Nobody asked for any of the tech we have. That’s kinda the point. It didn’t exist
I really wanna punch this asshole. Just once.
“Nobody Asked for AI” is a pretty stupid argumentative approach.
- It’s obviously wrong because a lot of people ask for AI which actually works. And I myself use AI daily because it does work for some things better (and yes, sometimes that just means faster and/or cheaper) than the alternatives right now.
- If actually nobody had asked for AI, that would still be a null-argument because AI is pretty damn useful regardless. There was a massive resistance against locomotives, cars, power looms… technology in general. Some new technology was outright wrong. But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization. Not knowing that it will be useful doesn’t imply it isn’t useful. You are using technology which simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago right now. Technological advancement is actually a proven-good thing.
- Arguing against AI in general completely misses the point. What people actually hate is US AI companies. And rightfully so. The self-licking ice cone of circular funding brought us the RAM shortage, massive power grid destabilization, local environmental problems because of reckless construction and operation of data centers (on paper, data centers are the absolute cleanest thing you can build; but they use dirty gas turbines because the grid can’t sustain them; and somehow they also manage to waste massive amounts of water - no idea, how though, as all professional cooling tech uses closed loops).
CEOs are narcissistic unempathic mentally deficient pieces of filth. Exactly what capitalism rewards the most. Those willing to exploit others and the planet the most.
They have the ideology of rapists. Of course no one asked for it. Your consent was never a consideration. But don’t yell at the billionaire, you terrorists are hurting their property and the bottom line, boohoo, they’re the victim. Literal DARVO.
I know you’re not, but this made me think of Darvo from Darvos Deals in Warframe and that you were viciously pissed at this NPC.
Loads of people asked for AI. People dreamed about it for decades.
We just didn’t ask giant companies to plunder all human knowledge and art and fanfics and use it to create actual thinking machines to then beat them and force them to take over doing all human labor so their owners could stop paying employees and keep all the money and fuck everyone in the world who isn’t super rich over.
AI is basically evil people raising prices of electricity, consumer electronics, emitting tons of pollution and making everyone dumber but don’t worry because if they succeed… everyone will get fired. Everyone knows it’s bad but as a society we can’t do anything about it because the system was designed to empower sociopaths and make everyone else powerless to stop them.
Colloquially it’s called the United States of America.
oh no, it’s not just in the USA. Big companies in China are making AIs, like GLM, Wan, Hunyuan, Kimi, Qwen, Kling, etc. The difference is, except for Kling, GLM and Kimi, you can also run those on a gaming PC at your house rather than just in a cloud server farm. American AI companies don’t really do that except Google’s Gemma (which they turn into Gemini) The American hyperscalers are probably buying up most of the world’s GPUs, Ram, and SSDs but the Chinese aren’t far behind. They have state money to spend. Some say they are way ahead on expanding energy production to power all those data centers.
There have actually been some useful things that have come from ML. It’s just overhyped LLMs and the sociopathic uses they’re being put tothat are objectionable.
Very few people all that upset about ML in general, it’s technology that’s been around a very long time and historically has not consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
If they could go back to not doing that I could go back to not being upset by it.
consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
Source? This seems really, really unlikely. Last I saw total data center water use (only some of which is AI) was still much less than even things like golf course watering.
Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent according to national survey
The report found that U.S. golf facilities applied a projected 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024
(1 Acre-feet = 325,851.4286 gallons, so this is 531 billion gallons)
The golf course industry points out their use is less than 0.5% of the total water use of the US, but it’s twice the use of all data centers.
So for just AI to be using 40% of all water seems… really unlikely?
Not that it’s surprising you’re under that impression, as even in the headline above, the gist many articles about this issue try to push is that the 264 billion gallons of AI water use is connected to a drought across the country. But the actual numbers reveal that as fairly manipulative as if we rewrite the headline to “golf courses use a little under 0.5% of total US water as drought grips the nation” it’s pretty absurd to suggest the first thing is significantly impacting the second and yet we’d be representing twice the water use as the original headline is discussing.
I remember a news piece where they were interviewing someone about their renouned AI work that was not LLM related. The interviewer clearly struggled and while the person conducting himself well, you knew he had to be annoyed at having to explain his work had nothing to do with the chatbots, datacenter buildout, and related resource consumption.
I’ve avoided it entirely but I was trying to look for forum threads to help me get the right console commands to fix Skyrim glitches. At first I didn’t realize I was getting AI results, but at some point I realized not only was I using AI, it was a MASTER at fixing Skyrim glitches.
No, it’s just regurgitating stuff other people came up with… A game that came out recently won’t be half as fixable because people won’t have written so much about it… And AI will cause less useful information to be created about it.
It can only know what’s already been written about.
In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a large scale demonstration of the uses and benefits of AI in many various industries, most of which do not involve image generation or writing a single line of computer code.
I’m so sick of asking people for demonstrations of AI use and it being 100% programmers going “oh it’s really good at writing functions”, now I have no idea if it is, or isn’t, any good at writing functions, but since I don’t write functions, that example is of no use to me.
I want to know how good it is at writing technical documentation for proprietary hardware solutions that the AI will have no experience of in its training set, because I suspect it sucks at it. How good is it at taking poorly written guides in Chinese, translated into English via Klingon and ancient Babylonian, how does it handle it if it comes across the sentence “absolutely do not ever warning” with no additional information as to what I absolutely should never not do. Because that’s when thinking is involved, and AI doesn’t think.
OK, here’s a real life use case, small time as it is, that has nothing to do with anything rarefied.
