Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they're creating. Either they're lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.

Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for "this was published before the slop flood gates opened"? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves "the fuck am I doing here?"... right?

And I thought Apple's prompt with "do no hallucinate" was peak ridiculous... but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.

This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?

wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate

Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?

Maybe your monitor was trying to protect you

There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it's really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I'm greeted with:

Note: I have absolutely no idea what "Fcitx" even is. Or why and how it's launched, or whether I'm actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to "improve the experience" with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I'm just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don't even want to know how much lifetime I've already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it's now "not too bad for throwaway weekend projects". Wow, great. Let's fire all the programmers already!

Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.

And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once... in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.

teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful

"potentially up to 100 times" is such a peculiar phrasing too... could just as well say "potentially up to one billion trillion times!"

Ah, so apparently Google has found a new way to make Youtube comments worse.

Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world's greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that's enough?

So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with "We’re living through a technological paradigm shift."... and right there I didn't bother reading the rest of it because I don't want to expose my brain to it further.

But what I found funny is that also today, there's this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

So Hololens is discontinued... you know... AR... the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.