Fuck AI

If only computers had a much more efficient and reliable way to tell time

This is exactly what Ed Zitron is talking about when he says AI psychosis is more widespread than anyone wants to admit. Acting like you made a dumb mistake by not constraining your LLM tool when the dumb mistake was thinking this requires an LLM tool and then writing “lessons learned” is cuckoo bananas behavior.

That post reads like slop vomit that could be one paragraph written by a human but for some reason is twenty for the slop parrot.

Motherfucker blew 20$ in a night, and extrapolated it to several hundred bucks a month. All for what is essentially a labeled alarm. You know, something your phone can already do, no AI necessary, for FREE.

This technology is a bad joke. It needs to die.

Why even use an LLM for that? That seems like the completely wrong use-case for an LLM.

Why does it seem like he repeats himself in a slightly different way? Did he get an LLM to summarize what happened, and then summarize the summary? Who talks like this?

This costs so little that my brain would burn more value in noodle calories just doing the math to figure out how much I pay for like 1 joule of electricity.

Why use an LLM to solve a problem you could solve using an alarm clock and a post it.

What an unhinged thing to rely on an llm for.

Had a Cron job running

So they set up a Cron job to ask an llm to remind them of something that the cron job itself could have just reminded them?

Everything about this is so wrong lol

I don't... quite get this. Even assuming the LLM made legit queries, you're ok with paying 75 cents for every time you perform what's essentially a web search? Then add in the fact that it hallucinates constantly and you've got how many times a day your search results are blatant lies that you paid 75 cents for it to tell you?

Bro and their AI never heard of an alarm clock

People who mastered calendar, clock and notes apps in their smartphones be like:

Pairing an automated process with something that costs money without error checking is like putting a credit card on file with a hooker. You're definitely running the risk of waking up broke.

Has this energy

I'm extremely confused. Why is he checking the time every hour 14 times a day? I understand he's trying to test AI out so he's doing something trivial, but I feel like I'm having an aneurism reading this. This is still not an optimal way to do reminders. Am I just really dumb or is this nonsense?

Billions of dollars on LLMs and probably burning $50 worth of resources to get $20, less transaction fees, just to do what basic digital voice assistants could do years ago ("hey Alice/Jarvis/siri/Alexa, set a reminder for nine AM tomorrow called get milk.") and basically any cell phone or PDA could do starting more than two decades ago... (set alarm>09:00>name: get milk>save)

I wasn't sure why this was so funny but then I thought about how most posts regarding AI I see are complaining about how its been shoehorned into every fucking product whether or not it makes sense or even completely destroys the functionality of the product. And then, on top of that, you have to pay for it, like when apple can't fix siri so they ask if you want to hook up a chatgpt not to access your data.

And thats what's so funny. This guy very consciously did that to himself. He drank the AI kool aid so thoroughly he made his own subscription service to... Set a timer? The concept of a to do list, or reminders or alarms, is something we've generally nailed as a species. Sure, there are ways to improve it, but he certainly isn't finding any of them and paying for the privilege. Shocking stupidity.

You thought computing had become too bloated in recent times? Now you get to kill a tree a day to perform the same job as a 0.10€ microcontroller

Jeezes fuck, all that trouble to conclude the obvious.

Buddy, humanity survived without computers since forever… maybe you know, dial it back just a smidge.

Amateur hour over here.

Always put guard statements in front of the "expensive" code path.

AI is like an extremely slow and expensive database call. Or a really expensive crypto transaction (since AI bros and Crypto bros are likely the same people).

Guy apparently has never heard of a fucking clock.

Didn't even write the tweet by himself holy shit

Can someone more technical than me correct me if I'm wrong here, but … isn't scheduling alerts for things something that has been in PRE-FUCKING IPHONE ERA DUMB PHONES EVEN!?

Like … am I taking crazy pills or something? Computers (and later phones) have had schedulers and reminder apps since before I was born (1966) right?

This is like a CS 101 concept. How do AI bros not know how to use an API other than Anthropic’s?

https://sunrise-sunset.org/api

Wow, such innovation, very impressive! I've never had anything that reminds me of shit and makes me go broke, too! That definitely justifies wasting energy, water, and all those GPUs and RAMs!

I've looked through a few pages of response on Nitter, hoping to find at least one sane response, and I didn't know what to expect, but holy hell. One guy. And their reply rather looks like a quote (maybe some docs, if that exists in LLM land) rather than full condemnation, before going on a trip in the next reply:

But the rest? Absolute zilch, noone full-on telling that guy what an absolute smoothbrained fuckwit they are. Instead most of the replies are either giving "optimization" advice, thanking them for the oh so helpful warning or roasting their "prompting" ability. It's quite horrifying, actually.

Imagine if every time the kids ask you "are we there yet" during a long road trip you'd be charged $0.75.

How does it tell that 30 Minutes have passed to know to check for daytime again? Better ask every second, if 30 Minutes have passed. Now to fix the problem of knowing if a second has passed. Oh boy the future is great!