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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#301

Post by jjgreen »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #104
bdw5204 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days. I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation. They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you" They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and…

[dead]

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#302

Post by BiteCode_dev »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #299
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #289

The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:

torrent

It did, just not the usual people. If you go to yandex, you can see that the russian mafia makes good money with trackers.

I love torrent, but it's legal used are cripple by corporate infra, so it's mostly florishing thanks to illegal stuff paid by shady ads.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#303

Post by jjgreen »

spaqin wrote: post #141
ninetyninenine wrote: post #127

AI is not overhyped. It's like saying going to the moon is overhyped. First of all this AI stuff is next level. It's as great, if not greater than going to space or going to the moon. Second the rate at which is improving makes it such that the hype is relevant and realistic. I think what's throwing people off are two things. First people are just over exposed to AI. So the overexposure is causing people to feel AI i…

Seems like an apt comparison; it was a massive money sink and a regular person gained absolutely nothing from the moon landing, it's just the big organization (NASA, US government) that got the bragging rights.

Gil Scot-Heron nailed it https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annota...

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#304

Post by whstl »

forgetfulness wrote: post #300
automatic6131 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends Oh, look, you've normalized deviance. All of these things are screaming red flags, the house is burning down around you.

This sounds just like a typical startup or small consultancy drunk on Ruby gems and codegen (scaffolding) back in the Rails heyday. People who don’t yet have the maturity for the responsibility of their roles, thinking that merely adopting a new technology will make up for not taking care of the processes and the people.

Bingo. The founders have no maturity, responsibility and believe they "made it" because they got somewhere AI. Now they're pushing back against AI because they can't understand the app anymore.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#305

Post by jatora »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

I hope I am never this slow to adapt to new technologies.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#306

Post by oytis »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #302
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

torrent

It did, just not the usual people. If you go to yandex, you can see that the russian mafia makes good money with trackers. I love torrent, but it's legal used are cripple by corporate infra, so it's mostly florishing thanks to illegal stuff paid by shady ads.

> If you go to yandex, you can see that the russian mafia makes good money with trackers

What's the business model though? Most Russian torrents are about giving away copyrighted stuff for free.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#307

Post by dandellion »

highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

Even if you consider a car a general purpose technology, Tesla displacing GM is a car displacing a car, so it's not really an example of what you're saying, is it?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#308

Post by Retric »

friendzis wrote: post #214
highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies. What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level. At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enoug…

> pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option

New technology often has ‘new’ tradeoffs, are GPU’s are sill only situationally better than CPU’s.

DC fast charging is several times more expensive than home charging which heavily influences the economics of buying an EV without subsidies. Same deal with plug in Hybrids or long range batteries on PEV, if you don’t need the range you’re just wasting money. So there’s cases when an unsubsidized PEV is the cheapest option and that line will change over time even if it’s not going away anytime soon.

AI on the other hand is such a wide umbrella it doesn’t really make sense to talk about specific tradeoffs beyond the short term. Nobody can say what the downsides will be in 10-20 years because they aren’t extrapolating a specific technology with clear tradeoffs. Self driving cars could be taking over industries in 15 years, or still quite limited we can’t say.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#309

Post by shevy-java »

It is also a tool to cut costs for corporations.

The whole word is not only now a buzzword too but one that thinly tries to disguise some underlying strategies. And it is also a bubble, part of which is currently breaking - you can see this at the stock market.

I really think society overall has to change. I know this is wishful thinking, but we can not afford those extra-money to a few superrich while inflation skyrockets. This is organised theft. AI is not the only troublemaker of course; a lot of this is a systemic problem and how markets work, or rather don't work. But when politicians are de-facto lobbyists and/or corrupt, then the whole model of a "free" market breaks away in various ways. On top of finding jobs becoming harder and harder in various areas.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#310

Post by FridayoLeary »

everdrive wrote: post #270
portanus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.

That's like saying ball point pens are pretty terrible. They are after all rubbish at writing. Nobody ever correlated popularity with quality.
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