81–90 of 189 posts
Slow?? AI is literally being shoved into everything. It took only several years to see AI being advertised as a magic pill everywhere. It’s not meeting the expectations, probably because of this aggressive advertising. But I would in no way say that it’s spreading slow. It is fast.
I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are…
I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more. I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people. LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a s…
Yes, network effects and hyper scale produce perverse incentives. It sucks that Wikipedia can be gamed. Saying that, you'd need to be actively colluding with other contributors to maintain control.
Imagining that AI is somehow more neutral or resistant to influence is incredibly naive. Isn't it obvious that they can be "aligned" to favor the interests of whoever trains them?
How about: because it's overhyped, but ultimately useless stock bubble prop?
Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…
> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…
If it's a multiplier you need to either increase the requested work to keep the same humans or reduce the humans needed if you keep the same workload. It's not straightforward which way each business will follow.
In contrast to the Economist blaming inefficient workers sabotaging the spread of this wonderful technology, make sure to check out https://pivot-to-ai.com/ where David Gerard has been questioning whether people are prompting it wrong or AI is just not that smart.
My dentist said he uses it near constantly, and so do I.
Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…
> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…
Most of my social circle are non-technicial. A lot of people have had a difficult time with work recently, for various reasons.
The global economic climate feels very precarious, politics is ugly, people feel powerless and afraid. AI tends to come up in the "state of the world" conversation.
It's destroying friends' decade old businesses in translation, copywriting and editing. It's completely upturned a lot of other jobs, I know a lot of teachers and academics, for example.
Corporate enthusiasm for AI is seen for what it actually is, a chance to cut head count.
I'm into AI, I get value out of it, but decision makers need to read the room a bit better. The vibe in 2025 is angry and scared.