AI: The Rise of the Machines... Or Just a Lot of Overhyped Chatbots?

Lanx said:

fuck that

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Khane said:

Redundancy between data centers is a backup, very literally... did you mean to phrase this another way?

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In ITIL terms, no one ever refers to a live copy of data on an active server, whether its on a passive server in an Active/passive pair, or a HA set of servers in another DC where the data is being synced or changed as a "backup". A backup is something physically or logically separated from production changes that can be restored in full or part if need be. I mean, it goes deeper than that but just having another set of servers somewhere doesn't count, and depending on the way they are being synced might also be affected.

Control said:

View attachment 629044

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She won’t make a sound while gutting you with that knife.

Khane said:

Meanwhile, since ~2004 you could just set a reminder yourself on your cell phone in about 10 seconds total.

The things people waste electricity and compute on with AI is a thing of beauty.

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This is true, and I get it. I tend to be forgetful and dislike managing the minutiae of life. It’s as much just fucking around to see what I can get working and what will actually be helpful so I can spend more time with family/friends/etc.

weird stuff like the screenshot along the way is just entertaining.

Khane said:

How many times can one contradict themselves in one paragraph? This isn't even really your fault. I blame the nebulous, dubious language that has steered technology "paradigms" over the last 30 years.

"It's not wifi! It's mesh! It's totally different!"

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Dude.
There is literally nothing contradictory in what I wrote. If you don't understand what a backup is or is supposed to be, no worries. Not colloquially, like "I got a spare" but actual recoverable data from a fixed point in the past. Production data, or data that can be changed in a live environment, isn't a backup. A backup is something physically/logically distinct from production data. Even a standby database, if its being synced with live data to be used for recovery, isn't a backup. That can be Redundancy or Recovery or High Availability, and all those terms mean specific, different things but none of them are backups. They have consequential meaning in enterprise IT, like getting your business back up and running and losing millions of dollars or not.

I am not as involved in the day-to-day management as I was in when I was in DC/Service Delivery but we used to back up critical systems to physical media, keep x number of days onsite, and then rotate some offsite to storage at Iron Mountain. I know Cloud storage is much more ubiquitous now but my career moved in a different direction so I don't spend as much time on that part of landscapes these days. 3-2-1 was and is the Iron rule of backups.

If you google "ITIL definition of a backup" you mostly find folks working from the ITIL v3 framework. They are on v5 now but things like that never change.

Khane said:

I guess the point I'm trying to make is people use AI in the wrong way to try and simplify their lives. It's like AI makes them forget how anything and everything works.

So using that example, prompting AI to do this type of thing can be efficient and a time saver. However people prompt and direct the AI in exactly the manner your screenshot depicted instead of how they SHOULD be prompting it.

Which is:

Add this item/event/occurence to my calendar app on this date and at this time. Add this note/description to the event. Set a reminder for it 1 week prior, 1 day prior, and 1 hour prior.

It really is that simple and wastes far less time, compute and actual mental AND physical, tangible energy (electricity) by just giving it actual, discernible tasks. And it fucks it up way less.

Telling it to just remind you will almost always result in it trying to create some funky script with its own reminder logic that may or may not fire, versus just having it add a task to something that is a known entity, works and does exactly what you want it to do.

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You are not wrong; Prompt engineering is really not as off the cuff as lots of people think it is/as it seems. What passes many people by is that it's just another abstraction layer from coding. In the distant past, we used to write directly in machine language/assembly. Then we came up with C/Fortran to move one layer up and give instructions to chips to tell them what we wanted to be done. Now we are yet again moving back another abstraction layer crafting prompts to have LLMs assemble the code to tell chips what to do in their own language.

It's a fair amount of crafting to get what you want, and your example is a great way to put guard rails on the simple request. As it gets more complicated, you have to add explicit language for guidelines, give the LLM a role, tell them tone and limits, etc. The more detail you add, the more you can get out of the prompt. There is, of course, an inevitable limit, along with all the noted pitfalls and dangers.

Khane said:

I want you to read your post, the one that I quoted, from the standpoint of "words have meaning". And then contemplate how contradictory the entire thing is.

Its magical how brainwashed people become in the tech space with buzzwords.

The best possible example of this is virtualization, what it was designed for, and how it has never, ever been leveraged for its intended purpose. And how Cloud service providers are robbing everyone by tricking people into thinking the way you do.

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What is this magic intended purpose?

I have been working with virtualized servers for more than two decades now: How have we been led astray?

Edit: That's just the terminology of the industry. Doctors have terminology. Geologists have terminology. Architects have terminology. IT, specifically Enterprise IT, uses ITIL terminology so that we don't have issues like this and conversations don't become a mishmash of "Who's on First" . It's literally why the ITIL framework was invented. It's not buzzwords or marketing speak; it's how industry professionals communicate. We fight constantly to keep our company (whichever company that is, its a struggle at every company at which I have worked , and I have worked for a number of the biggest) to keep them aligned and not doing their own thing.