bjornsno

As a senior developer I have serious doubts about the whole thing. Yes, I don't do tedious typing anymore, now I do extremely tedious code review all day, my least favorite part of the job. And I have to be very vigilant because the AI is an idiot more often than not. Then when I finally publish my own code it's time to go review my colleagues' ai code and figure out what they missed in their review.

I don't feel much of a productivity multiplier. I'm not saying we won't get there, but this current iteration ain't it.

Cool! Surely there is a library for ffmpeg that can get the PAR without having to resort to subprocesses though.

Totally fair disagreement to have there. I'm extremely critical of llms for many of the same reasons as you, plus environmental and economical concerns. Having said that however for summarization, simplification, and rephrasing they don't tend to hallucinate. Exactly as you say, they don't know anything, but they're instructed to always answer, so when something that doesn't match their training data comes along they hallucinate. For this kind of task though a specialized llm is actually a pretty good fit. As long as such a tool is used responsibly and carefully I don't see why it couldn't exist and be moderately helpful.

Google translate isn't the key or the answer either, it's constantly slightly wrong, but it's still useful because you can combine it with your own partial understanding to get the right translation.

It feels like you're either missing or ignoring my point entirely here, I'm not saying use Google translate for the legal document, I'm giving examples of how imperfect tools can still help you get to where you need to go. You're saying it's completely useless because sometimes it's going to be wrong, I'm just saying that's an un-nuanced take. Yes if they're signing a contract, absolutely get a lawyer if you don't understand what you're signing, but occasionally you just need to look up a law or accept a eula, and it would be nice to be able to have some help reading it, even if it's from an imperfect tool.

That's a bit extreme? In general yes they should get a lawyer but I'm not calling mine every time Facebook updates their eula or whatever. But more than that, are we going to pretend that having the answer doesn't make solving a math problem easier? You might have gotten the wrong answer yourself but with the key you can figure out how to get there. Or with language, I have maybe an a2 reading comprehension in Turkish, but if I have the translation already I can be sure I'm remembering words correctly and suddenly I'm more like b1. I won't trust the translation 100% if it's Google translate or whatever but it still gets me a lot further than if I had nothing.

Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Great strategy game, on steam or gog, can't remember which one has the expansion packs, but they're not necessary anyway for the first year. I played it for hundreds of hours with my sister as a kid. Has a lot of replayability. Works really well with two players with hot seat mode. More players and you will want to use the network capability.