I’m continuing the project of archiving my mother’s documents and artwork, including some photo albums that she made. Here’s Adobe Acrobat’s opinion of a 1968 trip to France album in which your ignoble blog host plays a small (5-year-old) role:
Don’t waste time on family history when AI can summarize it for you!
This reminds me of the old story…
A management consultant attended his first symphony concert and submitted the following analysis:
a. For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. The number of oboes should therefore be reduced, and the work spread more evenly over the whole concert program, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys of activity.
b. All twenty violins were playing identical notes. This would seem to be an unnecessary duplication, so the staff of this section should be cut drastically.
c. Obsolescence of equipment is another matter warranting further investigation. The program noted that the leading violinist’s instrument was several hundred years old. Now, if normal depreciation schedules had been applied, the value of this instrument would have been reduced to zero and the purchase of more modern equipment recommended long ago.
d. Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demisemiquavers, which seems to be an unnecessary refinement. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees and lower-grade operatives more extensively.
e. Finally, there seemed to be too much repetition of some of the musical passages. Therefore, scores should be pruned to a considerable extent. No useful purpose is served by repeating on the horns something that has already been handled by the strings. It is estimated that, if all redundant passages were eliminated, the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes and there would be no need for an intermission.
What did AI have to say about this 63-page photo album? It found an Avis rental car receipt and our future overlord’s entire summary of the monthlong vacation was based on that:
Was hoping for some ‘spun examples of Veo 3 video, but like every other breakthrough so far, it’s been another incremental improvement in the right direction. They seem to have bought out some startups in lip syncing & speech synthesis, which is lightyears beyond anything we had 5 years ago, but getting any more than drivel still requires an immense prompt effort.
Just tried Chat GPT 4.0 model to refactor my code with very specific instructions and highlighted code. With all my critique of current LLM training process Chat GPT does not like me: it slyly removed a property which I did not ask to refactor. Back to hand coding for me.
Refactoring was an equivalent of the summary above in the post.
“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”. — Einstein (unverified).
Assuming that AI makes Physics-like math model, it’s no surprise that it sees your vacation as a glorified car-rental. I take issue with:
> Don’t waste time on family history when AI can summarize it for you!
An AI will summarize a vacation like a sociopath would summarize it, because it can’t feel or sense affection, although it can very well manipulate others, like a sociopath, that it can feel affection. IMO, only if we remove the process of reflection from humans what you say is valid.
My Big Company is now mandating the use of Copilot across all development teams. What a mess! Sure, Copilot can be helpful for generating small snippets of code, and often it does a decent job. However, it lacks any understanding of the broader architecture or context of the application. As a result, the code it suggests can easily get off course. Unfortunately, our “senior” developers don’t recognize this and end up copying and pasting the generated code without fully understanding or validating it.
During code reviews, I frequently have to reject such codes, and I have to explain why, not only to the developer, but also justifying my rejection to management, because they think I’m slowing them down.
And it doesn’t stop there. There’s been an aggressive internal push to inject “AI capabilities” into all of our product, regardless of whether there’s a real business need. Our leadership believes that simply adding “AI” will somehow give us a competitive edge.
“AI” reminds me of the dot-com days.
This quickly becomes a joke.
I’ve seen best practices of prompt generation where prompt is more complex then output. This is because copilot adoption became one of year – end performance evaluation targets.
GA: What about copilots for code reviews? IMO, until devs (or AI) can do negative coding, they don’t understand the overall design anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy#Views_on_computing
I had tried to do some here at the design level, hahaha!
https://github.com/m-chaturvedi/undupes
Would you be willing to share your technology setup for scanning, indexing and saving such treasured Maryland artifacts?
JJD – Archivists in the making
My secret is to mail everything to Everpresent in Maskachusetts and get back a thumb drive!