Adys's recent activity

  2. Comment on Perplexity’s Comet browser invites in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    I’d love one 🤚

    I’d love one 🤚

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Blizzard Entertainment files lawsuit against World of Warcraft private server Turtle WoW in ~games

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Huh, I was going to say "nah, violation is continuous" but a read of that article actually says there is absolutely grounds for time-barring the suit. Wow, that's kinda nuts.

    Huh, I was going to say "nah, violation is continuous" but a read of that article actually says there is absolutely grounds for time-barring the suit. Wow, that's kinda nuts.

    9 votes

  4. Comment on America tips into fascism in ~society

    Adys
    Link Parent
    I really don’t enjoy seeing this take that just because it’s not as bad as in other countries it’s not fascism get. Fascism is a continuity of a country’s systems. The USA had incredibly robust...
    • Exemplary

    I really don’t enjoy seeing this take that just because it’s not as bad as in other countries it’s not fascism get.

    Fascism is a continuity of a country’s systems. The USA had incredibly robust systems which is why it’s not yet fascism - they haven’t been fully dismantled yet, it takes time.

    But if you had less protections from the get go, by now you’d be 1938 Germany and that’s all.

    “Bad but disrespectful” - no, it’s disrespectful to those who built the protections against fascism to ignore that those are getting dismantled to allow for more and more overreach.

    24 votes

  6. Comment on How to get a backpack sold by Decathlon in EU to the US? in ~life.style

  7. Comment on How to get a backpack sold by Decathlon in EU to the US? in ~life.style

    Adys
    Link Parent
    If it's cheaper BE->US than UK feel free to take a look - if you find it on http://decathlon.be/ ill be happy to ship it to you from Brussels. edit...

    If it's cheaper BE->US than UK feel free to take a look - if you find it on http://decathlon.be/ ill be happy to ship it to you from Brussels.

    edit https://www.decathlon.be/fr/p/sac-a-dos-de-randonnee-20l-nh-arpenaz-500-ice-compartment/_/R-p-309210?mc=8844396&c=bleu

    Btw if you're patient, I have acquaintances that regularly go to the US and may be able to just bring it on a plane and ship it from the US.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Study: Giving cash to mothers in Kenya cut infant deaths by 48% in ~health

    Adys
    Link Parent
    I like your practical thinking. Of course you could have replaced "cut" by "reduced" :P

    I like your practical thinking. Of course you could have replaced "cut" by "reduced" :P

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Study: Giving cash to mothers in Kenya cut infant deaths by 48% in ~health

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Actually same here. I did a double take …

    Actually same here. I did a double take …

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Didn’t mean for the response to sound harsh, sorry. The post said “correct me if I’m wrong” so I reused that same wording :) And I agree with you to a great extent that it’s a terminology problem....

    Didn’t mean for the response to sound harsh, sorry. The post said “correct me if I’m wrong” so I reused that same wording :)

    And I agree with you to a great extent that it’s a terminology problem. It’s the same problem I allude to in the OP I think.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Right now I don’t square it. I absolutely agree with you and I understand the implications… the thing is, this is such a massive differentiator that there is no catching up at the individual...

    Right now I don’t square it. I absolutely agree with you and I understand the implications… the thing is, this is such a massive differentiator that there is no catching up at the individual level.

    My company actually is working on researching better ways to democratize the access. But we can’t do it puritanically: being practical is how we can actually get results.

    Use these incredibly powerful tools to shape and create the future you believe is better for everyone. Even if that future doesn’t include said tools.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Yeah you’re wrong- genai is being used actively in dd and molecule discovery. I get that most people have this idea that ChatGPT came out and now every company that says they “use ai” is simply...

    Yeah you’re wrong- genai is being used actively in dd and molecule discovery.

    I get that most people have this idea that ChatGPT came out and now every company that says they “use ai” is simply offering a ChatGPT account to their employees so they can write emails faster. But it’s not the case and the impact is massive.

    It helps once you understand that these are not “advanced text autocomplete” but “informed decision engines”.

    Here’s a case from Exscientia: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/exscientia-generative-ai/

    And here’s the biggest of all, Isomorphic Labs; deep mind people are working on this: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/

    Is an llm going to one shot publish a paper about a new drug it discovered? No. But this isn’t how these things are used.

    Drug companies are not being super public about this unfortunately so I don’t have much to offer in terms of details, but being in Belgium I hang out with several of the people working on this — Pfizer in particular is super bullish on genai and they’re actively working on it. You don’t hear about it because it takes a long time to put these processes in place and guarantee + verify the entire chain of reliability.

    It’s the same in construction … there’s massive advances being made there but you won’t hear about them until they pass the certifications. And in the mean time of course naysayers will claim they’ll never pass those certifications but highly engineering driven companies wouldn’t be spending tens of millions on this R&D if “someone with zero experience in the sector who can obviously see this won’t work” was worth listening to.

    1 vote

  13. Talking defence

    ~tech Ask (survey)
    I’m curious to get a read of where people’s heads are at regarding defence - be it innovation, funding or working in it in general (in particular in Europe but please contextualise with your...

