Replying to @⁨timewarp@lemmy.world⁩

Language is constantly evolving and the meaning of certain terms shifts between eras. Right now everyone understands “AI” to mean the LLM slop factories being forced on the world by a trillion dollars in investment cash. If you want to be upset about that, be upset at Silicon Valley for spending so much of that VC money on marketing to corrupt the public’s understanding.

Also, “Luddite” isn’t the insult you think it is. The luddites were a pro-labor movement, not an anti-technology movement, and many of the labor protections we have today (despite being under attack by big tech) are owed to their successes.

Replying to @⁨timewarp@lemmy.world⁩

So: your point is the usage of AI in common vernacular should not have changed from its meaning 50 years ago, and using it in its modern sense as shorthand for LLMs and generative models is bad.

And your point is also that the modern usage of a Luddite is correct and you should ignore the original group and the conditions that led this group to smash the textiles because the usage of that word changing is fine and we should not look at original usage?

Got it. Words change. Sometimes. And other times no.

Replying to @⁨timewarp@lemmy.world⁩

While this definition isn’t necessarily wrong, it [purposefully] leaves out important context, namely that the so-called Luddites opposed technology and automation due to cuts to their incomes and rights, which were very obviously coming.

If industrial corporations guaranteed to keep all employees, to not lower their salaries, and to maintain the quality standards - the people we know today as Luddites would have never protested.

It was never about technology itself, despite what top Google results or AI summary will tell you. It was about people’s livelihoods, rights and freedoms, as well as quality of the craft.

Replying to @⁨dan1101@lemmy.world⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨dan1101@lemmy.world⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨berno@lemmy.world⁩

This likely refers to the famous fictitious quote from Heny Ford that wanna-be self-important “innovators” like to trot out to show how they are smarter than the customer when they put out some unasked for bullshit.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People like to imagine the car as some miraculous thing no one but a genius could have imagined wanting and the genius descending from on high and delivering. Truth was people could easily imagine and want it, the genius was in knowing how to make what people knew they wanted.

Instead, Henry Ford said: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”

So essentially the exact opposite of “screw the customers, we know better!”

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨crimsonsky@lemmy.world⁩

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Replying to @⁨ignirtoq@feddit.online⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨ranzispa@mander.xyz⁩

Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.

AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.

Replying to @⁨ranzispa@mander.xyz⁩

Yes they did.

People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.

Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,

Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and

Voila ! The internet.

It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.

If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.

Replying to @⁨thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe⁩

I come from a chemistry background. Chemistry is one of the first field in which machine learning was first applied. In fact many of the first algorithms and models have been developed by chemists.

This has been a gradual adoption throughout the past 50 years.

How is this different from your description of the internet history? If anything, internet was much faster than that: it took less than 50 years from the first computer to the invention of internet.

And I’m not even considering the first developments in machine learning, which happened pretty much as soon as computing machines were invented.

Replying to @⁨ranzispa@mander.xyz⁩

Logical fallacy. Just because I rebutted the assertion that no one asked for the internet, does not mean I support the assertion it was being used to rebut (that no one asked for AI).

The internet was absolutely desired and wanted and actively built by thousands of hands in academia as well as privately, it didn’t need to be pushed by corporate interests.

I’m happy to accept that the chemistry research industry wanted AI, I have zero knowledge of it, the question I have is whether this LLM monstrosity is what you had in mind ? I did see an LLM came up with a design (is that the right word ?) for a bacteriophage - is it doing positive things for you guys ? Or is it causing as much confusion as it does value like it does in IT ?

Replying to @⁨thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe⁩

What I’m saying is that also LLMs grew organically. Machine learning developed organically through the years and LLMs are one of the products of such development.

Machine learning algorithms were absolutely desired and wanted, hundreds of thousands of people worked on developing them. It is a very useful technology. If I may list one very useful development: AlphaFold, for which the 2024 Nobel prize was adjudicated.

Now, whether LLMs are useful in chemistry and biology: kind of. Coming up with the design of a bacteriophage is not the first use which would come to my mind. Of course LLMs are being tested for their applications in such domains, but results are in general worse than dedicated models. One area in which I see value is the use of agents in orchestrating tools and analyzing results. Not really in producing new things on their own.

