Are you sure? The rich have always wanted slaves they could control. All of this is mainly to end the dependence in the masses to create society. I highly suspect a coordinated depopulation event if AI becomes sufficient enough.
I highly suspect a coordinated depopulation event if AI becomes sufficient enough
Inb4 someone mentions climate change is already well on its way...
The timing is suspiciously perfect that humanity is committing global suicide at the exact same moment it's creating machine life not dependent on the environment.
Just look at what happened to the global horse population after the automobile was invented
I don't even think anyone is clear on what they are supposedly working toward, which appears to be some kind of singularity AI god a la Hyperion's TechnoCore... this shit is feeling more like Christiantiy every day.
Nobody has provided ‘AI’, at least if those characters are intended to be an initialisation of Artificial Intelligence.
Whenever anyone is impressed by the function or output of a LLM to the level they’re convinced it’s a representation of intelligence, their input and opinion of the targeted subject should be summarily dismissed, and if they persist, ridiculed.
Nobody asked for any of the tech we have. That’s kinda the point. It didn’t exist
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.
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 really wanna punch this asshole. Just once.
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.
compared to many LLMs, I'd prefer an application default to "I don't know / can't do that" than the absurdly frequent lying that's prevalent.
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.
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.
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...
so people were asking for linux for decades
find "$path" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -e "$what_to_look_for" /dev/null
Yeah that, but with natural language input and output. To me the (mostly) natural language is the most impressive part of generative AI.
Self-hosted LLMs are neat and private, if you (already) have the hardware/budget and some cheap (solar PV) surplus juice to drive it.
oh so yours is trained on ethical sources? you compensated the creators for their work and did so with their consent to machine training?
Do you know anyone doing all of that? Running a local model on off-grid power?
What would you like to know about it?
I glossed over it the other day here -
https://aussie.zone/comment/24336560
From go to woah (including the compute), total project cost is about $1400 USD / ~$2K AUD. I realise I have the privilege of claiming that's not a lot, but for a hobby spend that makes me happy / does useful stuff (see TV example above), it's not a lot.
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:
factory reset and reinstall the workarounds - 2-3hrs of pain-in-the-ass fuckery, but it wouldn't be the first time.
crawl the net decoding cryptic error codes.
take it in for repair (good luck with that).
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.
You managed to set up that tech stack but needed an agent with unrestricted access to figure out the time was wrong 😂
There are skill issues and a lack of imagination here but it's not from people dismissing the use of LLM...
Using a sledgehammer to crack a wallnut can be satisfying :)
Besides, the kids are always finding fun and inventive ways to break the TV, so I figured set it up once and then let the bot handle it.
Twelfth Doctor: This is Clara, not my assistant. She's a... Some other word.
Clara: I'm his carer.
Twelfth Doctor: Yeah, my carer. She cares so I don't have to.
I get doing things because you can, that doesn't mean it's not wholly unsuited to the task and massive over kill that you only use because either 1. It's self hosted so you are already paying for it or 2. It's super cheap. You likely wouldn't entertain such a set up if you were paying the true price for training and running the models.
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.
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.
Lots of folks asked for AI, but not like this!
Better take than their last one on AI
Oh, and the AI boom / bubble also shows that our ultra-wealthy don't actually know what they're doing. They got lucky early on, learned to be ruthless and anti-competitive, and then eventually got rich enough that they failed upwards.
This is a recurring rant of mine that commonly talks about crunching, RTO mandates and the failure of upper management to actually manage their human workforces.
I remember after the rise of social media, the world was always going towards decentralized finance, blockchain and many other things. Hell even Meta burnt massive cash in metaverse which supported cryptos. But after Covid, the whole AI episode started playing out of nowhere, and even now, the whole push around it just feels unnatural, almost as if staged. Today's so called AI success is 30% based purely on merit and 70% based on coordinated media management and unsoliciated offerings of desperate investment.
The innovations in AI/ML were always part of the modular infrastructure, specific to the enterprise level products and not su much for the retail users.
I think the idea of decentralized finance was to normalize company scrip again.
Now that AI can be used to track and geofence workers, you don't actually need to get rid of the USD. You just need to have an AI flag every transaction that happens 50 miles outside your registered address to be considered fraudulent and rejected. The anti-fraud infrastructure is already there.
I think the idea of decentralized finance was to normalize company scrip again.
It also makes regulatory scrutiny even harder, enabling many traditional methods of fuckery which have been made illegal in other contexts.
The whole idea behind defi isn't just minimizing frauds; it's literally to decentralize the monetory system and giving the control in the hands of people. The last thing people need is another layer of data collection on top of it.
But... But... Will nobody think of the stakeholders?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
