Gregory's ServerBoost if you want less generative AI in your tech in 2025.
 111 comments
@da_667 Part of this is to demonstrate the magnitude of negative sentiment. Truly, I've not seen a disconnect between consumer preference and corporate strategy this wide since, I dunno, Windows 8 removed the Start menu. But that change didn't endanger the internet or, like, the power grid. @mttaggart I do have to admit there have been some instances where I've passed code to microsoft's LLM, whatever they're calling it now to help me understand how certain bits of code work, and it can be useful as a force multiplier, but I can't stand that its being forced upon us all everywhere we go. Like, I have no idea where the model got its data. In google's case, It could have consumed a well thought-out bit of documentation, a blog post, or a collection of shitposts from Reddit. @da_667 I would say code is where the utility is clearest, but the cost of making the tool valuable is utterly bananas compared to the value—and that's for quite the niche, to say nothing of everywhere else it's being mindlessly jammed. @mttaggart I cannot fathom the fact that there are companies that are like "yah, sure, spinning up our own private reactors and diverting major water supplies to power a datacenter are a perfectly rational venture to create a computer program that cannot tell you how many r's there are in the word strawberry." @da_667 This is what I'm saying. And this isn't VC money; this is public corporation strategy intended to maximize shareholder value. How is that happening? The only conclusion that makes sense is that these execs are bought in on the (let's call it what it is) religious belief, the article of faith, that this technology must be pursued at all costs. And I guess, in MS's case, hopes that everyone's models will live in Azure data centers. @mttaggart we are the same mind on this, I think. There' is this willful suspension of disbelief that if enough tech heads say "AI is the future" it'll manifest into something useful. But all it is so far as a massive money sink. @da_667 So I'm writing this up properly, but MS Earnings Statements show their adventure has not been punished by the market. In the case of cloud, growth outstripped everything else, so I guess everyone really is drinking the Kool-Aid. @mttaggart correlation isn't causation, I think. There is a lot of sleight of hand going on here with Microsoft having tried to charge for AI services (e.g. github copilot) and just integrating AI into cloud services that nobody asked for (e.g. Microsoft 365 co-pilot). They aren't charging money for these services, just shoveling them out with whatever other stuff MS customers buy. @da_667 I'm not saying they're directly profiting from the models. I'm saying they're not being punished for it in any meaningful way. But it's worth noting that end users are not the customers for their cloud services, and we actually have reason to believe that those business may indeed want AI for the same religious reasons.  @mttaggart End users are *definitely* not the (primary) customer for Microsoft's cloud products. Some end users are also customers, but they get what the big-ticket customers ask for and pay for. Aunt Jane isn't going to have any meaningful impact on the direction of development of anything at Microsoft, even by getting their top-tier subscription. The CTO of a Fortune 500 company very well might. @da_667 @mttaggart I can’t get over how •••EVERY••• company is like, “ooh! Ohh! Me too me too let me get on the bandwagon too!!!” I am being force-fed technology that I don't want. I am paying to have my life and personal privacy streamlined into the coffers of ... I don't even know who... or where. It's a morass and I just want to unplug them all. It used to be such a great tool. Signed, not an engineer @mttaggart GenAI can't even get facts straight with regards to code where there's a clear "correct" answer and any number of incorrect answers. I recently discussed a coding problem with a coworker, who (I didn't know) fed some prompt relating to it into ChatGPT and came back with a "ChatGPT says $feature can be used for this". Knowing this not to be the case, I replied nope and a link to the documentation for $feature showing it can't. Response was "I know, but I thought maybe". ARGH! @mttaggart @da_667 I’m running it locally on my machine for coding purposes, because I don’t consider myself a coder but I need stuff on occasion. I bring it a concept of a plan and it spits out a plan, then I use it to assist with fine tuning that plan until the tests run correctly. I don’t think I can say I’ll use it less, but I have migrated to small, local, and focused usage. I’m not playing with it for fun.  @mttaggart @da_667 this almost exactly. Fisting it into everything like a toddler with superhuman strength doesn't mean it fits. It just means you've destroyed a lot of things to fist the "AI" into something that didn't need it, and no one wanted in the first place. There are finite, useful, things it can do. It's not worth the wholesale theft of artistic IP, resource costs, and the hit to every facet of data privacy everywhere.  @mttaggart @da_667 This is what happens when your innovators prioritise profit over making a useful product or service. The state of American (and Western) AI would be much further along if it, like the Internet and GPS, were government, not corporate, ventures. It's so bizarre since there's actual opinion polling showing that AI marketing claims cause the average person to want the product less than if it had none and meanwhile almost everything down to the chicken package in the grocery store now is telling you it's AI powered somehow. I'm not even joking about the chicken btw, it just turns out it's referring to their website having a chatbot which you can ask for cooking advice and meal ideas, once you read the fine print.   @mttaggart I want less but it won’t happen. Even though AI can be used for all sort of cool stuff, generative AI in the form of bs writers is shoved in all sort of products. Just now I saw an ad from WiX about using AI to write a web site. I mean how useful is that? No useful at all. @mttaggart I use it on some photos to clean up distractions to make art not reportage. Not going to rule out other uses for other people, but I do move on from obvious synthetic time-wasting crap. My biggest concern is hearing of people in important positions, so self-important that they think their time is so valuable that they need not read the things they are paid the big bucks to read and instead on the summaries imagined for them with generative AI. The devil is in the detail.   @mttaggart I try very hard to have none of it in my tech, but I want less of it in all the tech beyond my control that I am forced to use.  @mttaggart "Then he said to the rising tide, "You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master." But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king's feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless..."  @mttaggart Curious question: What does it change if I boost it (consuming energy) ... are the big bosses on Mastodon to read it? 😉      @mttaggart I actually want more. If it is implemented well and used well, it will make life easier for everyone.  @mttaggart I want quality content. While often that doesnt come from AI I wouldnt care if it did, in theory. @catsalad This post is the social media equivalent of carefully bending a fork to fit perfectly in an electrical outlet, then willingly inserting it while standing barefoot in a puddle.   @mttaggart It's been 13 hours since you posted this, and it is still blowing up!  @mttaggart @catsalad I saw it and thought "Surely he doesn't actually want a boost from everyone who agrees." Then I saw it boosted enough that I had to jump on the bandwagon too. :heart_cyber:  @mttaggart I have it on my iPhone 13 Pro, which is significantly prior to Apple Intelligence. (I mean the one that groups notifications from apps and delivers them all together at one time of day- not the horrible new thing that tries to reword your notifications that’s been all over the news) @SimonCHulse Okay, but getting like 3k notifications all at once isn't a solution either. @mttaggart I do agree, being able to group notifications by the post they are related to would be great but the way that notifications on phones work, you’d have to have buy-in from the OS, to go back and edit the notifications that had already arrived with the new information.  What I hate are the obvious AI written soft news articles online. Bing and Google will give you a list of the days news (often what gets pushed are articles on topics you've read before, which is annoying.) And as you click on an article you find garbage that was written by generative AI. Paragraphs simply tell you that you've come to the right place to read about XYZ.. and information that reads like it came out of reddit with no substance and a lot of rambling.  @mttaggart I want open source generative AI which is small enough to run on my local GPU and only runs when I explicitly start it. @mttaggart Baby If you want to have live sex with me, then you join my personal profile.  @FritzAdalis @mttaggart Command 'none' not found, but can be installed with: apt-install less @FritzAdalis Okay totally unrelated but now I'm imagining creating local aliases of common tools for service accounts like @mttaggart @mttaggart The one use case I've found Generative AI helpful in is a tool built for public defenders called Justice Text that takes video or audio, applies speech to text to make a time stamped transcript, then applies GenAI to summarize and point out important moments. The times it works are fantastic in helping pick up important bits. The times it doesn't, well I was going to have to sit and watch the video anyway.  @mttaggart I've come to like AI as a side chat kinda thing to help me with basic grunt work. But I HATE AI in my editor auto completing stuff for me  @mttaggart I think there is one thing that's especially lacking in Generative AI, a feature that'd fix it for everyone if present. Garbage collection.   @mttaggart  @mttaggart I'm far from being a LLM-enthusiast but I like using #Mistral Le Chat to explain me topics outside of my field, eg. from math or physics, when I need a simple and plain explanations instead of Wikipedia entries, that often are too profound and complex for the need.  @mttaggart All that generative AI will feed back into trainingsets. Lovely, what could possibly go wrong?  @mttaggart I'm frankly baffled by how warmly AI generated images seem to be embraced by people I follow. 😅  @mttaggart I don't boost "boost if" posts as a hard rule, but yeah, hard agree on the sentiment. for so many reasons. @gsuberland Much respect, neither do I. I just needed direct evidence of negative sentiment.  @mttaggart We need to make a list of tech companies that have pledged NOT to incorporate genAI, now that I think of it. The list I bet will be so small that you could probably count the numbers on one hand @mttaggart I don't see the need for internet connectivity in household appliances either, and the whole buying digital things, like books, songs and the like but you don't own them... Or buying cars that have functions that don't work... Unless you pay extra to unlock them, should be banned  @mttaggart my main concern is while its awesome imo, it's how much data mining that might be going on behind the scenes that I'm unaware of.  @mttaggart I get some friends saying that the same stuff was said about computers, internet, even the printing press. But AI feels quite different to me. I resent the unpaid plunder of people's work for training data for machines that belong to billionaires. That has strong echos of colonial appropriation of art and knowledge, except we're all now in the colony being appropriated by a small class of essentially stateless billionaires. 1/2 @mttaggart In classic economic terminology, it is rent seeking on an immense scale, and that historically has led to war. But my main objection, that overshadows all else, is that it makes an absurdity of any climate action. None of our coal port blockading, recycling, growing food, conserving water repairing, bicycling, electing Greens or Teals is going to have any impact at all on shooting past 3 degrees into a hellscape while there is AI. We can't have AI and a planet to live on. 2/2 |
@mttaggart I already don't care for it terribly much, but seeing google vomit an entire page of a computer taking clumsy stabs with a lack of links to the sources it citied to make that clumsy guess is so goddamn irritating.