41–50 of 59 posts
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But not without using a thousand gallons of water and propping up Nvidia shares.
I get that the water stereotype is funny, but it gets tiring after a while (because it's not actually true).
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For what it’s worth: yes, it’s not technically true, but the reason it’s sticking around is because it conveys a deeply felt (and actually true) sentiment that many many people have: the output of generative AI isn’t worth the input.
Urgh, I know that it's a solid explanation but I hate the "it may not be true but it captures a truth that people feel" argument so much! See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy.
I used to be sceptical of this claim but I have found it increasingly difficult to be sceptical after we found out last year that Facebook was exploiting flaws in Android in order to track your browsing history (bypassing the permissions and privilege separation model of Android)[1].
Given they have shown a proclivity to use device exploits to improve their tracking of users, is it really that unbelievable that they would try to figure out a way to use audio data? Does stock Android even show you when an app is using its microphone permission? (GrapheneOS does.) Is it really that unbelievable that they would try to do this if they could?
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I built a similar system for php and I can tell you what is the smart thing here: accessing data using tools. Of course tool calling and MCP are not new. But the smart thing is that by defining the tools in the context of an authenticated request, one can easily enforce the security policy of the monolith. In my case (we will maybe write a blog post one day), it's even neater as the agent is coded in Python so the ph…
I had to do something similar. Ruby is awful and very immature compared to python, so I "outsourced" the machine learning / LLM interaction to python. The rails service talks to it through grpc / protobuf and it works wonderfully.
I probably wouldn't write a training system in Ruby (not because it's not doable, just because it's not a good use of time to rewrite stuff that is already available in python ecosystem)... but hooking up a Ruby system up to LLM's for interaction is eminently doable with very little effort.
I am assuming your situation had some specific constraints that made it harder, but it would be nice to understand what they were - right now your comment describes a more complicated solution and I am curious why you needed it.
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For what it’s worth: yes, it’s not technically true, but the reason it’s sticking around is because it conveys a deeply felt (and actually true) sentiment that many many people have: the output of generative AI isn’t worth the input.
Well, it more demonstrates that people will quickly latch on to convenient lies that support what they want to be true, yet impede real discussion of the trade offs if they can’t even get the basic facts right. It’s not a good thing.
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For what it’s worth: yes, it’s not technically true, but the reason it’s sticking around is because it conveys a deeply felt (and actually true) sentiment that many many people have: the output of generative AI isn’t worth the input.
Urgh, I know that it's a solid explanation but I hate the "it may not be true but it captures a truth that people feel" argument so much! See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Urgh, I know that it's a solid explanation but I hate the "it may not be true but it captures a truth that people feel" argument so much! See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy.
> See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy. I used to be sceptical of this claim but I have found it increasingly difficult to be sceptical after we found out last year that Facebook was exploiting flaws in Android in order to track your…
(I have a ton more arguments if that's not convinced enough for you, I collect them here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/microphone-ads-conspiracy/ )
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But not without using a thousand gallons of water and propping up Nvidia shares.
I get that the water stereotype is funny, but it gets tiring after a while (because it's not actually true).
The water figures are very overestimated, but the principle is true: using a super computer to do simple things uses more electricity, compute and therefore water than doing it in a traditional way.
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"I was at SF Ruby, in San Francisco, a few weeks ago. Most of the tracks were, of course, heavily focused on AI" It may be the current "Zeitgeist", but I find the addiction to AI annoying. I am not denying that there are use cases to be had that can be net-positive, but there are also numerous bad examples of AI use. And these, IMO, are more prevalent than the positive ones overall.
If a problem is this widespread, a conference is arguably the best place to address it.
> but there are also numerous bad examples of AI use
which should be discussed publicly. I think we all have a lot to learn from each others' successes and failures, which is where coming together at a conference can really help.