• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Function/Method names, on the other hand, should be written so as to make the most sense to the humans reading and writing the code

    Of course—that’s why we have such classics as stristr(), strpbrk(), and stripos(). Pretty obvious what the differences are there.

    But to your point, the ‘intuitive’ counterpart to ‘zeroth’ is the item with index zero. What we have is a mishmash of accurate and colloquial terms for the same thing.














  • That’s because the explanation is often a bit disingenuous. There’s practically no difference between “listening locally” and “constantly processing what you’re saying”. The device is constantly processing what you’re saying, simply to recognise the trigger word. That processing just isn’t shared off device until the trigger is detected. That’s the claim by the manufacturers, and so far it’s not been proved wrong (as mentioned elsewhere, plenty of people are trying). It’s hard to prove a negative but so far it seems not enough data is leaving to prove anything suspect.

    I would put money on a team of people working for Amazon / Google to extract value from that processed speech data without actually sending that data off device. Things like aggregate conversation topic / sentiment, logging adverts heard on tv / radio for triangulation, etc. None of that would invalidate the “not constantly recording you” claim.







  • My PhD was in neural networks in the 1990s and I’ve been in development since then.

    Remember when digital cameras came out? They were pretty crappy compared to film—if you had a decent film camera and knew what you were doing. I fell like that’s where we’re at with LLMs right now.

    Digital cameras are now pretty much on par with film, perhaps better in some circumstances and worse in others.

    Shifting gear from writing code to reviewing someone else’s is inefficient. With a good editor setup and plenty of screen real estate, I’m more productive just writing than constantly worrying about what the copilot just inserted. And yes, I’ve tested that.