted to focus on other things to the extent that you went looking for a library). That said, knowing when to use a library (don't try to write a faster strcmp() than libc's) and when not (you can do better than qsort() in many circumstance) is something that only comes with experience.

As a general guiding principle it would probably be enough to direct optimization effort at older code, which by definition has survived the surface churn of innovation. Obviously I mean older code that is widely used, which will tend to be the stuff towards the bottom of your stack.

To some extent this is surely happening - I bet there's more optimization work done in kernels and operating systems than in apps. But even within apps it will be happening - your UI might be tweaked weekly, but those query optimizations you made months ago survive.

On my occasional visits to the USA I'm always struck how commerce is the culture. The people I come across don't really find it at all strange that everything is mediated by some business or other.

So while Americans might find it creep to be surveilled, I don't think they generally object to being constantly advertised to ("isn't that just... life?"), and would probably rather like more targeted advertising if they just didn't know about the surveillance (in the same way that spam fritters are tasty, as long as you don't know or think about what spam is).

So in a way all these companies are both defining and adhering to the prevailing culture. What galls is not so much that they assume the rest of the world is the same, but that they might be right.

I remember wondering how they did the 3D vector graphics flythrough of New York in the opening scenes of Escape from New York. Turns out, they built a physical model, painted the edges of all the buildings with luminous paint, and shot it in the dark or under UV or somesuch.

I guess this is the internet version of the old joke: "No one goes there any more, it's too crowded"

In an ideal world, phones would be human centric. If I want to send a message to someone, I send it using the UI I prefer and they receive it in the UI they prefer, and neither of us has to know what the other uses.

I suspect this is more to do with hoovering content for their push into AI.

No window borders as the default on Windows was a huge enshittification. Watching my elderly mother trying to make sense of a mass of intersecting rectangles while trying to do something with an email attachment was soul destroying.

I think what the parent is referring to is that you're required to back up edits with reference to authoritative sources, but the allowed authoritative sources are, perhaps, not.

At least you won't have to worry about your house burning down. Or rather, you won't worry for very long.

I think you're agreeing with me? You're saying that if I want to avoid the AI's training biases I should learn how to formulate my queries accordingly, by which you're acknowledging the bias is there.

Go to the free AI chat on DuckDuckGo (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F%3Ft%3Dffab%26amp;q=&ia=chat), pick one of the models (I only tried gpt4o-mini), and ask it how many sexes there are.

It tells you two, plus a caveat re: intersex, a bit about chromosomes, and then adds on a swathe of stuff about the distinction between sex and gender, gender identity, nonbinary and genderqueer etc.

It's informative I suppose, and I wouldn't say it's especially pushing gender ideology, except insofar as raising it at all strikes me as ideological. It didn't tell me anything about a million other things relating to biological sex that it could have (cultural and religious attitudes, the scientific history of research into sexes, and so on), it picked just this one extra topic. I think I'd prefer an AI that didn't.

He's not disputing the weatherman being fired, he's disputing Elon's gesture being a Nazi salute.

My personal view is that Elon isn't a fascist, but it was a deliberately provocative gesture, i.e. he was trolling. He is after all the CEO and most-followed participant of a publishing platform that profits from engagement...

I don't think this means anything more than when they claimed to be fully committed to DEI.
Content moderation was a commitment to prioritising the truth. Now removing content moderation is a commitment to prioritising the truth.
They're a value-free corporation that will shift with the political winds.