Comment on Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release
irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 days ago
All things must pass. All things must pass away. ~ George Harrison
I look back over the years when I first discovered there was a thing labeled a computer as a yongster. I remember the curmudgeons, scoffers, and nay sayers talking about how this ‘fad’ called ‘the computer’ and subsequently ‘the internet’ was all just a waste of time, and that all of us nerds and geeks would soon see the stark error of our ways. I even had an employer tell me, ‘Buy something off the internet? <scoff> No one will ever buy anything off the internet!’ and then he launched into a ‘Why, back in my day we …yadda yadda yadda’ diatribe.
I look back and wonder how far along we’d be in solar power infrastructures had a lowly peanut farmer not been religiously and hatefully ridiculed for installing solar panels in the White House. Sure, they were inefficient but it was the concept, the idea, that yes this can work with some further tooling and technology. I look back even further in history and pick out Fulton’s Folly and how he was lambasted for his stupidity, thinking he could put a steam engine on a boat and make it a viable form of transportation. It became a huge boon to commerce and travel up and down the Mississippi, and subsequently spread to other areas. I think about our early steps into space travel and how there were massive amounts of vocal opponents to this waste of energy and tax dollars. Yet, even to this day, we still reap the rewards of that technology in our every day lives. So much so, that we never stop to think about it.
I’m not here to say that AI in any of it’s many forms is the golden goose or the egg. It is fraught with problems, some of which are glaring, and it needs some heavy governmental regulation. I, like many others, have concerns about AI coded projects and the safety and security thereof. However, this knee jerk reaction to anything AI reminds me of so much of history, in that, the once disdained has now become so common place, as to be taken for granted.
Really, after all this years of computer technology and the internet, what good came out of it? That it can outweigh the bad.
People are dumber and misinformed. Social media is a cesspit of fakeness and product advertisements. Software improves profitability and takes away jobs. Unparalleled potential for mass surveillance.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 days ago I can think of hundreds of innovations and good. Take just the medical field. Huge advances in attending the sick, the diseased. Yes, all technology wields a double edged sword. When the first Ford rolled off the assembly line it was a huge boon to travel, tourism, commerce. What were the downsides? Well, it’s noisy, pollutive, the processes to extract it’s fuel is very volatile. Yet, you get in your car and go to the grocery store, work, or even vacation without thinking about such things for the most part. The efficiency, the decrease in pollution, emissions, etc. are somewhat a thing off the past. Yes, there are massive improvements we can make, especially in renewable resources and electric vehicles.
Those who pine for ‘the good ol’ days, usually do so with thick rose colored glasses.
Yes Ford. That guy was pretty sweet. When the assembly line was first implemented by him. An innovation that eventually lead to unchecked industrial growth and waste production, greed intensified.
On a surface level. Yes there were many good innovations, or rather many good business opportunities. On one hand the health care is better, on the other hand no effort seems to have been made to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place. It’s a catch I guess.
Anyway those innovations will become annulled when no one will be able to afford it.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 days ago Ford didn’t create greed. Computers and the internet didn’t create hucksters, neither did it create gullible people blown around by the wind without a compass or direction. Fools and their money have been parted for millennia.
no effort seems to have been made to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place
I would somewhat disagree with you in that no effort has been made to keep people from being sick. That’s a pretty bold statement. However, a large portion of the medical industry (which, yes is subject to greed) is not really about the curative and more about the maintenance. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You can instruct people on healthy living which will extend their life and the quality thereof, but you cannot force them to do so. That is, and has been a huge issue. People line up at the hospital in large instances because they did not even attempt to lead a healthy lifestyle. They are an encumbrance in a way, because those who do live healthy lifestyles are penalized for those who don’t.
Without being overly dramatic, I can confidently say, that if it weren’t for medical advances, I would probably not be typing these words. I did everything I could to live a healthy lifestyle, but suffered a TBI in a fall from 2 stories up. I have a medical polymer implant in my right frontal lobe due to cranial damage. They scanned the hole in my skull, and 3D printed a replacement. Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle. I’m 71 now. That’s pretty damn awesome in my book.
I often wonder this. I love computers and the internet but when it comes to quality of life I don’t see much imporvement over when I was young and the world was still analog. I mean I would not want to live in a time before electricity and definately before plumbing and sewer. a nice metro line is great and well as geared bicycles. libraries to. can’t really say much from the computer age really is all that great.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago Open access to information is one thing I love about the internet, I can find information (of varying quality) about anything I’m interested in without having to look through a library or get a massive encyclopedia
Trying to remember how the world was before computers and the internet. It was really hard to look up information yet that you didn’t have in your own home. You had to hop on the bus and go to the library searching through several books. That’s one Google search today. You hadn’t had the access to music, films, and so on. You can listen to nearly every modern song on Spotify versus those few CDs you had on your home or the songs that were playing on the radio. If you want to watch a movie you can do that. You do not have to wait until it’s showing on TV with at breaks or go to some kind of rental store. You want to go somewhere, just fire up Google Maps, versus buy and paper map, figure out where you are, and still get lost. Global communication is free. Just remember how expensive long distant calls were and how you lost contact to people who moved away.
The internet and computers really have made everything easier.
No absolutely not everything is on spotify. And Google is not a search engine anyway. We gave them the privilege of their brand becoming a verb and now they’re a corporate surveillance monopoly. We absolutely botched it here. Same with facebook.
