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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#261

Post by jmull »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

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…

You really think we should all either happily accept AI-generated emails or opt out of having an email address at all?

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#262

Post by babymetal »

brookst wrote: post #216
babymetal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue. Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bot…

Is it specific to AI or have they made other bad UI choices over the years?

Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.

That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#263

Post by nottorp »

bacchusracine wrote: post #116
sagacity wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People didn't even want mobile phones. In The Netherlands, there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative.

>there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative. So people didn't want to be walking around with a tether that allowed the whole world to call them where ever they were? Le Shock! Now if they'd asked people if they'd like a small portable computer they could keep…

Actually iirc cell phone service was still expensive back in 1997. It was nice but not worth paying that much for the average person on the street.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#264

Post by atemerev »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #129
oceanplexian wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. 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.

Sure. Just set the temperature to 0 in every model and see it become deterministic. Or use a fully deterministic PRNG like random123.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#265

Post by throwawayoldie »

windows2020 wrote: post #202
Workaccount2 wrote: post #188

As far as I can tell, the AI-hate is most prominent in tech circles (creativity too, but they don't like media generation, largely embrace text though). It seems here on the ground in non-tech bubble land, people use ChatGPT a ton and lean hard on AI features. When Google judges the success of bolted on AI, they are looking at how Jane and John General Public use it, not how xleet007 uses it(or doesn't). There is als…

Without menus and ribbon panels, how do you discover the capabilities of the software?

Reading the fine manual?

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#266

Post by throwawayoldie »

mat_b wrote: post #228
arnaudsm wrote: post #222

Remembering the failure of Google+, I wonder if hostilely forcing a product to your users makes it less likely to succeed.

Google Buzz is a better example

Was it that one or Google Wave that was supposed to become the dominant form of communication within 5 years? I don't remember much about either one.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#267

Post by throwawayoldie »

iambateman wrote: post #123

Just a quick quibble…the subtitle of the article calls this problem tyranny. 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 po…

> The natural state of capitalism is trying things which get voted on by money

That is what the natural state of capitalism _would_ be in a world of honest businesspeople and politicians.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#268

Post by atemerev »

ruszki wrote: post #260
satyrun wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 75 year old father uses Claude instead of google now for basically any search function. All the anti-AI people I know are in their 30s. I think there are many in this age group that got use to nothing changing and are wishing it to stay that way.

Nothing changing? For people who are in their 30s? Do you mean internet, mobile phones, smart phones, Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit were already widespread in mid 90s? Or are they the only ones who understand that the rate of real information/(spam+disinformation+misinformation+lies) is worse than ever? And that in the past 2 years, this was thanks to AI, and people who never check what garbage AI spe…

In mid-90s, people who are now in their 30s were about 5 years old. Their formative age was from 2005 to 2015, and yes, things were staying relatively the same during this time.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#269

Post by oceansweep »

kgeist wrote: post #142
pu_pe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really great performance! Could you share more details about the implementation (ie which quantized version of the model, how much RAM, etc.)?

Model: Qwen3 32b GPU: RTX 5090 (no rops missing), 32 GB VRAM Quants: Unsloth Dynamic 2.0, it's 4-6 bits depending on the layer. RAM is 96 GB: more RAM makes a difference even if the model fits entirely in the GPU: filesystem pages containing the model on disk are cached entirely in RAM so when you switch models (we use other models as well) the overhead of unloading/loading is 3-5 seconds. The Key Value Cache is also…

Are you doing this with vLLM? If you're using Llama.cpp/Ollama, you could likely see some pretty massive improvements.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#270

Post by echelon »

spacemadness wrote: post #241

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as f…

Companies that don't invent the car get to go extinct.

This is the next great upset. Everyone's hair is on fire and it's anybody's ball game.

I wouldn't even count the hyperscalers as certain to emerge victorious. The unit economics of everything and how things are bought and sold might change.

We might have agents that scrub ads from everything and keep our inboxes clean. We might find content of all forms valued at zero, and have no need for social networking and search as they exist today.

And for better or worse, there might be zero moat around any of it.

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