"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I grew up before playing snake on a phone. Anything good the world will rape till it's evil. We can't have good things. It's not worth it. Shit look what happened to democracy.
Honestly the older I get the more I want to move off the grid and disconnect from all this mass marketed manipulation of the human species.
This is so true. I'm nearing 40 and becoming more and more frustrated with (mainly) horrible UI redos that move shit around every 6-9 months.
I can't think of computers as tools anymore because every revision of their OSes just completely obliterates the muscle memory that I've built up from decades of using them.
This is the worst! I can't stand it when I open up some software and I have to click through some bullshit tour of new things I don't care about.
It's one of the reasons I'm happy I took the time to learn emacs. The UI has been consistent for decades and it works the same across all platforms.
It’s horribe, and getting worse every year.
I got a new company laptop after 2 years with double the RAM, and it still takes ages to open powerpoint or any other program. And not just Windows: I remember a time where iOS was snappy and smooth, not laggy and bloated. Web also sucks, even with adblocker. I try to find movie tickets, have to click a million times through a mobile-optimized page, instead of getting an overview of the weekly schedule like 10 yrs ago.
One of the best things about my workplace is a lean, no nonsense custom software that integrates HR, controlling, and some other admin things in one place. It looks like it was developed by somebody over a long weekend in the early 2000s. But it’s fast and it works, saving me a ton of admin time every day as a team lead.
We are switching to SAP next year.
It's not that people are unimpressed, it's that the product you're shipping is:
It's fucking cool that computers can talk now. Sadly, they are not super smart.
Perhaps a solution is to just replace the CEOs,not being all that smart is practically part of the job description.
Even my Linux PC talks to me through the terminal. It is just that it is very specific and technical but at the same time isn't invasive and hogging my resources.
Being unable to get my computer to do what I want because I don’t know how it works is less frustrating than being unable to get my computer to do what I want because •it• doesn’t know how it works.
Exactly why I'm switching to Linux!
LLMs ARE impressive! Impressive as hell! But the use case is limited and I do not want that shit jammed in my OS.
Tell ya what. We're going to shove them in your OS. We're going to put them in your tv. We're going to put them in your toaster. We're going to put them in hour bed. Yeah. We're going to track when you sleep. We're going to put it in your toilet. Then we're going to report all that information to advertisers, who will sell you fiber suppliments, and white noise machines.
And we'll make you get a digital ID. And track your every movement. Even your bowel movements! And then we'll have microsoft clippy ask if you'd like to schedule a colonoscopy!
Welcome to the future! The future is dumb....
“Profoundly impressive”?
I find nothing profound about it at all. It’s a devastating resource hog, it’s wrong a lot of the time, it’s manipulated by its owners to deliver the messages they want or avoid inconveniencing them, it lends itself to the further stupidification of humans who are too lazy to fact check(that’s almost everyone), it’s used to make video lies in the face of objective truth and sexually humiliate women.
Honestly, fuck AI.
Why it couldn’t be strictly deployed as a backup to human skill such as looking for cancer, trying to formulate better drugs, etc. instead of the invasive garbage it is being used to get rid of humans.
Ai is great. It can detect cancers earlier. It can optimize traffic lights to reduce travel times and accidents. It can calculate folds of proteins. It can find and summarize tiny details from huge sets of data.
Fuck cramming it into my operating system though. I don't need an LLM to run a query on Lightroom and give me a summary of the application and suggest how I can download and install it when it is already installed on my system and I just want to filter my list of apps so I don't need to scroll halfway down my programs list to open it.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is the people selling it.
Making sand output what feels like a real conversation is impressive. Making nuclear bombs is impressive. Bad things can be impressive.
Current AI image generation is really impressive if you compare it to previous ones like openais gpt2
Its unimpressive when compared to humans, who manage to do so much
I was having a conversation with my brother who was like: "I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster."
And like, that's cool I guess, but it's a computer generated summary with no soul. I recently bought a book on a super niche subject, because of course there's a researcher somewhere who writes stuff like that, and it's so much richer than any AI could generate.
Basically, replacing human art and research is a huge loss, because we'd no longer be talking to one another. I want to hear about niche topics and look at art from people who can think and dream and are passionate about it. No matter how impressive AI will get, we shouldn't end an intergenerational conversation that has been going on for millennia.
/rant
“I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster.”
"And as a bonus, AI will withhold crucial bits of information, make up others, and then shade this twisted, regurged slop with whatever bias suits its owner, so I can walk away confident I have seen a thorough treatment of that subject and not need any further information at all. Win/win!"