    I’m curious to get a read of where people’s heads are at regarding defence - be it innovation, funding or working in it in general (in particular in Europe but please contextualise with your country if you’re commenting).

    Still five years ago, most people’s view was rather negative on it. I’ve seen attitude change significantly but I’d love hear opinions.

    20 votes

  14. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    A lot of the "Rich People Money" is entirely make believe, built out of overleveraged nonsensical financial systems. Elon got investments in order to buy his own company at his own valuation, to...

    A lot of the "Rich People Money" is entirely make believe, built out of overleveraged nonsensical financial systems.

    Elon got investments in order to buy his own company at his own valuation, to justify valuations in a dead acquisition made out of mostly the same shit, and this works because he has /some/ money. It's a modern day ponzi scheme that relies on a mix of financial privacy and charisma to pull off.

    Similar levers are available to most people with some side cash saved up if they know it. Can be used for good if you know how to do it. I taught a friend of mine how to turn an extra 30k/yr she didn't know what to do with, into a 1M investment fund for green tech. She worked in fintech for longer than I've been programming and had her mind blown this was possible at all.

    Income inequality is not a money thing, it's a society thing. It's accessibility to knowledge: Education with extra bells and whistles.

    Lowering barriers of education lowers income inequality. This is something AI achieves.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    This, by the way, is the #1 problem in AI and tech today - I am dead sure of this. I try to keep juniors in my team but I have literally no idea how to train them anymore. Where do you even start...

    This, by the way, is the #1 problem in AI and tech today - I am dead sure of this. I try to keep juniors in my team but I have literally no idea how to train them anymore. Where do you even start to learn the skills my fellow senior engineers learned over years of experience, when the path is basically dead and littered with bad examples?

    Solving this is going to be serious business.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    How do you define productivity? I spent my life (23 years in engineering + various other fields) working on side projects. Some of them have led to startups. I professionalized my ADHD and turned...

    How do you define productivity?

    I spent my life (23 years in engineering + various other fields) working on side projects. Some of them have led to startups. I professionalized my ADHD and turned it into a venture studio / AI lab.

    I wrote a Hearthstone simulator and the next thing I knew, I was CTO of a video game data analytics startup. This is the stuff I used to do to "avoid being productive".

    This little TUI game would not have existed because I would not have bothered, because my off-time is no longer being spent playing world of warcraft but rather dealing with a million other things life is throwing at me. I'm officially too busy to ever have side-projects worth starting.

    So instead of spending some of that off time on a passive activity, I was able to spend it on a creative activity and produce something, which /would/ have taken me several weeks had I gotten past the starting step.

    I'm flabbergasted people can look at these examples and still not Get It. What is it with that?

    Just to illustrate the insanity of 1000x productivity, that means what you’d normally deliver in two years (assuming a forty hour work week) you deliver in four hours with AI.

    A Tesla can accelerate "0 to 60 mph in as little as 2.1 seconds". To illustrate the insanity of that number, that means a Tesla can reach the speed of light in less than a year.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    I have no desire to fight cement and I'd honestly rather keep both my steel and my sanity instead of trying to move people who wouldn't want to budge anyway. If I'm going to waste my breath...

    You fight cement with steel; if you really show the results and show beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is working, then cement will crumble.

    I have no desire to fight cement and I'd honestly rather keep both my steel and my sanity instead of trying to move people who wouldn't want to budge anyway. If I'm going to waste my breath convincing someone who's dead-set on their position, I'd rather convince an american that trump is not as great as they thought or something - at least that'd achieve some good if I succeed.

    Of course, this is all speculative

    But it's not... people are speculating on future while ignoring the present. AI is helping in clear-cut-good areas such as drug discovery (and yes, that includes new-generation GenAI), it's helping students learn languages, it's helping create more free and open source tooling...

    And all those chuffing at, for example, AI replacing consultants "as if that has real-world value"? Consultant $$$ consume a ton of tax money on public projects. The cost of creation being brought down means money being used for more useful purposes than lining these same pockets. And while I'm sure the efficiency of the conversion won't be perfect, it'll be a hell of a lot better than before.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Yeah it's definitely a learning curve to get it to behave well in large codebases but it's possible! I'm actually going to be speaking at a couple of meetups and webinars on that exact subject....

    But it's often a slog to use it in a large codebase and can get confused easily. I have it document it's plans and actions and will constantly use those documents to refresh it's context and even still it's constantly getting things wrong in large refactors. It speeds you up, but also slows you down in a way.

    Yeah it's definitely a learning curve to get it to behave well in large codebases but it's possible! I'm actually going to be speaking at a couple of meetups and webinars on that exact subject. Basically: guardrails (in the form of strict type checking and linters), indexed and well-structured documentation, extreme consistency, strong abstraction layers. All things which overall improve the health of a codebase. All things which Claude can generate itself :)

  19. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    It’s impossible to argue against a cemented position.

    It’s impossible to argue against a cemented position.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    Adys
    Link Parent
    Same here. I'd love to hear more!

    Same here. I'd love to hear more!