MangoCats @ MangoCats @feddit.it

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5 mo. ago

You are saying it's Grok TACO Wednesday, again?

My distro isn't the best, but it's at least a good starting point: Debian + XFCE.

Was using Ubuntu from about 12.04 through 20.04, but it is getting too snappy and support contract happy for me these days.

I don't think the system has that much sophistication.

I do think they can "weight" the training set and feed it endless variations of "approved content" to be regarded as correct, and maybe also feed it other content to be identified as "incorrect" and rebutted from the approved content.

Last time I checked, Grok was still 'woke' (meaning: repeating the most common opinions published around the internet) - that's been a couple of months. I was shocked that it was permitted to be accessed by the public back then.

I'm beginning to think those people are already lost... anyone who is going to fall for this has already fallen for similar things and reflexively distrusts anything that doesn't back up their world views.

I also think people who are opposed to this are very unlikely to change their minds based on something controlled by someone like that.

Finally, we've been at this hard for almost a decade, I'm pretty sure the undecideds are lying to the pollsters.

Took 'em long enough to get around to this result, I'm shocked that the boy genius would let it operate in "bash me because that's what the majority of the world thinks" mode for so long.

Yeah, I agree. Canonical seems to think "snaps are for everyone" so, for both my personal and professional applications they have decided: "Canonical is not for me."

I view the delays during launch and the extra time spent during updates as a "load on the system."

Also, it entirely depends on your deployment environment. I develop system images that go out on thousands of devices deployed in "Cybersecuity Sensitive" environments, meaning: we have to document what's on the system and justify when anything in the SBOM (list of every software package installed on the machine) is identified as having any applicable CVEs... soooo.... keeping old versions of software anywhere on the machine is a problem (significant additional documentation load) for those security audits. Don't argue with logic, these are our customers and they have established their own procedures, so if we want their money, we will provide them with the documentation they demand, and that documentation is simplest when EVERYTHING on the system has ALL the latest patches.

The most secure systems are those that don't do anything at all. You can't hack a brick.

i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.

I agree. The agents also need to mature more to handle multi-level structures - work on a collection of smaller modules to get a larger system with more functionality. I can see the path forward for those tools, but the ones I have access to definitely aren't there yet.

The more exacting the shop, the better they pay.

That hasn't been my experience, but it sounds like good advice anyway. My experience has been that the more profitable the parent company, the better the job security and the better the pay too. Once "in," tune in to the culture and align with the people at your level and above who seem like they'll be sticking around long term. If the company isn't financially secure, all bets are off and you should be seeking, and taking, a better offer when you can find one.

I knocked around startups for 10/22 years (depending on how you characterize that one 12 year gig that ended with everybody laid off...) The pay was good enough, but job security just wasn't on the menu. Finally, one got bought by a big fish and I've been in the belly of the beast for 11 years now.

Yeah, sometimes the requirements write themselves and in those cases successful execution is "on the critical path."

Unfortunately, our requirements are filtered from our paying customers through an ever rotating cast of Marketing and Sales characters who, nominally, are our direct customers so we make product for them - but they rarely have any clear or consistent vision of what they want, but they know they want new stuff - that's for sure.

Probably just to save money really.

That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that's outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis...

same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling

Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.

I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.

I've been R&D forever, so at my level the question isn't "does the code work?" we pretty much assume that will take care of itself, eventually. Our critical question is: "is the code trying to do something valuable, or not?" We make all kinds of stuff do what the requirements call for it to do, but so often those requirements are asking for worthless or even counterproductive things...

I have been more successful with baby steps like: "Write a python 3 program that converts X to Y." Tweak prompt until that's working as desired, then: "make it work recursively through all subdirectories" - and again tweak with specifics like converting the files in place, etc. Always very specific, also - force it to fix its own bugs so you can move forward with a clean example as you add complexity. Complexity seems to cap out at a couple of pages of code, at which point "Ooops, something went wrong."

I was 0/6 on various trials of AI for Rust over the past 6 months, then I caught a success. Turns out, I was asking it to use a difficult library - I can't make the thing I want work in that library either (library docs say it's possible, but...) when I posed a more open ended request without specifying the library to use, it succeeded - after a fashion. It will give you code with cargo build errors, I copy-paste the error back to it like "address:

<pasted error message>

Inescapable movie reference: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He's developing a toxic relationship with his AI agent. I don't think it's the best way to get what you want (demonstrating how to be abusive to the AI), but maybe it's the only method he is capable of getting results with.

I frequently find myself prompting it: "now show me the whole program with all the errors corrected." Sometimes I have to ask that two or three times, different ways, before it coughs up the next iteration ready to copy-paste-test. Most times when it gives errors I'll just write "address: " and copy-paste the error message in - frequently the text of the AI response will apologize, less frequently it will actually fix the error.

Well, I very literally lived the "one can never go back home" reality while away at University, my home town doubled in population. So, most of the old places I remember are still there, but there's all the expanded roadways and bigger crowds everywhere you go. Half of it was built after I left, so the half I remember is now the dingy old stuff.

Of course we all change as life goes on, I find that home is wherever I am, and the longer I'm there the more it feels like "my home."

My big trip was across Europe (I'm from the US), and there's a strong tradition in Europe of the "wanderjahr" taking a year off before, after or even during University to travel and see other places, meet other people, etc. I only got to do "wanderjahr light" and I ended up going back the following summer for an encore. I definitely learned more in those 4.5 months than I did any two years in school or University.