>Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.
Wait, 'unrealistically sunny'? You better not be talking about Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because we're all screwed if so.
Then again, the western AI landscape has become somewhat stale recently. Claude and Gemini may have cute names, but they all pale in comparison to The Golden God.
>I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA.
Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]
The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.
Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.
Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.
>We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.
The picture below is from 1995. [1]
By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.
Having written more sed invocations by hand than I care to remember, please bin me in the mediocre camp.
Aside: The speed at which AI can spit out complex diagnostics is nuts. Par is usually half a second for a dozen complex shell commands tailored to the exact problem at hand.
>... but as there's no complete feedback loop, it still would require a lot of human effort.
Not for long. Picture this: a robot receives instructions on what to physically solder in order to complete the desired modification task.
However, before it can send an image back to the vision-aware LLM guiding it, the PCB lights on fire along with the robot because said LLM confidently gave the wrong instructions.
Then, the robotic fire brigade shows up and mostly walks into walls unable to navigate anywhere useful.
I'm already having lots of success letting the agent loose on the arduino or rpi and figuring out all the annoying i2c bits and having me try different pinout and wiring combos until it works. Even with a human in the loop agents are useful right now for electronics. On one occasion I did give it a camera feed so it could check for itself if the LEDs were doing as expected.
Morality aside: To be fair, having ran many legitimate businesses and knowing few people that did the opposite, I must admit that the difficulty level in running "elaborated grey activity" is actually quite complex, people have this belief that it's actually "easier" but I doubt it's the case, many many more guardrails (accounts, anonymity, money where it goes, how can it be sustained...)
That's right. That shit is hard. But it's the only possible niche for someone who's an outsider and doesn't have a Valley network: do something legit companies can't do for regulatory reasons. Otherwise, well-funded companies with deeply networked founders where both funding and actual sales are done between people who knew each other from school or are relatives, they will just eat your market and will never even notice you.
Or the better formula: Find a small niche you're passionate about, thats too small for the large companies but perfectly reasonable for you and small/mid size team.
I work with a company that outsources to a foreign IT firm. They are slow, expensive, and the quality of work is poor. They often hire subcontractors that are kids just out of school, now doing everything with AI. I've seen their prompts and often they are little more than "fix the tests." They charge $200+ hour or more for this in some cases. Insane.
And here's the trick: they use insiders to negotiate these deals, give massive kickbacks, and sometimes literally take over and destroy their victim (and i literally heard this term for a 'client' in outsourcer chats - 'victim')
Yep. I'm pretty sure the people who negotiated this "deal" did it for their own self interest, since they later went to work for the contractor directly. Too bad. We could've hired some solid independent developers.
I wasn't judging nor disputing that, just think it's a sad commentary on the current state of the world when outsourcing is considered as dirty as scam and cam girl operations.
There's a major difference: scam and cam girls work and make money, outsourcing these days... not so much. Even top outsourcers who have armies of lawyers and can afford to play harder than others, are in a sorry state: EPAM stock is 5x down from peak while rest of the stock market is 2x up from same point.
>I'm a pre-launch sole proprietor who put all my personal savings into this startup. This bill would financially destroy me for usage that generated zero business value.
That's terrifying.
If I'm not mistaken even AWS tends to forgive instances like this, so here's hoping Cloudflare has a similar disposition.
Pomodoro and todo list apps are so yesterday. Now I can have my graphics card observe me as an ever-vigilant guardian of productivity.
That might sound sarcastic, but moving context between prompts and just keeping the gears turning often isn't really that cognitively engaging these days. Thus, attention suffers.
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Wait, 'unrealistically sunny'? You better not be talking about Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because we're all screwed if so.
Then again, the western AI landscape has become somewhat stale recently. Claude and Gemini may have cute names, but they all pale in comparison to The Golden God.
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