Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 430 posts

Re: This is not the future

#321

Post by kahmeal »

jrowen wrote: post #306
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale. For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive…

> Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of…

> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.

You are describing two different advertising strategies that have differing goals. The billboard/tv commercial is a blanket type that serves to foster a default in viewers minds when they consider a particular want/need. Meanwhile, the targeted stuff tries to identify a need you might be likely to have and present something highly specific that could trigger or refine that interest.

Re: This is not the future

#322

Post by bcrl »

terminalshort wrote: post #188
munificent wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person . I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers . If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.

I would be fine if data centers paid the full cost of their existence, but that isn't what happens in our world.

Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the long term. The pollution from building semiconductors in servers and GPUs that will likely have less than a 10 year lifespan in an AI data center as newer generations have lower operating cost. The cost of water being used for evaporative cooling being pulled from aquifers at a rate that is unsustainable because it's cheaper than deploying more expensive heat pumps in a desert climate.... and the pollution of the information on the internet from AI slop.

The short term gains from AI have a real world cost that most of us in the tech industry are isolated from. It is far from clear how to make this sustainable. The sums of money being thrown at AI will change the world forever.

Re: This is not the future

#323

Post by Terretta »

shadowgovt wrote: post #201
Terretta wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nature . Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?

Models are emphatically not nature. They are at best an attempt to use our tools of reason and observation to predict nature, and you can point to thousands of examples, from market crashes to election outcomes, to observe how they can be flawed and fail to predict.

> the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and they're going to react to incentives

= “nature”, if you're an evolutionist

as for models, all models are wrong etc.

Re: This is not the future

#324

Post by BloondAndDoom »

intended wrote: post #277
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

As someone who spends quite a bit of time sketching and drawing for my own satisfaction, it does matter to me when something is created using AI. I can tell whether something is a matte painting, Procreate, watercolor, or some other medium. I have enough taste to distinguish between a neophyte and an expert. I know what it means to be that good. Sure, most people couldn’t care less, and they’re happy with something t…

I mean we have already stopped caring about dump stock photos at the beginning for every blog post, so we already don't care about shit that's meaningless, let's it's still happening because there is an audience for it.

Art can be about many things, we have a lot of tech oriented art (think about demo scene). Noe one gives a shit about art that evokes nothing for them, therefore if AI evokes nothing who cares, if it does, is it bad suddenly because it's AI? How?

Actually I think AI will force good amount of mediums to logical conclusion if what you do is mediocre, and not original and AI can do same or better, then that's about you. Once you pass that threshold that's how the world cherish you as a recognized artist. Again you can be artist even 99.9% of the world thinks what you produced is absolute garbage, that doesn't change what you do and what that means to you. Again nothing to do with AI.

Re: This is not the future

#325

Post by munificent »

terminalshort wrote: post #188
munificent wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person . I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers . If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather live in a world with lots of artists making art and sharing it with people than a world full of data centers churning out auto-generated content.

Re: This is not the future

#326

Post by acessoproibido »

always_smiling wrote: post #296
lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Just objectively false and assumes that the path humans took to allow this is the only path that unfolded. Much of this tech could have been regulated early on, preventing garbage like short-form slop, from existing. So in short, none of what you are describing is "inevitable". Someone might come up with i…

Which is exactly what happened though? I never engaged with most of what the author laments - one thing i found hard was to exist in society without a smartphone, but thats more down to current personal circumstances than inevatibility.

My personal experience is that most people dont mind these things, for example short form content: most of my friends genuinely like that sort of content and i can to some extent also understand why. Just like heroin or smoking it will take some generations to regulate it (and tbf we still have problems with those two even though they are arguably much worse)

Re: This is not the future

#327

Post by ericmcer »

rng-concern wrote: post #176
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

We lost that like 100 years ago. Sitting and watching someone perform music in an intimate setting rarely happens anymore.

If you listen to an album by your favorite band, it is highly unlikely that your feelings/emotions and interpretations correlate with what they felt. Feeling a connection to a song is just you interpreting it through the lens of your own experience, the singer isn't connecting with listeners on some spiritual level of shared experience.

I am not an AI art fan, it grosses me out, but if we are talking purely about art as a means to convey emotions around shared experiences, then the amalgamation is probably closer to your reality than a famous musicians. You could just as easily impose your feelings around a breakup or death on an AI generated classical piano song, or a picture of a tree, or whatever.

Re: This is not the future

#328

Post by acessoproibido »

throwaway613745 wrote: post #286
lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

You're taking the meaning of the word "inevitable" too literally. Something might be "inevitable" in the sense that someone is going to create it at some point whether we like it or not. Something is also not "inevitable" in the sense that we will be forced to use it or you will not be able to function in society. We do not need to tolerate being abused by the elites or use their terrible products because they say so…

But you can just say no?

What i dont like about this sort of article is that it fails to come up with _any_ meaningful ideas on how to convince others to "just say no"

Re: This is not the future

#329

Post by ajkjk »

doesnt_know wrote: post #311
chaseadam17 wrote: post #218

Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't. Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food too…

Obesity rates have never been higher and the top fast food franchises have double digit billions in revenue. I don’t think there is any redemption arc in there for public health since the 90s.

those statistics really gloss over / erase the vast cultural changes that have occurred. america / the west / society's relationship to fast food and obesity is dramatically different than it was thirty years ago.

Re: This is not the future

#330

Post by ericmcer »

herpdyderp wrote: post #190
rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

On the other hand, I prefer playing video games against AI because human skill disparity almost always ruins PvP. Though really I simply prefer co-op.

There is also something personally ego-shattering about getting destroyed by another human. If I died 10 times trying to beat a boss in a game I wouldn't care much, but if someone beat me 10 times in a row at a multiplayer game I would be questioning everything.
Post reply on HN