Replying to @⁨scarabic@lemmy.world⁩

What would you like to know about it?

I glossed over it the other day here -

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.

Replying to @⁨eleitl@lemmy.zip⁩

It may sound odd but I’ve heard people bring up the above point a few times. “AI isn’t bad - if you run it on a sustainable off-grid system it’s perfectly fine.”

But I have NOT encountered people actually doing this even once, let alone a few times. That’s why I was asking.

Anything that wastes energy can be recast as harmless if you put it on an imaginary sustainable setup but that just seems like fantasizing.

Replying to @⁨scarabic@lemmy.world⁩

Renewable infra isn’t sustainable, since it can’t be built with renewable energy alone. As such it’s just a fossil multiplier. I make about 2/3rd of my own net power, since my electricity meter is old enough to run backwards. I can’t install more orelse my meter would read negative. I intend to run a Qwen model that fits my 8 GB HBM Radeon card as an experiment during the day, starting end of this month.

If this works I consider running something hotter, and double my PV capacity. Adding AC or an EV would be another option. None of this is sustainable, but not exactly a fantasy.

Replying to @⁨eleitl@lemmy.zip⁩

understanding what standing on the shoulders of giants means.

bwhahahaha. Newton would spit in your face you silly toolbag, how fucking dare you.

who’s doing the inference dummy? and how much local grunt do you have? you running a gb200 with blackwell and graces huh? no you’re not, you’re a fucking casual idiot who thinks his desktop is gonna be his new best friend.

what a maroon

standing on the shoulders of giants to you means someone else stole the training sources. god you’re fucking dumb

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨echodot@feddit.uk⁩

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.

AI Data Centers’ Water Consumption Breaks 264 Billion Gallons in 2025 as Devastating Drought Hits Nearly 63% of U.S.

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.

Barchart.comAI Data Centers’ Water Consumption Breaks 264 Billion Gallons in 2025 as Devastating Drought Hits Nearly 63% of U.S.Americans across multiple states are being urged to conserve water as drought conditions intensify, reservoirs shrink, and utilities issue increasingly urgent warnings. At the same time, a different kind of consumer is quietly demanding unprecedented...

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨echodot@feddit.uk⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a launch 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.

Replying to @⁨echodot@feddit.uk⁩

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:

  1. factory reset and reinstall the workarounds - 2-3hrs of pain-in-the-ass fuckery, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

  2. crawl the net decoding cryptic error codes.

  3. take it in for repair (good luck with that).

  4. 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.

Replying to @⁨Mondez@lemdro.id⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨Mondez@lemdro.id⁩

Actually, I’ve been toying around with doing just that.

github.com/karpathy/nanochat

Given the surplus of power from solar I have, my set up (discussed elsewhere), I can run the training process end to end over about 50 days. It could be fun to make something truly bespoke from scratch.

Returning to my prior example - it was only overkill for this task (and only because the problem turned out to be relatively simple), but I wanted to answer against the claim that people were using LLMs and agents for just programming.

The example I cited IS silly, but it happened - IRL - 3 days ago. I can cite several much more “serious” use cases if you’d like.

On the broader topic of costs: none of us can really comprehend the embedded costs in the things we use everyday.

However unlike (say) the recurring embedded costs of buying bottled water, a cup of coffee or streaming a movie, the costs of my set up are paid once and pay off multiple times.

Ultimately, I get why there’s a FuckAI sentiment… but really we should expand that to “Fuck Corpo AI”. My feeling is that it’s not AI that people are against per se, it’s the corpos and what they’re doing with them. Too much of that gets flattened and tribal.

The “true cost” argument only holds if you assume the only valid infrastructure is someone else’s. I don’t make that assumption, and I’d say that neither do others in the enthusiast community.

The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy. Contribute to karpathy/nanochat development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubGitHub - karpathy/nanochat: The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy.The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy. Contribute to karpathy/nanochat development by creating an account on GitHub.

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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).

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

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.