Technology will make your life easier

[Phil]

Apparently “Gemini” is Google’s particular corner of the A.I. hellscape which has been foisted upon us, and anyone who has actually used it has quite likely made their relevant accounts vulnerable…

Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules. ◆ Truffle...

“You created a Maps key three years ago and embedded it in your website’s source code, exactly as Google instructed. Last month, a developer on your team enabled the Gemini API for an internal prototype. Your public Maps key is now a Gemini credential. Anyone who scrapes it can access your uploaded files, cached content, and rack up your AI bill. Nobody told you.”

[JGD]

I really like working on software that isn’t web-based. For bonus points, it doesn’t have a GUI either.

[yashima]

Don’t be evil dumb.

[yashima]

Today I had trouble explaining something we needed to do to my colleagues. But because we had previously talked about using an LLM to write this part of our code, I went to our organization’s locally hosted LLM chatbot and began writing a prompt. I never have any difficulty writing prompts for things I want to do.

I find it easier to explain what I want to the LLM than to explain it to my colleagues.

In the end posted my prompt into the ticket instead of a specification as I usually would.

I am not sure what emotion I feel now.

[Icelander]

You’re not explaining to the LLM, which cannot understand anything and is not designed for it. The difference might not have anything to do with LLM technology, just that you found it easier to define exactly what you wanted while you were sitting down with plenty of time to write than you did verbally, without time to prep, and probably while being distracted by the active conversation around you while you tried to explain.

[yashima]

@Icelander

define exactly what you wanted while you were sitting down with plenty of time to write than you did verbally, without time to prep, and probably while being distracted by the active conversation around you while you tried to explain

I didn’t quite make myself clear it seems.

I was screensharing as is usual when we discuss tickets and instead of talking, I was writing the prompt live while my colleagues were watching and even suggesting changes to me. Once I had shifted from trying to explain to writing the prompt we came to a result quickly.

I just find it curious that I felt blocked while explaining things to humans and the block went away when I shifted to writing it down as a machine prompt.

[dscheidt]

I wonder if it’s the same sort of focus shift that explaining a problem to your cat causes.

[Phil]

(vent)

I know that naming things is, famously, a hard problem, but it’s not this hard. Why are these names so bad?! Arrgghgh.

[Phil]

The Cards Await — Deploy Tarot

[yashima]

The cards observe it is Friday. They have not forgotten the Great Friday Deploy of 2021

I did a Hotfix in Production as Senior Dev. Great fun.

[Phil]

For a number of years I was leading a project which, every few years, covered Election Night. There were testing opportunities, but for obvious reasons there was no dry-run for the real thing – it simply had to work on the night. We put a lot of work into building and testing the systems as best we could – and then watched with a sinking stomach as various things went wrong on the night. Most notably, network responses which weren’t even documented as possible weren’t accounted for, and started breaking things.

Writing, testing, and deploying hotfixes to live code in production on election night was definitely one of the worst few hours of my career.

(All subsequent years were flawless, at least…)

[RogerBW]

@yashima

I did a Hotfix in Production

[yashima]

I spent X amounts of time needlessly trying to figure out how to get my tax program running on a windows VM and it was super slow… everything was. I suspected graphics or something weird. I optimized everything, and it turns out Windows Defender is breaking the VM… MEH.

I am so glad my main machine is no longer a windows infested monstrosity.

[pillbox]

Looking forward to hearing about that time NASA got audited by Microsoft and paid a fine for unlicensed Moon Outlook

[Acacia]

[Benkyo]

Damn, just learned that since our mobile carrier stopped supporting 3G this month, Hozumi is no longer able to make or receive calls because her phone doesn’t support VoLTE. Big surprise, had no idea 3G was even relevant to the situation (as her phone is 4G compatible, of course).

Tech advances, aren’t they wonderful?

[pillbox]

This was an issue that we were concerned with back when I worked for Sprint. Sprint used CDMA for 3G but and voice was done via CDMA 1xRTT. Sprint switched to GSM for 4G LTE, and as part of that, the VoLTE switchover was a big milestone (a.k.a. it sucked; as someone with an employee-discount service, I was forced to use it. For the first two years of VoLTE service, I pretty much had to use WiFi calling instead).

I’m surprised you didn’t get nagging letters in the post about it. Sprint had a plan to force all customers to adopt a VoLTE capable phone; the last phase of the plan was actually to just ship flip phones to the last holdouts at little-to-no cost, I believe. I wasn’t there for the CDMA shutdown, so I’m not sure how it all played out for the Sprint-colored customer base once it all became T-Mobile.

[Phil]

Went through the exact same thing over the past week. I took my phone into one of my provider’s shops in person, months ago, to confirm whether it would survive the 3G shut-down without loss of service; they looked and told me it would be fine; and then a week ago I completely lost the ability to make calls or send text messages. (So nice of my provider to fail to provide their shop people with the information they’d need to actually help their customers.)

They spent months advertising the impending shut-down of their 3G network without ever – to my recollection – mentioning the term “VoLTE”, or otherwise suggesting that the thing you needed to stay connected post-“3G” was not “4G”. (Which might explain why the person in their own shop apparently didn’t know this either.)

---

Here’s an email conversation I had with my sister about three weeks ago, after she arrived back in the country:

Her: …also seriously any old mobiles you have lying around. Surely someone must have an old phone capable of “making calls”.

Me: Just for calls? Note: I think phones pretty much need to have 4G support now, so some old phones might not be useful. (Might depend on who the provider is, but mine is shutting down their 2/3G support later this month.)

Her: Yes that is the problem. Mum and dad’s old ones don’t support VoLTE. I have one old phone with me which should in that it’s not too old but is a known black hole in this area… and another which does support VoLTE but the SIM tray is broken so I can’t use it.

Me: I may be able to help, but I don’t know offhand what state it’s in, or if it’ll work with 4G. Or where it is! :). I shall endeavour to find these things out for the weekend.

Her: The problem isn’t 4G, which all the phones in this house support – it’s being provisioned for VoLTE.

Me: I don’t even know what that means.

Her: My hopes are now a little lower… .

Me: I have learned that “The volte is a very small circle that is used in the training of a horse. Of all the circles, it requires the most balance from the horse.”

Her: Correct. I need a phone for niche horse training purposes.

[Benkyo]

Turns out the tech support had misinformed us about what her phone could and couldn’t do, and it was a simple matter of a firmware update to turn on VoLTE. So, problem solved, which is nice. Still surprised we were totally blindsided by this. Also amused it took 9 days before we noticed.

[RogerBW]

Various carriers are turning off 3G support in the UK and it turns out that many “4G” non-smartphones don’t actually work with the super special 4G that one particular provider operates. Even if they have explicitly said “oh yes, that phone will work with our 4G service”. (Since “everybody” uses a smartphone for everything, they just pay up and don’t even apologise. I think they’re trying to forget that any other sort of phone exists.)