91–100 of 105 posts
For the last 4bn or so years we've had reproducing DNA which led onto thinking humans but they get born, thinking and then drop dead a 14 millionth of a bn years later. Now we will have AI mind children that live on indefinitely. It's the biggest change since the evolution of life.
These are poor examples: > Why do I need to know what quarks are, or how steam engines work? Why do I need to know anything about anything? I can just look it up with AI Literally all possible with Google and YouTube.
Go to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same). Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for…
I thought the video images were AI at first but the guy actually does them in blender https://youtu.be/itj2t8Fv8xs?t=2040
It's something I often find when people complain about "even freaking YouTube and their even worse ad feeds" etc., when you look you find all this amazing stuff that didn't exist a few years ago. I mean I'm sure the ad crap exists but I don't really see it due to ad blockers and the like.
AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into Sta…
China manages to have long term planning. The only planning Trump and co do is planning how to line their own pockets.
Remind me of some of the things that Biden himself planned during his presidency.
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Hindsight is 20/20. Past breakthroughs look obvious and immediately beneficial in retrospect. Btw, there were plenty of people who thought electricity or the internet were just toys or fads.
True, but original electricity stayed the same, even the turbine generators still in use are very similar. (Same with steam power, still in use today.) Batteries are improved but general operation is the same. There's many more devices using it, mostly for the better. We don't even know if we want LLMs in more devices. Likewise we likely do not want Internet/email in every toaster. LLMs staying the same would be the…
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity#Cultural_perceptio...
> It is said that in the 1850s, British politician William Ewart Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, "One day sir, you may tax it."
That admittedly apocryphal anecdote is set 30 years before the turbine you mentioned was invented.
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Ok I guess that's where we differ, I don't really find it to be science fiction, the more I use it the system, the more I understand that magic of it, what it's going to do, and I've learned that to get good results, you absolutely have to drive it like almost every other tool. I guess if anyone went into a cave and came out for 5 years things would be like science fiction. FPV drones on the battlefield would be anot…
FPV drones on the battlefield were absolutely obvious. The only strange thing about it was, and still is, that powerful armies of the biggest players were "nah, I'll pass" on this obvious application. Wedding photographer figured out that you can hit people with drones. Farmers figured out they can carry and release significant payloads. Yet for some reason, generals seen them as toys and preferred to stick with thei…
With regards to the models I use. I'm pretty much using Claude Sonnet 4 with Claude Code and Gemini 2.5. In my opinion Sonnet 4 is the most superior model I've used yet, although I've not used GPT-5. Where some of my attitude comes from is even in the way you get used to using differnt models, like you really kind of get a grasp for how to prompt them and kind of know what to expect. That's where I don't see them so much as an intelligence, but an approximation engine. I feel that what many "coders" fail to realize is how extremely common the patterns they're employing to solve a problem are. The approximation engine can see that as numbers, match it and give you a similar eyt slightly modified (to your context) version of what you want.
These models have been trained on probably hundreds of millions or billions of lines of code after all, yet there probably isn't all that much variation in what most code looks like. What you'll notice is that it's horrible at coding in anything it's not trained on. Recently I tried to use it with FastHTML, and it knows almost nothing about it, and the author of that project will even provide you with a context file you can give your "AI" to use so it can "understand" how to code with it.
We also follow like common architectural patterns to get them most out of "AI". We've found that to be very helpful to reduce the amount of random and unhelpful code we get out of them.
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The thinking-averse outnumber the thinking-inclined. They've tried this thinking thing, and want nothing to do with it. They all went to public school, after all, and the rare times thinking happened it was painful and had to be forced upon them. Their ideal of Being is to react to content, experience positive emotional immediacy, or dull their intellects: all feeling, no thinking. They'll win in the short term, due…
They all went to public school?
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Personally I now get my work done in half the time and spend the rest of my newfound time with my family. It’s gonna be hard to convince me that isn’t a fantastic productivity increase.
That's interesting! Historically (at least for the last century or so) we mostly stopped lowering working hours and instead focused on increased output. Eg people still work eight hours a day, but get paid vastly more in real terms than in the 1950s. Instead of working only one hour a day (or fewer years or whatever) and taking a 1950s compensation package. Of course, this is merely a statistical observation. There a…
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It still can be amazing, more amazing than it was in the 90s. You could make a website this afternoon and host it on your phone. But ~nobody can be bothered, because easier centralised platforms exist. The problem, if you want to call it that, is purely social/cultural.
Have you ever heard of Geocities?
I can't tell what your point is.