Issue triage, code exploration, extracting information from disparate sources, first pass code review. There are loads of use cases that it’s potentially useful.

For me it’s a lot better at extracting the requirements for a CPU feature from a 10,000 page architecture reference manual than I am.

I have API access at work because I don’t want to be tied to a UI. I’m very aware of the cost because I’m trying to see where it offers good value for money.

Of course things like the deep research and notebooklm are covered by the Google workplace fees which while including more than the personal plans are also a fair bit more expensive.

Where you live maybe. The NHS is centrally funded through taxation.

If course you do - if the cost of treating the patient down the line is going to cost you more. Public health systems have a vested interest in healthier citizens.

The majority of my gaming is on the road too but I’ve found the Steam Deck hits that niche for me. I carry a thin Chromebook for work related things. Admittedly you don’t need as powerful a GPU for a small 720p display.

How big a niche is that - because when I think high end gaming a laptop has all sorts of trade offs to make anyway.

It is from the David Lynch Dune.

Never seen it. Something about French ladies and floating door space?

If it’s mentioned up front and fixed then it’s fine. One way or another the restaurant needs to cover it’s costs and it’s either done via inflating the price of the food or a fixed service fee.

What I hate is a discretionary tip suggestion because suddenly I’m made to be responsible for how much the staff get.

On the potentially bright side maybe this will make people think harder about which model to use for which task. You don’t need to feed your entire code base into Opus when a Gemini Flash sub-agent can do a perfectly fine job running grep and compiling a summary for the main agent.

I think the article is over complicating things. I work in a project which is heavily forked for a variety of reasons. While it’s academically interesting to look at the reasons for those downstream forks we have no interest in going to the considerable effort of tracking them all.

If you can take a project and use an LLM to enable your niche use case then more power to you. FLOSS was never about ensuring all patches flow upstream.

They don’t have to be. They know what they asked the LLM to do. They know how much they adapted the output. You usually have to work to get the models to spit out significant chunks of memorised text.

No, that’s why the author asserts that with their signed-of-by. It’s what I do if I use any LLM content as the basis of my patches.

If the 2-10% is just boilerplate syscall number defines or trivial MIN/MAX macros then it’s just the common way to do things.

My kids are growing up in this environment and they already have an eye for ai slop. I suspect it’s the same thing that led to OpenAI’s TikSlop “product” is getting canned. After society had gotten over the sugar rush excitement of new and shiny toys I suspect the interest will fade and people will crave the connection you get from real art made by real people.

At least I hope that is what will happen. We might have to do something to hold the tech companies accountable for their dopamine trigger machines though.

Where are you seeing the 2-10% figure?

In my experience code generation is most affected by the local context (i.e. the codebase you are working on). On top of that a lot of code is purely mechanical - code generally has to have a degree of novelty to be protected by copyright.

They don’t, just like they don’t with human submitted stuff. The point of the Signed-off-by is the author attests they have the rights to submit the code.

So algorithms then?

LLMs have some interesting properties and certainly can do a good job sifting through large amounts of raw data. They are however a very brute force approach compared to say a network routing protocol. Sooner or later people will start to realise (again) that engineering is about trade offs and you need to work out what your constraints are and stop trying to solve every problem with massive amounts of multiplication.

I thought the whole “virgin” thing was an interpretation of the original Greek or Aramaic for “maid”, as in a young women of child rearing age.

Is that really the case? I work for a multi national FLOSS organisation but every additional country you want to hire from requires additional compliance overhead so in practice we generally hire from countries where we already have the legal setup to employee people.

How big an org is Signal?