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Cake day: February 28th, 2021

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  • Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.

    Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.

    Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it’s right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you’ll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.










  • Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.

    The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.

    So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?




  • Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?

    Didn’t say that. But I also don’t think that it magically appears in the plant.

    While coal powerplants don’t spew out radioactive coal ash??

    Please stop this whataboutism.

    Nobody cares to recycle concrete.

    Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that’s a different topic.

    I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive.

    Convenient. Then I will because I’m not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don’t want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.

    And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that’s far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.






  • Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.

    Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on these investments are not guaranteed. Generally, GenAI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.

    This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.