Pingk's comments

Pingk | 1 month ago | on: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts.

> Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

Pingk | 3 months ago | on: Deprecate like you mean it

This isn't a good idea regardless of why it's being deprecated.

If it's no longer being maintained then put a depreciation warning and let it break on its own. Changing a deprecated feature just means you could maintain it but don't want to.

Alternatively if you want to aggressively push people to migrate to the new version, have a clear development roadmap and force a hard error at the end of the depreciation window so you know in advance how long you can expect it to work and can document your code accordingly.

This wishy-washy half-broken behaviour doesn't help anyone

Pingk | 3 months ago | on: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work.

If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body?

Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs.

In my opinion the whole economy needs a rethink regarding what our actual goals are as a society, and maybe AI will force that conversation to happen, but I'm sceptical if it'll be a well-considered consensus.

Pingk | 5 months ago | on: OpenAI, Nvidia fuel $1T AI market with web of circular deals

There are plenty of non-US index funds, like EU, UK, Japan and others. There are also indices that track smaller companies rather than just the S&P500 or Nasdaq.

Or diversify in both directions - small US, and big and small international funds.

Pingk | 7 months ago | on: The value of institutional memory

This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.

This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Modular PC Design: Sustainable Approach Enhanced Repairability Reduced E-Waste

This is the reason I chose to go with AMD's 7000 series for my 2022 build.

I wasn't aware of Intel's limitation when I built my first computer in 2016 so when I wanted to upgrade a few years later I wasn't expecting to need a new motherboard since it still had everything I needed - it felt so wasteful!

Instead I just waited for AM5 based on the longevity for AM4.I'm really hoping AMD support AM5 for a few more generations so I can do the same as you in 2026/7

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Antimatter production, storage, control, annihilation applications in propulsion

To make 1 gram of antimatter, from E=mc^2, would take about 90 Terajoules. For reference, the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima released about 60 Terajoules of energy.

So you would need at least (and with the efficiency loss of production, much more than) 1.5 Little Boy atomic bombs worth of energy to make a single gram of antimatter.

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Cybertruck's Many Recalls

I'm not worried about the label, but I am worried about the implication - since software made the jump from physical to digital/OTA distribution, there's been a decline in software release quality because "we'll patch it later".

The historical financial punishments to writing buggy software are gone, and now it's infecting cars I'm concerned that safety standards will begin to slip and potentially injure someone.

Side note: I know a common response to buggy software is the market won't pay because it takes longer to develop etc. But writing robust software is a hard skill,and it you haven't seen an industry write robust software for a long time, why should you trust they still can?

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

Tech isn't siloed for no reason.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Ryzen 9000X3D performance according to MSI

The whole 9000 series has been disappointing, in terms of price/performance you're better off getting something from 7000.

It seems like 9000 (and the newly announced Intel 200 series) have a lot of restructuring work and lay the bed for future generations to push further

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns

Maybe, but it was already public knowledge:

> In September 2023 the government regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), had issued an improvement notice to Network Rail about overcrowding at the station, warning: “You have failed to implement, so far as reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station.”

It's concerning to me that Hendy was the chair of Network Rail from 2015 before becoming Transport Minister, and here he is sacking someone after a comment about his former workplace. Should definitely be an investigation into his motives/incentives IMO

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

I think you're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it was spam or not - The point is that automating creativity is not a useful way of facilitating content creation. We should be automating the tedious behind-the-scenes stuff.

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: The Pumpkin Eclipse

Yes, being able to see all the traffic on a given network is a legitimate threat to Tor's anonymity.

IIRC There is an alternate method of connecting to an endpoint which uses a 3rd node as a rendezvous point which is meant to be better, but I forget the name of the process...

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: EU countries must implement right to repair laws within two years

Why do you think he set up repair.wiki? It's a free resource he started to provide diagnostic and repair guides for a wide range of electronics. He's very transparent about wanting people to be able to repair their own devices and his actions clearly back that up.

These are not the actions of someone being protective of their skills to make more money imo.

Pingk | 1 year ago | on: Tesla's Sales in Europe Fall to a 15-Month Low

Self-driving in Europe is more problematic in a couple of ways.

Firstly the road structure is very different to the US, streets are much narrower and less car-centric so models are harder to train; secondly regulating it is much harder because the EU is a collection of countries, which is very different to a collection of states.

Thirdly non-car alternatives like trains and ebikes are a lot more viable due to a higher population density, many big cities (such as Paris) are pushing for better cycling infrastructure rather than better layouts for cars.

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