it is fucking priceless that an innovation that contained such simplicities as “don’t use 32-bit weights when tokenizing petabytes of data” and “compress your hash tables” sent the stock exchange into ‘the west has fallen’ mode. I don’t intend to take away from that, it’s so fucking funny
This is not the rights issue, this is not the labor issue, this is not the merits issue, this is not even the philosophical issue. This is the cognitive issue. When not exercised, parts of your brain will atrophy. You will start to outsource your thinking to the black box. You are not built different. It is the expected effect.
I am not saying this is happening on this forum, or even that there are tendencies close to this here, but I preemptively want to make sure it gets across because it fucked me up for a good bit. Through Late 2023–Early 2024 I found myself leaning into both AI images for character conceptualization and AI coding for my general workflow. I do not recommend this in the slightest.
For the former, I found that in retrospect, the AI image generation reified elements into the characters I did not intend and later regretted. For the latter, it essentially kneecapped my ability to produce code for myself until I began to wean off of it. I am a college student. I was in multiple classes where I was supposed to be actively learning these things. Deferring to AI essentially nullified that while also regressing my abilities. If you don’t keep yourself sharp, you will go dull.
If you don’t mind that or don’t feel it is personally worth it to learn these skills besides the very very basics and shallows, go ahead, that’s a different conversation but this one does not apply to you. I just want to warn those who did not develop their position on AI beyond “the most annoying people in the world are in charge of it and/or pushing it” (a position that, when deployed by otherwise-knowledgeable communists, is correct 95% of the time) that this is something you will have to be cognizant of. The brain responds to the unknowable cube by deferring to it. Stay vigilant.
Honestly, overuse of AI in the West is likely going to compound our societal incompetence and accelerate our decline
Yea, it gets said about every generation with a new technology going back to writing, but I really feel like this is the one that will actually sink us.
Every other technology going back to writing still has a learning feedback loop. This particular technology interrupts the learning process and replaces it with what we currently call prompt engineering - a circular self-contained process that is limited by the user’s existing level of learning, does not add to the user’s level of learning, and explicitly prevents the user from doing the learning.
Can this AI power a smart speaker that can actually reliably manage timers and alarms, manage my lights, play music, convert units, and find my TV remote? No?
That’s literally all I’ve ever wanted out of any of this and nobody has been able to pull it off. Every single option is awful, takes like 10 seconds to respond for no reason other than to upload my whole shit directly to the NSA, and has maybe a 1 in 3 chance of being so comically wrong that it’s a nuisance.
“Alexa, set a 5 minute tea timer.” “Buying 5 kilograms of Earl Grey Tea on Amazon.” “NO NO NO NO”
“Hey Google, what’s 1/4 cup in ml?” “Playing the Quarter Life Crisis podcast on Spotify.” “NO NO NO NO”
I’ve got hardware ready to go, but trying to figure out proxmox has me like
If it’s any consolation, I have never used proxmox for it. I’m rawdogging docker on an Ubuntu server
Home assistant has that, and with some knowhow you can change it to whatever you want. My assistant is named Sorcha and has a Scottish accent.
I’m gonna ask my AI what I should do about this.
i’ve yelled at a couple cs students about learning things for real and they’ve at least stopped telling me about it
it’s tolerable to use it to get a lead on something you don’t understand well enough to formulate search terms but you have to do extra work to verify anything it spits out
This is the cognitive issue. When not exercised, parts of your brain will atrophy. You will start to outsource your thinking to the black box. You are not built different. It is the expected effect.
Tools not systems
