RIF Notes #34

“One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple. When you make it vastly complicated — and only a few high priests in each department can pretend to understand it — what you’re going to find all too often is that those high priests don’t really understand it at all…. The system often goes out of control.” -Charlie Munger

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RIF Notes #42

“In practice, problems are delegated but the power to address them is not.” - Maslach & Leiter Building the Object Model You Want with Entity Framework How you can improve your SQL with code analysis in SQL Prompt A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm – This is a head scratcher. Macro trends in the tech industry Technology Radar Vol 17 Essential .NET - C# 7.0: Tuples Explained – “What many folks didn’t realize when it was first introduced is that the new C# 7.0 tuple all but replaces anonymous types—and provides additional functionality.” Editor's Note – Misprint – “Any IT manager can regale you with stories of undiagnosable printer failures, but even at the home-office level printing is an exercise in fail” .NET Standard - Demystifying .NET Core and .NET Standard Devops - Continuous Data Migration Using Visual Studio and TFS
Read more

RIF Notes #1

"If it is fast and ugly, they will use it and curse you; if it is slow, they will not use it." - David Cheriton in _The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis “The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]: •0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result. •1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data. •10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback i
Read more

The greatest trick the AI ever pulled was convincing the world it wasn't THAT intelligent

Just listened to The AI Dilemma and it definitely elaborated on and articulated some of my own concerns, as did the news of OpenAI plugins. The synthesis of concern is: AI doesn't need to be that powerful to be destructive and destabilizing (e.g. social media algorithms) to people and society. These new LLM's are already much more powerful than social media algorithms. Many of the new LLM capabilities are emergent and poorly understood. The experts designing these systems don't fully understand them, and some of whom are already worried about what they've created. LLM's are being rapidly and recklessly deployed very broadly across society, in an arms race. The strongest argument against worry is that these LLM's aren't really intelligent, are really just a super-autocomplete that enables automating mundane tasks via natural language. But I don't think any of the companies developing or deploying these things are arguing that. Even if they were, see #1 &
Read more