Screwball

How do they do that? Where did the squiggly things come from? I can't remember what you call them things.

I just retied from a 6 year gig in academia, and I'm with you for the most part. My college had hours upon hours of meetings on how to deal with the AI thing. As need be, good for them. My classes didn't/couldn't use it so it didn't matter to me. As far as the high school stuff, I did 2 1/2 years in a high school setting through the college giving the kids a head start on college with a 3 credit hour course. No way, no how that should have happened. They didn't have the skills, or even close, to do the work 3 credit hours should require. It was all about the money. There wasn't a lot of learning going on there (vocational school fed by 14 high schools) no matter the discipline, best I could tell. A very large percentage of my students over the years really didn't care about anything but getting the class done, get their grade, and do the least amount possible to do so. I'm sure all of us who went to college had classes where they felt like that, mine might have been one, but all the other profs said the same thing, so it wasn't just me. It continues to get worse. If I were to pick a subject that I think AI can do the most damage it would have to be math. It's too easy to ask my Aussie buddy what the percentage gain between a couple of numbers gives me, instead of understanding the math myself. I would guess 95% of the people working at a POS (point of sale) cash register couldn't make change if the machine didn't tell them what to give. It's too easy to lean on AI. Besides, it's cheating. 🙂

I would imagine coding is like design engineering - the KISS rule still applies. Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex, the more things there are to break and go wrong. Many times things don't need to be complex - all they need to do is work (correctly). This is where it will be interesting to see how AI handles things. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. Humans have experience and know things because they have that. I posted an example in the Investment thread where I told AI to design and give me a drawing for a punch press that pokes a 1" diameter hole in a sheet of steel. It failed miserably. It didn't even get the tonnage correct.

I don't know how you do it. I played with coding years ago and it's not for me. It drove me nuts with all the squiggly brackets and stuff. Visual Basic (at the time) was fairly easy, and I'm being kind with "fairly" when it came to my talents. I did OK with that but didn't like it. I also played with C, and C+ or whatever it was. Hated that. Tried Java which looked a lot like C so I hated that too. If those weren't bad enough to pull your hair out, I had to learn and deal with a language called "Fourth." Oh, brother!

It is now called Visual Studio. You can download it from Mircosoft at no cost. The interface looks similar to the old Visual Basic of years ago. The input boxes, buttons, and text I used seemed to work the same way. I built the interface and AI wrote the code. All I had to do was copy and paste the code. The interface looks like this;

Friday night, why not play with my old buddy from down under. Let's give AI a little test. Thought about the old days when Visual Basic was a thing. Is that still around? Yea, it kind of is so it turns out. Free as well. Simple download and install. How can AI help us with a basic interface and calculation? I used Microsoft's Co-pilot. All I wanted was a simple form with three inputs, and a button to calculate these inputs to the output we are looking for. In this case a simple math problem of cubic inches, like used in our family car. It took longer to download the software (the new VB) and get familiar with that, than it did me and my Aussie buddy to come up with this; Some things to clean up. Couple of hours total. Wild stuff. ON EDIT: Forgot, this is a stand alone .exe file.

Assuming you were interviewed by humans? I've been out of the workforce for a while and nothing in this world would surprise me. At some point my Aussie buddy will be hiring people, if he's not already. From the Investment thread (related). MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce - From CNBC (Bubblevision)

Someone above mentioned "prompt engineering" which caught my eye. So let's see what our Google AI buddy has to say; Of course! We are helping to train what is now a derivative of old school programmers. The code we started writing back when binary math hit the computer world it all changed. It's been an incredible ride. Below was from October 30 originally posted in the investment thread. This is from MSFT Co-pilot. It now simply says "Co-pilot may make mistakes." My Co-pilot buddy is an Aussie. Next time we do a project I'm going try to give him a name. Like mentioned above, it's amazing how personal they get. So might as well **** with them. 🙂

Be careful or beware might be in order... Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure — cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: “I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am"

Since there is a thread about this now, I would be curious when talking about our own experience with AI, which AI app did you use? There seems to be quite a few. I did a Google search and got this; I've used Co-pilot (comes with Windows 11), Grok (Twitter's version) and Google's Gemini. Make one wonder how the results from the same query would vary across platforms.

