GreyBeard

That’s quite a wall of text there. I work in IT, probably the first part of the tech sector to be outsourced, and it has been known as a bad idea for a long time, but it keeps happening. I know of one fortune 50 company that, a little over 1 year ago, outsourced their IT to India. Everything from help desk to knowledge management. They are bringing it back because it was a disaster.

That isn’t to blame India. I’m sure it is full of skilled workers, but you don’t outsource to get the best, you outsource to get cheaper. So what you end up with is the worst workers. And then you tack on a language barrier on top of that and suddenly work in the US grinds to a halt. The problem is, it does save money for a few quarters, the execs who pushed it get their bonuses, and then the real cost hits as systems break down.

But my company is special!

Its uses are way more subtle than the hype, but even LLMs can have uses, occasionally. Specifically, I use one to categorize support tickets. It just has to pick from a list of probable categories. Nice and simple for it. Something humans can do just as easily, but when you have a history of 2 million tickets that need to be categorized, suddenly the LLM can do it when it would drive a human insane. I’m sure there are lots of little tasks like that. Nothing revolutionary, but still valuable.

Of course everyone’s ears are different, but for me, my Jabras lock in. They aren’t going anywhere. They are designed to be twisted into place, causing a literal lock into your ear. I can force them out without touching them, but it takes work to do it, they aren’t falling out on their own, and if they start to come loose, I’ll know instantly because the seal is broke and I can hear that they aren’t settled in right.

LLMs aren’t it, but AI, as in the computer science field, has been helping the medical industry since it has existed.

That one is creamy, so no. But there is gritty peanut butter, we generally refer to it as “chunky”.

LLMs are AI as it is defined in Computer Science, not SciFi. And the lane assist on your car might also be, although it may just be a well tuned PID for all I know.

Nah, if you are racking computers, and they don’t have built in lights out management, you open them up and connect remote triggers to the power button leads, allowing you to remotely start them if they get shut off. I’m sure lots of companies do have Mac farms for Mac and iOS development, but I doubt Apple give a crap one way or another about them.

Stockholm syndrome was made up by the media to discredit women who criticized them. It’s not a real thing.

A møøse once bit my sister.

Another fun fact: On the backend, Teams uses SharePoint to store files, and Exchange to store message. The whole M365 stack is a house of cards built on ancient tech. It’s a wonder it works at all.

And Google? I’m sure some companies use Google Apps for Business or whatevere they are calling it now, but the vast majority use Microsoft 365. Which does basically tie you to Windows, annoyingly. Especially if they are following industry and Microsoft best practices with MDM and Conditional Access.

FYI, there are registry keys you can set to stop it from trying to upgrade. They are strong policy settings that Microsoft completely respects, for now at least.

My understanding is that 24H2 crashes if you try that. Microsoft is starting to build their OS around the TPM, so that work around is bound to stop being helpful. I decided a few years ago to stop fighting Microsoft and do what they are asking me to do, stop using Windows.

I moved to syncthing a long time ago. I run it on all my computers, my phone, and my NAS. Keeps everything in sync and local. My only worry is the lack of an offsite. If my home burned down, I’d be a little screwed. Otherwise, I’ve got lots of copies on lots of devices, as well as automatic backups.

Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle on this one. I can do voice cloning with consumer hardware and available models. That can’t be undone, but good legal protections would be nice.

That said, the Johanson case is a bad example because it really didn’t sound much like her at all. It was a chipper yound white lady sound, but to my ear sounded nothing like Johanson. It did sound kinda like a character she voiced, but I would not gave confused the two. They cloned the voice of someone they paid to give a similar inflection as the voice from Her. That’s far removed from cloning Johanson herself. It is closer to people making music “in the style of”.

Reminds me of StumbleUpon. An old way of sharing and finding content.

I also think people discount the power of advertising when they think Facebook or Amazon is listening to them. They don’t think that maybe why they were talking about xyz was because they saw an ad for it. Then they saw another ad for it after they talked about it and got confused on cause and effect.

I don’t know, but I’m a big fan of cowboy and mafia planets.

Well, in the case of Ender’s Game, that was the point. Trick kids into thinking they were playing a game and they wouldn’t think twice about being as brutal as necessary to win. So if your goal is to have cars murder people, having people control them with their dreams is a pretty good idea.