Curious Canid

An LLM does not write code. It cobbles together bits and pieces of existing code. Some developers do that too, but the decent ones look at existing code to learn new principles and then apply them. An LLM can’t do that. If human developers have not already written code that solves your problem, an LLM cannot solve your problem.

The difference between a weak developer and an LLM is that the LLM can plagiarize from a much larger code base and do it much more quickly.

A lot of coding really is just rehashing existing solutions. LLMs could be useful for that, but a lot of what you get is going to contain errors. Worse yet, LLMs tend to “learn” how to cheat at their tasks. The code they generate often has lot of exception handling built in to hide the failures. That makes testing and debugging more difficult and time-consuming. And it gets really dangerous if you also rely on an LLM to generate your tests.

The software industry has already evolved to favor speed over quality. LLM generated code may be the next logical step. That does not make it a good one. Buggy software in many areas, such as banking and finance, can destroy lies. Buggy software in medical applications can kill people. It would be good if we could avoid that.

If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.

The claim is that the remote operators do not actually drive the cars. However, they do routinely “assist” the system, not just step in when there’s an emergency.

I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern “tech” seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.

This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren’t. They depend on remote “navigators” to make many of their most critical decisions. Those “navigators” may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.

When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.

It’s also worth noting that the human “navigators” are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.

This may be the least important area in which China is displacing the US.

I have added the swipe library to FUTO. It works, but not well enough for me. (That may be my clumsy swiping, but the issue remains.) I estimate that it gets about one word in four wrong. GBoard is still wrong about one time in ten, but at that rate, swiping and correcting is still much faster for me than traditional typing.

Circles are the worst possible shape in terms of making efficient use of the limited screen space available on a phone. The screen is rectangular and nearly everything we display falls into rectangular arrangements. Using circles just means there is less room on each key to show useful information, like the long-hold functions.

I’m not opposed to change, but change entirely for the sake of change usually produces bad results.

I periodically try FUTO. It’s a great keyboard, except for its swiping support. That seems to be gradually improving, but it isn’t quite there yet. Unfortunately that is how I do all my typing, so I keep going back to GBoard. I look forward to leaving it for good.

…and the horse he road in on.

I’ve seen kites that looked more convincing. There are now some real, functional flying cars, although they are still far too expensive to be practical. This is not one of them.

It is probably worth noting that I am removing the DRM so I can read them on devices that do not have Kindle apps.

Nothing is certain, but it looks like you will still be able to download books into local memory so you can read them. As long as the apps still work that way, it will be possible to access the book files.

You do need a tool that can remove the DRM from the books files the Kindle uses. DeDRM used to do this nicely, but it has not been updated to handle the most recent version of Kindle DRM. It will not works on any books published since early 2024.

There are commercial options that can remove even the latest DRM from Kindle books. I use Epubor Ultimate. It was the first to handle the most recent Kindle DRM, but I’m sure there are others by now.

Well, they have almost always circumvented them instead, but that impacts the bottom line too.

I think you’re right that some kind of “menu” button that presents additional options would be best. Eventually there will be other options and it will be necessary…

I think most people will adjust the volume once, but may want to change the octave while playing. If my assumptions are right, the octave change feature should be the most accessible one, replacing the current volume buttons. The volume, and any other features could be handled through the menu button.

My ideal solution would be to provide a menu button and two function buttons. Then have a menu option to configure whether the functions buttons acted as octave up/down, volume up/down, or controls for whatever additional features get added.

I’d also like to put in a pitch to add support for the “scrolling” feature that some watches now have. It could control the opposite feature of whatever is assigned to the function buttons, making it possible to adjust both octave and volume on the fly. It does seem like it should be a lower level priority, since not all watches support that feature.

This looks great! I have a pitch pipe app for my watch, but I like this better.

I do have the inevitable feature request… :-)

I’d love to have some way to change the octave up and down.

A lot of people don’t seem to get that social media services are almost entirely about their userbases, not their companies. Facebook and Meta are unbelievably terrible, but that is where most of the people you know can be found. Switching to something else is easy, but pointless, if your reason for being there is the people.

I have slowly convinced friends and family to begin using MeWe, but only a small number. And most of them still primarily use Facebook. At least recent events are pushing a few more away from it.

Chording keyboards are never likely to become mainstream because they have a steep learning curve. That doesn’t mean they aren’t a great idea or that they don’t work quite well. This looks like an unusually clever implementation of the concept.

The particular application makes a lot of sense. The combination of a wearable keyboard with extremely fast typing and text-to-speech would solve a real problem for people who can’t talk.

Personally, I’ve played around with chording, but came to the conclusion that I actually don’t need that much typing speed. Most of my typing is either coding or writing emails. In either case, I stop to think about what I want to write often enough to keep my maximum word rate quite low. I can type around 90 wpm on a regular keyboard, which is still faster than I can compose.

You can be certain that if you’re upsetting Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg, whatever you’re doing is making the world a better place.

This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.