At "later in life" I look back and see that I did this too much with things I didn't deem important at the time. Fast food immediately comes to mind. A promised "tech" for the every person, the too busy person, the person who saw a short cut...used carefully, thoughtfully, and occasionally its pretty helpful. Used as a staple, well it has had consequences that I don't like.
Edit: I also value the freedom to be able to decide what works for me and what doesn't.
I wonder if this is to help support a newish arch. like the one Microsoft and Intel are proposing (Taipei conf.) with each laptop/pc having a dedicated NPU, CPU, GPU to bring some of the Copilot button back on PC? Everything I see today I inadvertently read in "oh this will help me as a hobbyist". It generally doesn't. Probably just technology doing what it does and moving forward.
I would agree with this for state work as well. Alabama, because Montgomery is super cheap, is a very good option. I will warn you though...the red tape can take a while. Fill out the paperwork or call the local contract recruiters. We find most of our people that way. They come in on contract, which I did, and convert to government. Depends on the department but once you are in it is fairly easy to move around. DOT is Java, Banking is a mixture of Microsoft and open source, Medicaid is a mix etc. If there is nothing immediately it may take 6-9 months before you get a call but if you are reading this you will be in the top candidates. Sometimes I think we are as "out of the way" as Alaska as far as people considering working here but we would love to have you. I love the state and I didn't start here until I was in my late 40's. Shooting for retirement at 70-75+...I really just love doing this for a living. I moved to government after my 4th 5 year startup/SMB experience. Just needed the stability, someplace I could code and feel good about what I was doing again, and good health insurance. It's the nicest group of people I have ever worked with.
Refining is dirty and dangerous so it has been pushed out. Used to work for a Canadian gold mine in Montana in the mid 90's. Most of the friends I graduated with went overseas for new mines or were Environmental engineers focused on cleaning up messes from the late 1800's early 1900's.
This saved me probably 3 months work digging up a good summary of the current state of specifically LLMs. This is a highly dense, easily consumable summary for someone like me. Even if it's only 80% encompassing super valuable. Thank you.
Context:
Business apps. Bleeding edge curious and supportable day-to-day pragmatic developer. 25+ years web stack, 10% client desktop apps and small business sysadmin. Spending 6+ hours a day currently retooling concepts and where they can fit into day-to-day business stacks. "Retired" from SMB market after spending 25 years there and moved to government hoping for another 20-30. I love what I do.
"To really solve novel problems with LLMs will take a large amount of research, experimentation and prototyping of ideas, but people funding this hype have no patience for that. I fear we'll get hit by a major AI winter when investors get bored, but we'll end up leaving a lot of value on the table simply because there wasn't enough focus and patience on making these incredible tools work."
...this is what happened in 99-2000. It took 3-7 years for the survivors to start making it usable and letting the general public adjust to a new user paradigm (online vs on PC).
Anecdotal but we are in an AI freeze. I was, emphasize was, using copilot for over a quarter for development augmentation and seeing good velocity gains, our organization, now that it is all over the news (AI not our organization), has asked us to stop using everything except for one free search provider until they can come up with organizational rules. It is like walking through hip deep mud. The difference between this and dot com surge in 98-20 is that it happened within 6 months instead of 3-5 years.
It wasn't the boomer parents killing the fun. They have more money so the ads came, the addiction cycle was changed to accommodate that potential revenue, and it didn't/doesn't appeal to anyone from GenX younger anymore.
Actually still is if you are found convicted of a crime.
13th amendment section 1.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/
There are no till drills that are being sold exceptionally cheap (~$800 US) and show up as the first google ad that are rumored to be an empty box shipped from the country of origin (not China) with incorrect paperwork that gets stuck in customs. Most people say they get their money back through CC or Paypal but maybe a few don't check? Either way it was plausible enough that I did not purchase. The market is small farmers and hunters planting food plots. You can use an old repurposed grain drill if the grass is super short/overgrazed and you can fix it, ~$1500 used on marketplace, or buy a small 4' (no tires/3 point hitch) no till drill US made low end ~$8k. So it is "too good to be true".
A person I know won a Microsoft contest when this was first announced and rolled out. Here's to you Scotty. A very smart person at a company full of them in the late 90's. I was one of the dumbest around in a place packed with talent. Never worked at a place as smart since.
Be careful with corporate land. Find Weyerhaeuser recreation (in the south primarily for hunting not grazing like BLM out west) here...
https://recreation.weyerhaeuser.com/Leases/Search
Note: Weyerhaeuser combined with Plum Creek.
