The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • The backlash to this is going to be fun.

    In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

    It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

    It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.

    Here’s three practical examples:

    1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can’t use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
    2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a “must check” pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I’d probably have missed them.
    3. [Note: reported use.] I’ve seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

    None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).



  • It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

    Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

    Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

    Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

    I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.



  • You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

    1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
    2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
    3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
    4. Left microblogging altogether.

    But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.


  • My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.

    Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.

    But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.

    And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.



  • The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker […]

    This example is perfect - native teachers (regardless of the language being taught) are often clueless on which parts of their languages are hard to master, because they simply take it for granted. Just like zoomers with tech - they take for granted that there’s some “app”, that you download it, without any further thought on where it’s stored or how it’s programmed or anything like that.


  • As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.

    [Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).

    Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.



  • This is bad on three levels. Don’t use AI:

    1. to output info, decisions or advice where nobody will check its output. Will anyone actually check if the AI is accurate at identifying why the kids aren’t learning? (No; it’s a teacherless class.)
    2. use AI where its outcome might have a strong impact on human lives. Dunno about you guys, but teens education looks kind like a big deal. /s
    3. where nobody will take responsibility for it. “I did nothing, the AI did it, not my fault”. School environment is all about that blaming someone else, now something else.

    In addition to that I dug some info on the school. By comparing this map with this one, it seems to me that the target students of the school are people from one of the poorest areas of London, the Tower Hamlets borough. “Yay”, using poor people as guinea pigs /s



  • I’ve seen your post. Ouch - you stumbled upon some nasty circlejerking there. On multiple levels.

    Plenty people here expect you to treat their “vision” as above everything else. Including your agency (“free will”), issues that you might want to solve, etc. That makes them unable to tell the difference between “criticising Apple” (a fair thing to do) versus “treating someone who bought an iPhone as an emissary of Satan” (what they’re doing against you).

    To make things worse plenty muppets there are putting words in your mouth, regarding Samsung vs. Apple.

    If it’s any consolation, it isn’t just Lemmy. The whole internet of the 20s feels like this nowadays.

    TL;DR: I know that feel, bro.



  • I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just “pissed off redditors”. (I have further reasons for that, but they don’t matter here.) As such I’ll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

    The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It’s hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

    Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it’s tempting but it wouldn’t help if the person doesn’t know about Lemmy already.

    Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

    It used to be like this. “Stumbling” upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.