121–130 of 421 posts
> Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it? Highways.
pretty much the whole population pays taxes
pretty much the whole population also wants tax cuts.
It's kind of insane out there in tax land.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IPv6 adoption is actually limited by network effect and infrastructure transition costs, not lack of end-user benefits - unlike AI, which faces a value perception problem.
ChatGPT has more than 500m DAU, three years after creation. Is that really a value perception problem?
After seeing something like blockchain run completely afoul/used for the wrong things and embraced by the public for it, I at least agree that AI has a value perception problem.
Tyranny is a real thing which exists in the world and is not exemplified by “product manager adding text expansion to word processor.”
The natural state of capitalism is trying things which get voted on by money. It’s always subject to boom-bust cycles and we are in a big boom. This will eventually correct itself once the public makes its position clear and the features which truly suck will get fixed or removed.
I noticed that some of his choices contributed to his problem. I haven't been forced into accepting AI (so far) while I've been using duckduckgo for search, libreoffice, protonmail, and linux.
even ddg has integrated AI now and while it can be disabled, the privacy aspect seems to mean that ddg regularily forgets my settings and re-enables the ai features. maybe i'm doing something wrong here, but even ddg is annoying me with this.
Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…
Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.
Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…
Once upon a time, not too long ago, there was someone who would bag your groceries, and someone who would clean your window at the gas station. Now you do self-checkout. Has anyone asked for this? Your quality of life is worse, the companies are automating away humanity into something they think is more profitable for them.
In a society where you don't have government protection for such companies, there would be other companies who provide a better service whose competition would win. But when you have a fat corrupt government, lobbying makes sense, and crony-capitalism births monopolies which cannot have any competition. Then they do whatever they want to you and society at large, and they don't owe you, you owe them. Your tax dollars sponsor all of this even more than your direct payments do.
Companies didn't ask your opinion when they offshore manufacturing to Asia. They didn't ask your opinion when they offshore support to call centers in Asia. Companies don't ask your opinion, they do what they think is best for their financial interest, and that is how capitalism works. Once upon a time, not too long ago, there was someone who would bag your groceries, and someone who would clean your window at the ga…
https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/7/12/how-much-do-yo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't "Engineering" is based on predictability, on repeatability? LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. Each change to the model impacts how it parses and computes the input. For someone claiming to be a "Prompt Engineer", this cannot work. There are so many variables that are simply unknown to the casual user: training methods, the training set, biases, ... If I get the feeling I am…
> LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. It will spit out the same answer every time. So it’s not an issue with the technology and there’s nothing stopping you from writing repeatable prompts and promoting techniques.
Are you sure of that? Parallel scatter/gather operations may still be at the mercy of scheduling variances, due to some forms of computer math not being associative.
Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…
The OP's point is that increasingly, we don't have that choice, for example, because AI slop masquerades as if it were authored by human beings (that's, in fact, its purpose!), or because the software applications you rely on suddenly start pushing "AI companions" on you, whether you want them or not, or because you have no viable alternatives to the software applications you use, so you must put up with those "AI companions," whether you want them in your life or not.