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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

341–350 of 467 posts

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

#341

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

how about the wheel bicycles sewing machines hand tools musical instruments open radio bands like CB and FRS ham radio (licensing exists but not corporate control) meshtastic blacksmithing glass blowing garden tools propane camp stoves mechanical clocks and watches open source software (the ecosystem overall, not specific projects) email as a protocol RSS SMS as a protocol USB storage devices SIP based VOIP mesh netw…

RSS was such a redundant idea

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

#342
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So their business model is good old conextual ads? That's pretty innocuous by modern standards. UPD: I've checked what ads it shows me on Rutracker - it's VPN services and online gambling. Youtube and Facebook have shown me worse

Online gambling, most of which is about good ol’ money laundering, and thepiratebay seems to not censor their ads at all, so you may get all kinds of scams and malware spread via ads.

I get finance scam ads all day on Instagram and Youtube, so it seems like a wash to me.

If anything I have more sympathy for that mafia.

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

#343

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…

I heard a very similar sentiment expressed as "everything is not good enough to be useful until it suddenly is".

I find it a powerful mental model precisely because it is not a statement of success rate or survival rate: Yes, a lot of ideas never break any kind of viability threshold, sure, but every idea that did also started out as laughable, toy-like, and generally shit (not just li-ion batteries, also the wheel, guns, the internet and mobile computers).

It is essentially saying 'current lack of viability is a bad indicator of future death' (at least not any more than the high mortality of new tech in general), I guess.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…

A contrarian opinion - I also didn't jump the train yet, its even forbidden in our part of company due to various regulations re data secrecy and generally slow adoption. Also - for most seasoned developers, actual dev activity is miniscule part of overall efforts. If you are churning code like some sweatshop every single day at say 45 its by your own choice, you don't want to progress in career or career didn't push…

> Seniority doesn't come from churning out code quicker. Its more long the lines of communication, leading others, empathy, toughness when needed, not avoiding uncomfortable situations or discussions and so on. No room for llms there.

they might be poor at it, but if you do everything you specified online and through a computer, then its in an LLMs domain. If we hadnt pushed so hard for work from home it might be a different story. LLMs are poor on soft skills but is that inherent or just a problem that can be refined away? i dont know

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you wait for dust to settle down? Just curious. Productivity gains are real in current form of LLMs. Guardrails and best practices can be learnt and self imposed.

Whenever I hear about productivity gains, I mentally substitute it for "more time to play video games left in the day" to keep the conversation grounded. I would say I rather not.

If you have two modes of spending your time, one being work that you only do because you are paid for it, and the other being feeding into an addiction, the conversations you should be having are not about where to use AI.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that AI makes annotating/combing through all that data much more feasible.

Can you explain what you mean? The queries in jrochkind1 are not something I'd expect AI (LLMs, I assume) to be necessary for. Too simple and factual. (Maybe just the last one would be where interpretation kicks in—knowing what to emphasize in a summary, describing actions.) Did you have something else in mind?

If you have a bunch of surveillance footage, the bottleneck is your analysts' ability to comb through it. You can sit LLMs on top of faster object detection/identification algorithms to create narratives across your surveillance net that are easy to query, can be overlaid on timelines, etc.

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

#347
I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career.

They think that if an engineer makes $100k, then making a machine that produce the work of 100 million of them, that machine would be worth $10/T per year. This certainly wouldn't be the case as the supply and demand would dictate that as cost goes down, there's going to be more demand, but not to an infinite degree, and the overall contribution to the economic output would probably be within 2x of what we have today, it's just that something that used to cost a lot, is suddenly very cheap and widely available.

There'd be an economic bottleneck somewhere else. I think most people nowadays understand that A: technology in general has hit diminishing returns and B: it has gotten increasingly sinister overtones.

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

#349
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients. Some of us also like the food tasting nice besides the reproducibility of the results.

Like I have said, meat prepared in this way is the tastiest that I have ever eaten, except if you are one of those who like real meat less than the burned crust of meat. Even for the burned-crust lovers, many microwave ovens have lamps for this purpose, but I cannot say whether the lamps are good at making tasty burned crusts, because I have never used them, since I like more to eat meat than to eat burned crusts. Th…

> tastiest that I have ever eaten

Let me strongly doubt that.

> the meat is heated very uniformly

Are you sure you are using a microwave oven at all?

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

#350
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients. Some of us also like the food tasting nice besides the reproducibility of the results.

Like I have said, meat prepared in this way is the tastiest that I have ever eaten, except if you are one of those who like real meat less than the burned crust of meat. Even for the burned-crust lovers, many microwave ovens have lamps for this purpose, but I cannot say whether the lamps are good at making tasty burned crusts, because I have never used them, since I like more to eat meat than to eat burned crusts. Th…

This convo is hilarious, you rock. I'm not surprised someone was open minded enough to master the art of cooking with a microwave. Also there are different type of fast cooking apparatus that are usually reserved for restaurants but I could imagine they might be up your alley. (I can't right now recall the name of such a device but its similar in function to microwave maybe it is a microwave at its heart?)
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