We can search to get a quick superficial view written by whoever and now AI vs reading through a book to get a comprehensive view by someone who studied and has a reputation to defend. One doesn’t substitute the other. The internet merely allowed for the lazy masses to pretend they could get away with not reading, which worked just as well because their boss needs his productivity/wages ratio in check.
Computers have been a mixed bag
Entertainment is better.
Education is far better. (you can learn about anything you want right now for free)
Racism was on a slow decline. (communication, education)
The economy is far worse
The job situation is worse.
I’d say cars are better, being more efficient, but the SUV loophole fucked that.
Yeah I can’t even say that. There is more entertainment and its a lot more accessible. Better special effects are great but that is so low on quality of life things I don’t care to lose it. Education is kinda the same. Not really better but more access to information but less information is high quality as a percentage of what you have access to. Honestly cars themselves are another problematic technology to begin with.
“IA” have very few applications besides faking things. It fakes someone having read that mail, it fakes having wrote that mail, it fakes art, it fakes “helping you”, it instead do fake job for you.
It’s the “IA” spite can look too spiteful, but there’s a key difference I think between “IA” and actually useful technologies: A computer helps you do things, not only work, better and faster, “IA” do it for you. You don’t “learn” to use an “IA”, you do have to learn to use internet and a computer.
“IA” is less akin to something like a computer and more like NFT, Radium Watches, etc. “Innovation” for the sake of selling instead of progress. Has is uses? Of course, but it create far more problems that it tries or even cares to solve and it’s inclusion on everything just for the sake of selling just screams like plastic, radium, Teflon, lead on gasoline, etc. The promised miraculous new invention. Sooner or later we are going to pay for it. Again. All of us.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 days ago Since we are in a technology forum, a few quotes:
“Frontier AI models have given defenders the ability to find and fix vulnerabilities in open source software at a speed and scale that were never possible before. That’s an enormous opportunity for defenders, and Akrites ensures we seize it together. Maintainers deserve a coordinated partnership, not a flood of reports. AWS is committed to securing the projects our customers depend on and building this shared infrastructure alongside the community.”
– Matt Wilson, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Amazon Web Services
“Open source projects collectively underpin much of the internet, and the existing model for coordinated disclosure has been outpaced by how quickly AI can now find vulnerabilities. Getting ahead of that requires the industry to coordinate on findings and get fixes upstream before they’re disclosed and exploited. Efforts like Akrites drive this level of coordination at the scale and speed this moment requires.”
– Jason Clinton, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, Anthropic
“The software supply chain is only as strong as the upstream it draws from, and we see how thin that layer really is. As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven’t touched a project in years. Akrites gives the industry one coordinated way to fix vulnerabilities upstream before they’re exploited, with maintainers still in control. Now the work is making sure there’s always someone on the other end to catch them.”
Sooner or later we are going to pay for it. Again. All of us.
Yes, we will pay for crawling out from the primordial ooze billions of years ago. Everything is finite.
"IA is very good"
I don’t know chief. I get your point, but quoting the people who benefits the most out of it seems like a conflict of interest.
DuPont said Sprays weren’t that bad for the planet, backed it up with a DuPont financed “research” and used DuPont financed media.
So, here is another quote:
Dario Amodei — quote on opacity: “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”
I think is very different paying for building a society more complex than what we can understand and 10 million deaths by lead poisoning because some rich family preferred even more money over the life of everyone else. But you do you. The way you think “we will pay wether we like or not so we better make it count and take the biggest debt we can” is what have the world rotten as a whole.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 days ago The way you think “we will pay wether we like or not so we better make it count and take the biggest debt we can”
There was a tinge of snark in my comment. Sorry it didn’t follow through. In the end, we are but a minute speck, but our over exaggerated sense of self importance hinders us.
Despite all our rage, we’re still just rats in a cage.
We still have no clue how magnetism works either lol.
These LLM are just new technology, they had the same complaints about cars a hundred years ago too, and yes lots of people die in car crashes nowadays and how many more from the industry and pollution? But we move forward, humanity makes progress most centuries, idk maybe this century is one of those steps backwards, but we gotta stop acting like everything that happens today is unprecedented. We’re a blink of an eye in terms of just human history much less cosmic history.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Computers make money. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc all proved that. They can sell you products that people felt like did things for them. It didn’t make infinite money.
How much money does ChatGPT make? How much money does Grok make? How much money does Copilot make? How much money does Claude make? LLMs and generative AI don’t make money. If they did, AI CEOs would be boasting about the massive profits coming in from AI.
I would agree with you. At this juncture AI a loss leader, much like putting a man on the moon was a loss leader. How’s that technology benefiting you now? Significantly. I’m in no way glossing over the issues with AI. It has real world problems, and needs intervention, serious intervention.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
AI was already doing good before ChatGPT and LLMs like folding proteins which shaped human history. I am really drilling down on LLMs and the sell to CEOs that generative AI can replace employees or that it is worth transforming the economy over. It’s not. Computers had a dotcom bubble which made computers useful by creating the infrastructure for engineers to be produced by universities and companies to use the networking tech. Its not like video games were keeping computers alive. See: Nvidia before bitcoin and ai made them the most valuable company ever
Absolutely. AI is not really a new phenom. ChatGPT and LLMS are.
I certainly do too.