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Any company right now: You want some AI? Me: Not particularly, thanks Company: Got it, here's a big huge heaping helping of AI Me: No thank you please Company: Make job go fast, do vroom vroom on your career: Me: I don't really… Company: We put AI IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT Me: Kinda but not really Company: Here's AI tools for your software engineering Me: These are really obtrusive and in my w… COMPANY: YOU WILL LOVE OUR AI Me: … 84 comments
 @f4grx Same. I want to go back to making useful things with Machine Learning.  @veronica @tjdraper I struggle to imagine a world where someone could invent a universal function approximator without a lot of people finding it very useful. The mind-boggling part is where someone thought "The next word that a sycophantic redittor would most likely type" might be a useful function to approximate. @jeremy_list @tjdraper I said *I* have no idea what to use it for. So I never have.  @veronica @tjdraper yeh, the most useful use-cases seem to be stuff like DLSS on video cards, enhancements for video/images, or even using it to help with scientific analysis. Basically anywhere that you can throttle it down to very simple sets of rules, it works wonderfully. Outside of that it's a theft and bullshit machine  @tjdraper even @nextcloud could not help themselves. I wish there was a nextcloud app to hide all this shit, even if it's disabled. The thing is, there's an effect where nontechnical people will start believing the ads after a time. So when @nextcloud has to compete with Microsoft/Google/etc for contracts from big companies/governments, at some point some idiot in a meeting will say "yeah but Google Docs 365 has the AI thing, we should take that one because it's super awesome", and then nextcloud needs something to point at so they can say "yeah no problem dude, we got that too" and not loose the contract. @guenther @tjdraper @nextcloud I know that, so I dont complain that much. I also have to be honest, all the nextcloud AI stuff is disabled by default. Thats important and good. Nextcloud does VERY important work and I am thankful for that.  @guenther @f4grx @tjdraper @nextcloud Before we were all dunking on AI folks were using LibreOffice to take notes at conferences. Being all buzzwords the type ahead would be pretty likely and folks marvelled at the speed.   @tjdraper COMPANY: It costs us money to run these AI servers. We’re increasing your subscription.   @tjdraper I wish my employer understood this as well as I do. We have yet another Town Hall today where they'll run the usual agenda -  @tjdraper @neurovagrant honestly. LinkedIn has a prompt now: "Start a post, try writing with AI." why the HELL would I want to do that?   @researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant let's be fair, most of the posts on LinkedIn already read like they were AI generated, with all that hustle culture bullshit @http_error_418 @tjdraper @neurovagrant This is true. If it's not the most autistic-hostile place on the Internet it's because other places said hold my beer @http_error_418 @researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant  @researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant To blend in with the herd, avoiding predators? Have you read most LinkedIn posts?  @pseudonym @researchbuzz I am still working on breaking down the "OMG AI is amazing" thing within my working group (and looking for another job), but I think my boss had an epiphany when we watched a video together that was all about tying tools together to take a prompt and automatically post the resulting LLM generated bullshit to LinkedIn and a few other sites. @danlyke @pseudonym there is a reason I’m gettting preoccupied with tightlydefining search spaces….  @danlyke @pseudonym @Researchbuzz "plausibly accurate" is not a product anybody should sell, certainly not by putting more untrue crap online. 2 examples of LLM content in the wild: A kite museum in Texas was said to have a display on "The Age of Mastodons" because the LLM didn't know how the word "kite" modified the word "museum". A garden center had a review of a night club in their Facebook feed because the club was called "Dahlia". @Jennifer @tjdraper @neurovagrant I got a notification that it was so-and-so's birthday, so I went into the LinkedIn Messenger to send them a happy birthday note. The message box was populated with "Happy Birthday" and the message "Write your message with AI." WHAT? It's a birthday message. It's HAPPY BIRTHDAY. My time is not so freaking valuable that I cannot turn a few neurons into a coherent happy birthday greeting without the help of a computer. Sheesh. @Researchbuzz @tjdraper @neurovagrant To fool the hiring AI your future employer will use into thinking that you're active in your community.  Me: Look I can help you with this... I have a... You: glares at me. Me: ...Large Language Model that can interpret the reasoning behind your thinking... You: now narrowing your eyes... Me: ...and suggest other potential outcomes.   @tjdraper fortunately, not that it's relevant since I retired, carpentry has very little opportunity for AI to intrude itself into lives. Not much use for IT in a hammer or a saw. @capnthommo @tjdraper But only, if they are "analog". If they were electrical, AI could improve the rpm to match the task at hand and you wouldn't have to think of how to handle it properly. /s  @tjdraper what's better about this is: > We put AI IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT they did not put AI in your mouse drivers or even an api client to speak to an AI, they just put a web view of chat.openai.com into the mouse drivers. such low effort it's laughable. @tjdraper    @tjdraper Engineers and content people share the same pain. It's slowing me tf down!!  @tjdraper my employer sent me an email yesterday: Technical writers should learn how to be prompt engineers! Here are some unpaid professional development seminars about it. So far, I can quietly ignore that. At some point, though, I will likely feel forced to tell them that I never want to put myself in a position where a future client (or employer!) thinks I'm capable of working with a large language model.   Now, have an LLM write this. See, the give away is that this is direct, forceful, and satirical. Default LLM output is wishy washy and bland. I swear, this is all Clippy's revenge on us for not letting it help us write our term papers. Badgey from lower decks  @tjdraper Just as kind of joke, asked Gemini to make a CLI tool to base64 a JSON file or back for nodejs. It pooped out a piece of code with a tiny and fatal error. ... Just be sure to click 'accept' on the EULA! Nothing weird in there at all! @tjdraper I had to check about the mouse thing. https://robservatory.com/remove-the-ai-bloatware-from-logitechs-mouse-driver/ Prego spaghetti sauce: now with AI! Your mouth won't believe what it tastes! Or will it? We're not sure. Haha! They're just finishing what the advertising industry started. Somehow we went from "would you have 3 minutes to participate in this survey" to "maceration in our thorny product is mandatory so we can feed your exudate to the machine. The machine is always hungry. The machine must be fed. To serve the algorithm is to serve humanity."  @tjdraper Someone at GitHub wouldn't stop emailing me about incorporating AI into our development workflow. There are ethical concerns, security concerns, environmental issues, just, so much. They also do that to your clients.  @tjdraper I know, right? Open Google maps: wanna try our maps AI? Me: are you going to make some place up for me to go? How is this any different from your usual WTAF directions?  @tjdraper actually they do something different. - Hi Big Company, did you know with OUR AI you can fire 20% of white collars, you know, the expensive ones. - Really? - yes, we did this for your competitors. We cannot share details, but look how many people they fired. This is how they behave today. @tjdraper Logitech pushing AI features you have no way to opt out from through the software that helps you set mouse sensitivity got me really pissed last week... @tjdraper this seems like the appropriate reply guy opportunity to point out that the movie HER features Joaquin Phoenix enjoying an upper middle class lifestyle as a GREETING CARD WRITER during a time when AGI exists. Sure, that's the joke. But this needs to be pointed out more often.   @tjdraper you'd think that if AI were as good as it's claimed, it could have predicted that many people would hate having AI jammed down their throats, and so it wouldn't have happened.  |
Gregory's Server
@tjdraper I still have no idea what to use all this so-called "AI" for. I'm happy to use new things if they are useful. This mostly isn't.
Of course, Machine Learning has been around for quite a while and has a lot of use cases. I have used it successfully to enhance video. But the stuff they're pushing out now is 99% utterly useless and only exists to inflate stock prices because we're in a bubble.