The owner lives in London and rarely visits but he has arranged for AI consultants to come in and workshop with us to see how "AI can help the business". Our operations mainly consist of data entry.
"AI" (LLM-based automation) is only useful if you don't really care about the accuracy of the output. It usually gets most of the data transformations mostly right, enough for people to blindly copy/paste its output, but sometimes it goes off the rails. But hey, when it does, at least it'll apologise for its own failings.
"It says 'no shellfish', go ahead - eat it"
Even with lots context the various services we tried would get something wrong.
e.g. huile is oil in French and sometimes it would get translated as "motor oil"
1. SOA and later micro services 2. Big data & MongoDb 3. Kubernetis 4. Blockchain
Same here, but I started a few months earlier than most (I work in a marketing department as the only one with SWE skills). There's a lot you can do with AI.
For one, you can finally introduce some more automation, they are more open to it. And whenever you need a more "human-like intelligence" in your automation, you basically make an LLM call.
It also helps in terms of creating small microsites, etc.
It helps me personally because whenever I want to make a small command-line tool to make my life easier, I can now also decide to create a whole website as it's about as quick to make nowadays with things such as Codex and Claude Code (aka 30 min.).
https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/17/linus_torvalds_leaves...
It was pretty clever. You loaded x86 code (or Java bytecode, or Python bytecode, or whatever you felt like) and then it would build up a table of emulation instructions that would translate on-the-fly to run x86 natively on the Crusoe's ludicrous SUV of an instruction set. They were physically smaller and far less power-hungry than an equivalent x86 chip, even though they were clocked roughly 30% faster.
25 years ago they were going to be the future of computing, and people stayed away in droves. Bummer.
No no no, though, the transputer was a totally different thing. That was from 40-odd years ago, and - like the ARM chips we now use in everything - was developed in the UK by a company that did pretty okay for a while and then succumbed to poor management.
They were kind of like RISC processors. Much has been made of "you programmed them directly in microcode!" but you could say the same of any wholly combinatorial CPU, like the Good Ol' 6502, where the byte that's read on an instruction fetch directly gates things off and on.
The key was they had very very fast (like 10Mbps) serial links that would connect them in a grid to other transputers on a board. Want to run more simultaneous tasks? Fire in more chips!
You could get whole machines based on transputers, or you could get an ISA card that plugged into a 16-bit slot in your PC and carried maybe eight modules about the size of a Raspberry Pi Zero (and nowhere near as powerful). I remember in the late 80s being blown away by one of these in some fairly chunky 386SX-16 doing 640x480x256 colour Mandelbrot sets in like a *second*.
Again, they were going to revolutionise computing, this is the way the world was going, and by the time of the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem Pump Up The Jam, transputers were yet another footnote in computing history.
Unoptimized code would easily take tens of minutes to render the Mandelbrot in 640x480x256 on a 486. FractInt (written by Ken Shirriff) was fast, but would still take tens of seconds, if not longer -- my memory is a little hazy on this count.
Fractint ran blindingly fast on that compared to pretty much everything else we had at the time, and again it could show it on a 640x480x256 colour screen. We kept it round the back and only showed it to our most serious customers, and our Fractint-loving mates who came round after hours to play with it.
It still took all night to render a Lyapunov set.
You might just as well say “The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.”
It would be exactly as meaningful.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLAFy7o7Zvo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoODPQ4CTM
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENnAa7rqtBM
sigmoid10•3mo ago
Relevant section From Wikipedia:
>Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the ".edu" top-level domain. However, since the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions in the US, it is allowed to remain active and operational. All .edu domain names registered before 2001 were grandfathered in, even if not an accredited USA post-secondary institution.
hshdhdhehd•3mo ago
tom1337•3mo ago
jeroenhd•3mo ago
Don't you need that already anyway? There's no standard for how universities format their academic email addresses.
Plus, .edu only applies to American universities. Services validating if you're a "real" student by checking for .edu emails were quite annoying during my time as a student. A lot of these platforms don't seem to even know .edu is an American thing.
heavensteeth•3mo ago
bryanlarsen•3mo ago
Considering that many universities provide email addresses to alumni, I don't think that heuristic would work either.
Loughla•3mo ago
I wonder what the benefit is.
bryanlarsen•3mo ago
I'm not sure how common it is, but my wife has an edu email address despite being well over twenty years from graduation.
AlotOfReading•3mo ago
pavel_lishin•3mo ago
Someone then asked what happens when we graduate and lose access to those emails, and they didn't have a particularly good answer.
I think that was also the same onboarding where they passed around a piece of paper for us to sign in with our name and social security number.
jz_•3mo ago