unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.

It kind of shocks me that services like camel camel camel didn't get more popular over the past 20 years. They've been out there, they're not hard to use, but it seems like people would rather blunder through life uninformed than take a minute to research before acting. This applies at retail, and the voting booth.

Fucking school is the part that students naturally seek after class.

I've seen plenty of arts and humanities that could benefit from a bit of STEM just so they can "express themselves" more effectively in our technology laden world.

At University, I participated with a bunch of 3rd and 4th year Mechanical Engineering students in building 3D cardboard figures for a parade float, their cardboard car kept falling over. I showed them how to make a rigid box section out of cardboard to support the objects' structure... that hands-on "artsy" experience probably taught them more useful application of structural geometry than six semesters of engineering classes had.

Airlines have been doing this for decades, they've just got new tracking tools - but they've used everything at their disposal forever.

Disclosure is how you kill stuff like this. Who's going to patronize a store they know is charging them double what the next guy in line pays? This is 'murica, only poor people who can't afford to get to the discount stores are supposed to be overpaying.

Or, you could promote more well rounded people who don't just hyper-focus into science/math type problems but also take on the harder "squishy" problems like relating to / making impressions on other people.

Exactly...

Even more true for (other) human written code for me... That "WTF would you do that?" which you're afraid will offend feelings if you even start to discuss it. At least when LLMs get their feelings hurt you can reboot them.

You've just got to get them where they're easily purchased by people that want them... It's not about the desirability of your toenail clippings, it's more about marketing / market development.

Germany has understood it for many years, what they lack is the conviction to follow through and stick with OSS.

Not saying it's a great career move (pushing FOSS), but things do change over time. 25 years ago we hired an ex-FDA employee as a consultant, he was available because he had championed harmonization of the US medical device regulation with the new ISO regulations to make a more uniform global framework for companies to comply with... yeah, before his time, but apparently - in an otherwise anti-globalization administration, the idea of globalization of medical device regulations is finally taking hold at US FDA...

Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.

When we started cooperating with a team in India, we had to clean up our logs to reclassify those "errors that are not a problem" because we end up endlessly re-explaining to every new engineer they hire how "ERROR doesn't indicate a problem in this situation." No, writing docs explaining that and assigning said docs as required training ALSO did not help.

Not if you don't scroll tiktok reels while your agent is coding for you.

it feels good and weird and phoney at the same time.

I feel like: we've been developing these "best practices" of documented traceable requirements and design specs, repository storage of the whole change history, trace matrices showing test coverage / validation of all requirements and specs, code reviews, etc. etc. etc. and... for the most part... if you've got exclusively good responsible programmers on your team, most of that is a waste of time. But, when you have personnel turnover, people with ... marginal skills, etc. those practices become much more important, even if they more than qunintuple the time required to do a thing, they enable projects to grow and be maintainable at much larger scale than if you don't do them.

And along comes LLM agents, who strongly resemble those fresh hire colleagues of marginal skills, and they don't complain about these "best practices" wasting time, and they're so wicked fast that they can cut through the process that used to take 500% as long in 20% of the time instead... No, they're not the greatest at getting things right on the first try, but they have been getting good at catching and correcting their own mistakes. And I can type messages like this one while they work on things that don't need my attention...

I've written the fucking code myself for 30+ years. With AI, doing it right, fully understanding what it's doing, it's still 5x faster than doing it myself.

I see a lot of "human type mistakes" in my LLM agent sessions. If you manage these human like mistakes with the same procedures that keep them under control in real humans, the LLMs become much more useful.

https://onland.westernlandowners.org/2024/stewardship-in-action/growing-rain-in-the-desert/

When those glaciers are gone there are going to be a lot of changes...

While human efforts at reclamation of the Sahara have made some dents here and there, overall the desert has expanded 10% in the last 100 years. When there's no more snow in the alps, it's going to make the jump across the Mediterranean.

I have found that LLM agents can monitor ALL the logs, synthesize information that takes me hours to put together in minutes - and when there's a problem in there it can spot it faster and more often than me. It can also miss things, not as many as I miss given equal time to work the problem, but it's not perfect - just better. Like cutting down a tree with a chainsaw, instead of a bare hacksaw blade.

Class differences, murder and mass killings without legal repercussions, flaunting of property and resource rights - confiscations without compensation, all of it are older than the human race and have always been continuously present somewhere on Earth - what makes it war is the open declaration and proud practice of it.