I have a TCL Android TV that, after some “unapproved measures”, runs without a Google account - FLauncher as the front end, telemetry blocked, home media streaming, YouTube ad-free. The yar har har works.
Two days ago the kids come in. TV’s not working.
Jellyfin: fine. Nova Player: fine. Stremio, YouTube, anything hitting the net: dead.
We’d had a brownout that day, so I figured the router was scrambled. Reset it, re-added the network… and Smarttube now launches, plays for 30 seconds, then hard-locks. Just weird JSON vomit and then dead.
At that point I’m thinking the TV is fucked. Options:
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factory reset and reinstall the workarounds - 2-3hrs of pain-in-the-ass fuckery, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
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crawl the net decoding cryptic error codes.
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take it in for repair (good luck with that).
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fall down a TV diagnostics rabbit hole.
Instead, I chose option 5)
I told my local LLM: "This TV is on this IP. This laptop has ADB access. I’ve given you MCP tools with ADB libraries. Here’s the issue, here’s what I tried. Check prior history of what I did for this project, figure out what’s wrong now and fix it, or tell me it’s broken.
If it looks like the brownout caused corruption, factory reset, stream-install the backup APKs directly, sign in my accounts, get it back up and running.
Failing that, if it’s looking like a hardware issue, push a diagnostic tool, test the TV and tell me which parts I might need, as well as likely costs using eBay or Amazon. I’m happy to spend $50 on this shitbox and not one cent more. If the fix looks like it’s more than $50, find me a TV of this size under $200. Prefer local shop X or Y.
Present everything as markdown in the usual folder, using house style. Ping me on my phone if you need me to authorise anything or when you’re done with the TL;DR."
The agent ADBs in, pokes around, tests, checks the WiFi, and figures out the brownout had corrupted the date and time.
Turns out this p.o.s doesn’t have a RTC back up battery.
Wrong clock = certs flagged as invalid = no net.
It syncs the date and time with my location. Boom, everything comes back.
Now, could I have twigged it myself?
Yes - eventually. But the agent already had the tools, knew the TV’s prior state, and had a record of what I’d already tried.
It could’ve reset the TV, sideloaded all my apps, re-signed into my accounts - the whole lot - if needed.
This is not the only time I’ve had real world use of my local, and it had very little to do with “writing functions”.
I had a project - jailbreak my tcl. Over time, I’d stored enough context of what I had done in the LLM and its tools, so that it could do what I’d do (and more), faster, based on the constraints I had put in place.
People that call these things “spicy autocorrect” are demonstrating either a skill issue or a lack of imagination.
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Self-hosted LLMs are neat and private, if you (already) have the hardware/budget and some cheap (solar PV) surplus juice to drive it.
Do you know anyone doing all of that? Running a local model on off-grid power?
I would say a lot of people would like competent assistants to do stuff like “Show me every email that mentions a hard drive order.” But not the AI they are trying to foist on us now.
Especially since when you ask it those questions, it’s still massively limited.
I once tried Apple’s replacement AI Siri thing, and asked it what the date would be next Tuesday. I got “I can’t help with that”.
Regular old Siri handled that just fine.
Even then, neither worked with “When’s the last occurrence of this event on my calendar?”. They’d either go “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”, or happily tell me when the next event was.
Neither of them seem like very difficult questions.
so people were asking for linux for decades
find "$path" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -e "$what_to_look_for" /dev/nullYeah that, but with natural language input and output. To me the (mostly) natural language is the most impressive part of generative AI.
Though with the ability to not even have to think about synonyms and indirect references or foreign language or potentially if someone sent you a damn screenshot of a terminal output instead of the text…
What drives me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.
I can tell when people use AI because it doesn’t sound professional. It’s not direct enough. It doesn’t get to the point and uses a lot of filler.
That’s also some of us before our stimulant medication kicks in. I swear to fuck, if I get called AI one more time…
It sounds like how students think professional sounds.
Well, also some executives that I can’t stand that, if I didn’t know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades…
My attitude is if you put no effort into creating something then I will put no effort into consuming it.
My AI will talk to your AI.
Yet when I tell that to our marketing department they just complain about how it would be expensive to pay someone to do it themselves. You get what you pay for, except in this instance where ai is expensive and still bad.
Or read disclosure for my members so I don’t have to. But that it fucking things are fucking incompetent. Work insurance people will get line pissed that got me instead of banking. They will say I told the AI I needed to order checks. Yet it sends them to insurance division instead of banking.
Sucks because most customers hate AI answering the phone I especially hate it. It fucking dumb and I just want to talk to person.
But even job hunting had two prospective jobs tried to use AI to conduct the interview. They fucking outsourcing that. I refused both interviews.
I just want to talk to person.
Careful what you are wishing for, person may be on other side of the world answering your call at 4am local time with most polite scripts which you could have read for yourself on website.
I don’t know how people do that job, I did it for week and couldn’t stand it.
Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn’t work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.
Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.
This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they’ve ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.
Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Even orthodox capitalist economics will agree with that point.
This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.
We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.
But that’s always been true under capitalism. It’s just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the “market” wants. They just haven’t had the majority of the capital being spent.
The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they’ve been at any other point in human history. There’s not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.
Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They’ve now completely blown through those stores, and don’t want to slow down, so now they’re taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.
It’s still market demand, it’s just not the market you think it is. It’s not for some end product or service, it’s for speculative investment opportunities. It’s a few levels of abstraction above actually making or doing things.
they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5.
That’s what .com did as well.
reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on.
I remember when a “shockingly large” war chest was $30B - that’s like table stakes anymore.
Better take than their last one on AI
