The "enshittification" of computing. The Windows 11 default Photo Viewer has probably 20% of the features of IrfanView - and the problem is that normal users don't know a better tool exists for free if they need those extra features. As the resident techie in my house I get asked by people to do simple things like overlay text in a certain style or print a photo with a particular resolution or print multiple photos etc. and these tasks are just harder or impossible with the default tools
Do you really think that transformers came to us from God? They're built on the corpses of millions of models that never went anywhere. I spent an entire year trying to scale up a stupid RNN back in 2014. Never went anywhere, because it didn't work. I am sure we are stuck in a local minima now - but it's able to solve problems that were previously impossible. So we will use it until we are impossibly stuck again. Currently, however, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what's possible with these models.
One of the most beautiful examples of religious architecture I have ever seen in person. Definitely can get lost in the thousands of little details. Really puts me to shame calling myself an engineer when I other engineers accomplish things of that scale.
This girl uses her memory superpower to remember irrelevant celebrity facts and Netflix release dates..? Not sure if this is a reflection of the wider culture but this is pretty depressing.
Copy pasting from stackoverflow has been a meme for almost a decade now. I don't think that destroyed software engineering. Generative AI goes further than that, but fundamentally don't alter software engineering, at least at their current levels of power. You can't give them high level tasks - you have to handhold them. Yes verification is easier than creativity, but I haven't written a sorting algorithm, a Web server, an LRU cache or something similar from scratch in a long time. I reach for a library I know works well. If the LLM helps me write code at a higher level of abstraction than libraries, so what? It's going to be a leaky abstraction just like libraries currently are - the best engineers who can traverse the abstraction hierarchy will still be in demand.
You don't need college if your goal in life is to be a corporate drone. It's a huge waste of money. If your goal is to be a critical thinker with a diverse education and social experiences, college is one of the lowest barrier to entry (not necessarily best) ways to achieve that.
The Egyptian intelligence services repeatedly warned of an incoming attack and the Israelis ignored the warnings. Maybe the information was kicked up by the traders?
I wanted to watch a special by my favourite comedian Stewart Lee. It's only available on BBC iPlayer and most VPNs I have tried don't seem to work with it. Is it really unethical for me to torrent that special that I literally can't pay for even if I wanted to? Information wants to get out (almost like a gas), and as long as it's suppressed, torrenting will remain relevant.
Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why not non-profit in the start when you need to attract scientists and engineers who are in it for the challenge, and then change to for profit when you need to attract product managers and people who will scale the company and make it sustainable.
Always heartening to see a reminder that Einstein not only was intelligent in his field of physics but clearly recognized the ideal economic system is socialism.