(Yeah, I know that's not what your brother said, it's just what I hear when people genuinely rhapsodize about the bowdlerized half-digested shit they get from AI and think they actually got what they asked it for, assuming it exists to serve their own needs and not its masters.)
Totally agree with every word you said. At this particular point, I consider AI to be a net loss to humanity: unreliable, untrustworthy, unregulated, slurping up water and energy on an already warming planet, fed with literally stolen material and not satisfied even with that, killing websites and hogging bandwidth, pushed into every corner of our digital lives regardless of what we may want or need, and designed above all else to hoover up salable data on individuals while capturing as much manual searching and learning as it possibly can to ensure that the flow of information remains in the control of big data.
“I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster.”
These kind of arguments always remind me of this Alanah Pearce video:
"But anytime that I ask it about a topic that I don't really know anything about, it just teaches me so much. It's actually just the topics that I do know things about that it tends to be wrong on."
Excellent video btw, if anyone hasn't seen it yet :)
I love the fact that the idiot reckons he can just bluster his way out of this. People are really upset about the decisions Microsoft are making, and it's not as if they don't have competition. His response to all of this is to quadruple down on his already brainless decision.
No company in history has ever deserved to lose as much as Microsoft has.
If every single screen produced between 30 and 25 years ago just so happened to have a Snake game you had to look at every few minutes, people's (rightful) impressedness would turn into equally rightfull unimpressedness bordering on disgust.
It's not LLMs technologically that's unimpressive. It's shoving them down people's throats.
Sometimes less is more.
Never been a better time to ditch Windows.
Which has pretty much always been the case
Reminds me of an old saying my father once told me:
The best time to ditch windows was 10 years ago. The second best time is today
LLMs are the lava lamp of computing.
They are provably less random than a lava lamp, though. And also not very pretty to look at.
They consume a lot of energy for an extremely narrow use case. Output is still random. Companies such as Cloudflare will try hard to find a use for them when a better and extremely cheaper alternative exists, such as weather sensors.
Imagine if Nokia pushed Snake as hard as Microsoft is pushing AI.
Lots of tech and science is super cool. Time dilation and its compensation is incredible. I don't want that to be the main focus of my phone or OS, but I'm glad we use it for GPS satellites. It's not a multi trillion dollar industry that should take up a sizable chunk of energy usage, nor should it be a large percent of US GDP.
The whole demo about this was so stupid. The user said "the text on this website is to small, I cannot read it", and the ai points out how to click through the windows system setting to find the UI scale option which was at 150%. Then it suggest to set it to the current setting of 150% because there was a label "recommended" on it.
It's a fail on so many levels. Why could it not just set it without telling the user to "click here" through 5 different dialogs and windows? Why set it to the same setting it already has? Why not set the browsers scale if the user said "this website is to small"?
They just want to stuff ai into everything without knowing what problem they need to solve.
He might read it, but he's got a lot of money telling him not to listen.
They're going to keep doing this, because they essentially have a monopoly. Apple is the only real competitor, and they're paying Google for AI now, so same-same.
I think Linux on desktop is at about 3%, but rising lately. That's not enough to change their minds, but it is a good alternative. Linux Mint is where I've been for the past year and a half. As long as you don't absolutely need Adobe or AutoCAD products, etc., it's a stable, and useful alternative.
Valve is making good progress on pushing Linux. I think other companies could also follow suit. The only real reason Microsoft is so dominant is because windows comes preloaded.
We’re also unimpressed by his performance, so…
Brother, no matter how impressed you are/aren't with "AI", just make it optional! Remember when people flocked to a product because of how good it was, and how much it improved on things? Maybe your product isn't so self-evidently great as you think it is.
Every other update in ANYTHING has this shit shoveled at us. My god it's getting so annoying. I had to look up how to get my search bar to stop freaking asking me to ask Google AI about my search! Every goddamn search!
Well I'm not really impressed. Its nothing new. Just LLMs. What just cause tech bros put a fancy title on it im supposed to be impressed? I've been using Akinator for well over a decade.
If Microsoft's AI actually worked I would be more impressed but it "hallucinates" so often that it becomes nearly worthless.
It's all hallucinations. Sometimes the hallucinations are close enough to reality to be useful. Sometimes they're close enough to be plausible while also being wrong. Sometimes they're fucking ridiculous.
This "AI" technology is shit because it can't tell the difference.
Shit human pushing shit tech that makes people stupider, encourages them to kill themselves, worships fascism, and destroys the planet. Yeah, wow, go figure.
Always seems to be the people who understand computers the least that are tasked with selling these products or managing the companies they makes them. By these products I do of course mean AI and microsoft
