The News

AI engineers are so hot right now

Google has killed OpenAI’s acquisition of Windsurf by sneakily hiring the AI coding platform company’s employees (The Verge). Google’s hires are the latest in an AI hiring arms race in Silicon Valley, most publicly by Mark Zuckerberg (WSJ, gift link). The Meta founder has been reportedly waving around $100m+ pay packages to successfully snare execs from Apple (Bloomberg, $) and buying companies like Scale AI just to get its workers (Reuters).

The Sizzle: These companies have decided that the top “cracked” AI engineer talent is a differentiator, in the same way pouring ungodly amounts into buying GPUs to power AI training and operation has been. Is it really worth it? It’s clear that top Silicon Valley types see what happened in the mobile race — where Apple and Google are the bottleneck through so much commerce and life happens — and think that AI will be like that, except for even more.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Police are using AI to rewrite crime reports before they look at them

Victoria Police are using generative AI to help rewrite the public’s reports on non-serious crimes before cops see it (IT News). Each year, there’s about 150,000 non-serious reports that come in via phone or online. Now, “human agents” who review the submissions to the digital form can use generative AI to put it into a “short ‘narrative’ format that frontline police are used to writing and consuming”.

The Sizzle: Last year, I wrote about how (now last-gen) AI tools were trialled to see how good they were at summarising submissions to the government (Crikey, $). Police forces and governments get a lot of incoming communication so I get that it’s tempting to use these tools to get through them all. But, even if these tools are accurate, I worry it’s a bad idea because I don’t think jamming us through a machine is going to improve trust in these institutions. (And that’s before we even get into AI tools used by police that seem to hide that they’re being used).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Welcome me to the mini-PC club

I took the plunge and have purchased a cheap lil mini-PC. My main ‘puter is a 2024 MacBook Pro. It’s a beast and spends 90% of its time plugged into a dock, but it’s ill-suited to anything that requires self-hosting because I’ll lug it around to other locations just enough to be annoying.

What are your most useful self-hosted apps? So far, I use Linkding as my own read-it-later service, ChangeDetection to keep an eye on things for work, and I’m planning on running Plex. What else should I use? What do you actually use? Please let me know! Also — this is such a newb question — but what’s the best remote software? I’ve used Chrome Remote in the past.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

A private, personal dream interpreter in your browser

I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of crossover between the “self-hosting/data privacy” and the “dream interpretation” types, but, hey, I thought this was neat: the Starwhale Oracle (Github) which runs entirely in the browser. It apparently uses “deterministic logic” to match keywords to 300 custom meanings.

You can try an instance here (Dream Interpreter). I asked the Oracle about a dream I had recently about my teeth falling out, and it meant an “urgent call for trust amidst uncertainty” 😬. Is that good?

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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