Tootfinder

Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no intermediate. So the offer of being able to skip the poc phase is just not interesting. "Oh, cool, I can skip the part where I preemptively identify problems? Great. That's gonna work out well." Vibe coding can give you working proof of concepts that self destruct when you try to grow them (much like any poc code you just try to use without actually engineering).
I don't know that this problem will ever get fixed. Even if it does, I don't know that this fix will ever rival human engineering. I don't think it's actually possible to know that yet, there are too many factors at play. It's definitely lowered the bar for writing proof of concepts. Now a business idiot can make a proof of concept, which even further distorts their understanding of what engineering actually looks like.
In order to go back to work, I'm basically expected to be ramped up on LLM stuff. But it all keeps reminding me of the feeling of powerlessness when we organized against Trump, when we organized against the rally at UW, when I tried to stop someone from pepperspraying people and I got shot. It's all the same ideology of rapists and pedophiles forcing their entire world on us against our will, thinking they can dangle "the Epstein files" in front of everyone and then yank them away like nothing ever happened... Like no one knows they implicate the entire power structure.

Imagine:
You are these parent of an adorable 4-year-old kid. They have made a toy airplane out of spare cardboard. Sadly, during play the wing has fallen off. You, a wise parent, produce a piece of duct tape and tape it back on. Your kid asks: "but what if the tape breaks, or the other wing falls off?" Dutifully, and with a completely serious manner, you duct tape the other wing, and then with a sharpie you write "Please DO NOT fall off!" on each wing. "There," you say, now the wings will not fall off. "
Your child happily returns to their play.
Imagine:
You are boarding a Boeing airplane for an intercontinental flight. Just the other day you were reading news about the emergency exit door falling off a Boeing airplane during flight. Thankfully nobody was injured in that incident, but a passenger could have been sucked out the gap and killed. As you walk down the aisle towards your seat at the back, you notice that around the emergency exit door of this plane, there are some scratch marks. It looks like it might not be 100% seated in place. You see several rolls worth of duct tape slapped onto the gaps between the door and the frame. In sharpie, someone has written "Please DO NOT fall off!" on the duct tape.
This is a post about #Agentic #AI.
To clarify: there are a host of reasons why using Claude Code is unethical in the first place, besides the fact that its a danger to its users. These make it unethical to use it even for a child's-toy-like application. But the source code we've just witnessed in the recent leak is *exactly* this level of "engineering." If you see an app that claims to be "programmed with AI" and it has any possibility of failing in a way that could harm you (for example, if it connects to the internet, meaning that poor programming could allow hackers to take over the device you run it on), my advice is: "Do not use it and warn your friends and family."
P.S. yes, this advice does apply to Microsoft Widows at this point, although that can be a tougher bullet to bite.

The reasons we consider plagiarism to be cheating in school and malpractice in professional contexts are many of the same reasons that LLMs are not going to replace all knowledge-based human labor. (Details left as an exercise for the reader.)
And yes, a whole lot of what LLMs do •would• count as plagiarism if one of my students did it manually, and •should• count as plagiarism just the same if they use a machine to do it — not just in a “that’s cheating!!” sense, but more importantly in a “that’s not really doing the work” sense.
5/

Dear generative AI enthusiasts,
Look, I know the tokens you're burning right now don't actually use *that*much energy (even though it's somewhat substantial already and disastrous when we take into account the quality of the crap it's being used for) but what's more important is the appearance (or not) of that token spend on the quarterly earnings report of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. lays the foundation necessary for those companies to go ahead with their plans for datacenters on a truly ridiculous scale, and those datacenters, if built, ate indeed a climate nightmare which *my kids* will have to live through even if they never benefit from any of it at all. That's (one of many reasons) why I personally need you to stop using generative AI right now.
The fact that the output is crap, the way it erodes your intelligence, and the ways in which it plagiarizes and actively undermines good citation practices are among many other practical reasons not to use it, but what's personal to me is the way that your frivolous sloperation is making the future worse for the baby I'm feeding blueberries to as I type this, and half the time I interact with people like you the conversation begins with some form of "putting aside the ethical issues..."
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

Is there such a thing as best e-book reader?
I am thinking about replacing my Kindle 2021.
Please share what you are using. Multiple choices possible.
Poll limited to 4 options for reasons unknown so please use a reply if yours is not in the list.
Kindle
Kobo
XTEINK
Boox