FishFace

Yep, I’ve never experienced that kind of anti AI zealotry IRL. (Because if you interpret someone saying “only online are people extreme” as “let’s brush off the concerns” that is zealotry)

Imagine finding satisfaction in bashing an operating system …

…

It took me about 30 seconds on linuxmemes to find this image

Maybe there are better photos somewhere but the ones in the article look nothing like tyre tracks.

No-one is mentioning the damage to companies exporting to the US, who are even less likely to get anything back than ameridan individuals

Heh, yeah. When I was at school, security was an afterthought. You could run a .reg file and give yourself any privileges. Bypassing the filters involved going on babelfish and translating from Chinese into English.

… commenting from my work laptop, YouTube playing on another screen …

So the interesting line for me, that many comments obviously didn’t read, is:

Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school

So there clearly is something up with computers in school. But this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the kids who are getting their brains fucked by addictive algorithms are then more likely to fuck about on school computers. This line:

Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.

Suggests it’s not “tech” but “distractions enabled by tech” which is having the effect, i.e. if school laptops and tablets were locked down you wouldn’t see as much of an effect.

Wait, companies make more money off high paying customers?! Who knew?!?!

“there’s tons of election fraud and these people didn’t find it so they need to be fired”

You need to use your imagination a bit more buddy.

They will definitely pretend to count the votes.

I looked this case up. It doesn’t seem like the government could do anything useful - it’s not like you can extradite him.

No facts please, we’re furious

Then someone will open a competitor. Petrol distribution isn’t a natural monopoly, so without some kind of underhanded behaviour, that scenario won’t last.

Trump could ban new competition but he could also ban competition today if he wanted to.

The fact that the air remains a constant temperature means the model is assuming infinite airflow.

Whether the hardware to run it is on-prem at a large company, on local machines or in data centres, it is still a big increase in the demand for that hardware, and that costs money. Your argument doesn’t work, because it relates two unrelated things:

1. how energy intensive AI is compared to other activities
2. how hardware intensive AI is compared to current hardware usage

It should be clear that one can be high while the other is low.

The rest of your comment became a highly passionate rant instead of a reply to what I said about energy usage, which I will chalk up as yet more evidence that

people hate it with an irrational passion. So they criticise all aspects of it, whether reasonably or not.

Oh, I don’t think it should be opposed, I just think it should be viewed with deep suspicion.

I think at this point it’s speculation. Your speculation is a reasonable one. But with Trump, I think there’s another very reasonable one: he’s a natural fascist so they’re just trying to buy a future unspecified favour. Maybe it’ll be to avoid having to give up a bigger stake in the future, or to avoid a big tax, but they probably don’t know exactly. I’d compare it to all the techbros donating to Trump’s campaign and turning up to his inauguration - they don’t know exactly what they’re getting out of that deal, but they know they’d rather pay homage to the king than be on his shit list.

So to me this is evidence of corruption, even without a known deal having taken place. They know that Trump plays favourites with the enormous power he wields, so they want to be the favourite.

I literally described a situation in which AI has a practical use. If you’re going to disagree, fine - but at least acknowledge where the disagreement is instead of replying without (apparently) having read my comment.

I believe I read somewhere that AI capacity and hence potential usage is going up about 12% per year. That could turn out to be a lot but it would have to go on for a long time to end up significant compared to the actually large polluters.

AI energy usage for a single person is (very roughly) comparable to having the TV on or playing a video game on a high spec PC. Even if the only benefit it gives anyone is the same mild pleasure you get from watching TV, we accept that using energy for these purposes is worthwhile. So, despite this topic recurring constantly, no-one has given a sensible reason why we should particularly call out AI for its energy usage.

Of course, there’s a readily available explanation for why people do it: people hate it with an irrational passion. So they criticise all aspects of it, whether reasonably or not.

The contribution of AI to greenhouse emissions is tiny compared to the actually significant contributors - like transportation and rearing animals.

And with that 90% of people have stopped reading and thing I’m an AI booster so congrats for still being here.

I also think the utility isn’t going to be for techbros primarily. Software developers can already do the things that LLMs are good at, and are better than LLMs in important areas. But think about writing a 500-line script to extract data from a database and do some simple data analysis on it, then displaying it. Software developers, again, can do that easily (it’d probably take a few hours - more if it’s more complex or if they polish it).

But most people cannot. Yet there are a lot of situations in business or in government which could benefit from being able to say, “show me the average of (X) over the last 10 years, stratified by variables A, B, C.” And AI will do write a script to do it (so the actual computation is not done with unreliable bullshit) with ease. The script will have way too many comments, may well be laid out in a nonsensical way, and may reinvent the wheel stupidly, but in my limited experience of asking the LLM we have at work to do things like this for giggles and because I’m not paying for tokens, it will do it correctly.

I’m not saying to buy the hype, but if you think it’s useless for everything but “making it easier for some techbros” you’re just as immune to evidence as the hypesters are.

This is true but you also have to ask what OpenAI is getting out of this deal. They’re not just going to give away stock for nothing, and the US government doesn’t have a policy of helping itself to portions of companies.

So OpenAI thinks it’s getting something for this. Whatever that is, it’s bribing the government to get.