This has been the hardest adjustment for me moving from Montana to the deep South. The south has definite advantages for me at this point. Stability, easier growing crops and animals, better infrastructure, etc. But not being able to just walk all over the place is hard. It was a lot easier to get away and I definitely feel claustrophobic (some of it is no mountains). I know opportunities here are better for my family but I miss home.
I recommend Speed Queens for washing machine and dishwasher. We have them in our house and barn the prosumer versions not the coin ops. Have survived everything from nails-horse blankets and even a miswired 220 on the dryer.
I agree. We have a farm as well and Georgia clay, tractor grease, pebbles, a miswired 220 outlet (just popped a fuse...easily replaced), nails, and the occasional misplaced socket haven't broken it. Gets used 3-4 times daily. We also have one in the barn tack room that we wash horse blankets with. I love them.
Add Carroll County, GA to this list. Carroll EMC which covers three counties on the border of Georgia and Alabama overlapping I-20 (all three counties Carroll, Haralson, and Heard) are getting "on pole" fiber provided by the electric company.
Organic or bulk/modern farmed, having a variety like white, red, soft, hard wheat varieties, kamut, oats, rye, different types of rice, beans, etc. For us grinding them directly then baking so that they have not been bleached and had nutrients added back (basically for shelf life). The "bread becker thing", without getting into religion, boils down to a philosophy that commercial flour (without even thinking about adding additional gluten) has many micro nutrients removed during the process of stabilizing for shelf life that it loses a significant portion of its nutritional value. By storing whole grains (shelf stable) and grinding it right before cooking/preparation preserves the most nutrients possible. They have hard to find (in the US) mixers, grain grinders, etc. Most regions in Georgia will have a co-op that will take monthly orders and bring them back from Woodstock so that you don't have to drive there. We live about 2 hours away and found out about it through friends and our local farmers market. They have a full kitchen there where they do cooking demonstrations and record for youtube.
If you live in Georgia, Bread Beckers is an excellent source of different grains and instruction. Most of her classes/workshops are free on YouTube as well. Changing our diet with good grains has really helped overcome some chronic health conditions.
This is common practice with 3rd party/used sellers of books. It has been going on since the early 2000's and started as an excel spreadsheet that would go out and look up a price for you, match or go a penny lower, or raise prices when there was no competition. It doesn't surprise me that Amazon did the same. Why wouldn't they do it?
Yes the average American farmer cares because inputs are expensive. Really expensive. That's why spot spraying on a massive scale has been invented. If you want to see one in action look up Welker Farms in YouTube. There are some videos and anecdotal evidence in a single field on input savings.
Anecdotal, but I moved my "ChatGPT" usage to bing chat, now use bard regularly, and signed up for Copilot, using it daily. Basically I have spread my usage around. My $0 paid to ChatGPT is now paid through BingChat (MSFT => OpenAI) and my $10 Copilot subscription (MSFT => OpenAI). So I guess they are ahead as far as I am concerned.
There is also the reduction in pollution/carbon and overall savings. Letting a building of 500+ people wfh even one day a week takes an average of 100 cars per day off daily commute routes. During covid I remember going outside and just being surprised at how clear the sky was. I know that that kind of reduction is not economically feasible but I do feel guilty sometimes driving into work knowing that it is entirely unnecessary. I work for a government agency and most, if not all of our meetings are over Teams anyway because we are spread out all over the downtown area.
It was me. I finally quit the 5 year cycle and took a long term...hopefully to retirement job...in state government doing tech. Realized I still loved tech and there are still a few jobs that you can work for the better good and get paid. I still believe in the internet of the 90's and that it can be a thing for good. I get to get up everyday and try to spend my fellow persons' tax payer money the best I can. Maybe on a good day actually do some good for less advantaged people.
This is common at most CFAs. We have one of the busiest (in the US) CFAs in Carroll County, GA and they have 3 lanes that people deliver orders across. The closest one to the delivery door is the "App Orders Lane". CFA has done a great job of order taking using digital pads and taking payment in line. Cash is about the only slowdown they have when delivering orders.
A similar thing happened in Georgia a couple years back (embarrassed by Chattanooga's loop) and has paid off well. I live in rural Carroll County and have 2 choices of fiber to my farm. Spectrum (in ground) and CarrollEMC (on pole) now. This is huge for me since I work from home 3 out of 5 days. Previously it took filing a complaint with the FCC to get dsl hooked up because the provider at that time wouldn't do the install (previous owners already had it installed).