AI Data Centers Are Making RAM Crushingly Expensive, Which Is Going to Skyrocket the Cost of Laptops, Tablets, and Gaming PCs On another note, earlier today, after giving back a little bit, the S&P 500 was within 25 points of all time highs. We probably need to lower interest rates. 🙂

I'm not sure anymore. I told my buddy a year ago I am now owned by Google and Amazon. I have no privacy, none, zero. They know more about us than we do. There are companies traded on the NY stock exchange who make money by data mining our ****. 1984 wasn't suppose to be an instruction manual. I worked in and with IT since we had IT and you could see where it was all going to go as it progressed via the technology. So did crazy Teddy. 🙂

I'm sure everyone has noticed this who has played with it. It seems to me, you get the best results when you give it as much information as you can up front. That said, it also seems, some things they/it will do very well with, other things, not so much. On the downside, I was reading an article today about how this changes our educational system. It's really easy to ask HAL what percentage change is X to Y. No need to understand the math. That's part of the reason I quit teaching last June.

More than the increase the SS COLA adjustment will give you like every other year since forever. Think that's a rip-off? Wait until the pukes start to really "fixing" social security.

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce Maybe the 11.7% can start a youtube channel or a financial services company and get rich. 😉

Thanks. I had no idea this kind of stuff was going on. Selena Gomez - 2 million followers? I don't even know who she is. That might be a good thing. What a world.

OK, I'm going to admit stupid here, but I've never heard of this guy. I read the one article and tried to make sense out of it, this paragraph caught my eye; There is more but not much makes any sense to me. Does he sell cars too?

Absolutely. Change the oil, and filter, plugs (and wires if needed), points, condenser, clean the battery terminals (and battery), look at the belts, air filter, all the fluid containers (brakes, wipers, anti-freeze,etc) then put it up on a rack and check the suspension parts while they get greased, u-joints, rear end fluid level, tire wear level, and pull a front and back wheel to look at the brakes. This was a routine tune-up as they called it. It used to work that way. They were simple, and they lasted as long as you did that. Now they are too complicated. The first thing they do is hook up a computer.

Totally agree on the Fisher stuff. And how couldn't you love Cab Calloway?

Just a simple car (years ago), for the most part the make didn't matter, if you took it in for a tune up and inspection once a year they were dependable, and didn't cost a lot of money. I've dealt with some car issues recently, and it is a total mess, and not cheap. So much has changed over the years.

Classics, both. I wanted to watch the Blues Brothers movie a while back, and the only way I could was to pay for it. Spit. A buddy of mine featured the soundtrack at his wedding reception. It was a hit.

Why do they continue to try to do stupid things. This is baseball. It isn't difficult.

I had a Rambler of some kind, don't remember what year. 70s probably. It had air conditioning when that was a thing, but this was old when I got it. It didn't work. There were buttons on the dash for air, maybe 5 of them. One setting said "desert only." Too funny. Cars are a perfect example where a simple task like getting from point A to point B departs from the KISS rule (Keep It Simple Stupid) to product life cycle and making a **** load of money. You could design a car to last a lifetime and save a ton of money over the years, but they don't do that and never will. We also like all the bells and whistles. A good buddy is a retired Mercedes mechanic. They have car seats that make my recliner feel like a park bench. The electronics in cars today is off the charts as well. All stuff that can **** up - and cost money to fix. Lots of it, and usually not a fun experience. ON EDIT: appliances are no different.

The Gremlin was a POS too. A buddy had one. He loved it, even though it was broke all the time. That said, it was a different era. Back then you could work on cars, and preventative maintenance really helped. The cars were similar, but different. Chrysler and AMC were kind of the odd balls. In those days there were big thick manuals on how to fix them. So many times they would explain how to fix something in a detailed way, and then the disclaimer; except Chrysler. Their starters were a POS. So were the front suspension. There was nothing worse to align the front end than a Chrysler, and you always had to replace the ball joints first. They were always bad. At least someone with some tools could work on them. Not today.

The Pacer...I was an auto mechanic in 1975 and I can attest they were a POS.