MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 13 hours ago:
I have always thought that it makes the most sense to import your non-renewable resources regardless of whether you have them domestically or not. Then, if the SHTF, you’ve got what you imported, the exporters don’t have it anymore, AND you have your domestic sources to develop.
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 13 hours ago:
Schrodenger’s Douchebag: a guy who says something highly offensive to see how everyone reacts, then decides if he’s going to say “Oh I was just joking.” or not.
All the crap they’re doing with downsizing of federal agencies, they just wave a hand without knowing what they are doing and when the protests get loud enough they take it back.
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 13 hours ago:
View from inside the funny farm: I just hope we can remove the head clown and tell the rest of the world “sorry about that, we’ll try to not let it happen again, can we just call a do-over?”
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 13 hours ago:
With 4x as many people, they can be 4x more kinds of stupid…
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 14 hours ago:
My local oriental market has their business up for sale…
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 14 hours ago:
Just give me money, that’s what I want.
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 14 hours ago:
The Drax plan.
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 14 hours ago:
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.
- Comment on Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources. 18 hours ago:
Define stupid: www.google.com/search?q=shopify+financials
- Comment on Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources. 18 hours ago:
Vibe management (and investment) is a time honored tradition. It brings you such magnificent results as Theranos.
- Comment on Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources. 18 hours ago:
We hit rock bottom a long time ago: dealbreaker.com/…/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so… It takes power tools to make progress in the bedrock.
- Comment on Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources. 18 hours ago:
Well, first the CEO is asking for proof of a negative, so anyone with a logical brain cell just has to shake their head and repeat “it’s for the paycheck.”
We can assume CEO means “show me you tried to use AI and it’s not working well enough,” which isn’t all that bad of a directive but it’s got the huge gaps of “do your people really know how to use AI?” and “are they using the correct, latest versions of AI for the task they are attempting?” But, it may stand up a few use cases for AI that would have otherwise used expensive meat sacks to do what must be fairly boring rote recitation work if they can be adequately replaced by AI.
The problem comes when senseless metrics get pushed down that amount to: a certain number of AI projects must be greenlighted, regardless of how dreadful they are in practice.
AI is a tool, it can save labor, it can relieve human employees of tedious work, it can’t do everything. All this “big personality” top level management of large and very large organizations with broad stroke metrics leads to mass stupidity when the underlings blindly follow orders, and I suspect - within its limitations - AI will always follow orders, so getting AI into middle management will only magnify the idiocrazy.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 2 days ago:
We are ants in an anthill. Gears in a machine. Act like it.
See Woody Allen in AntZ (1998 movie)
Adapt early instead of desperately forcing against it.
There should be a balance. Already today’s world is desperately thrashing to “stay ahead of the curve” and putting outrageous investments into blind alleys that group-think believes is the “next big thing.”
The reality of automation could be an abundance of what we need, easily available to all, with surplus resources available for all to share and contribute to as they wish - within limits, of course.
It’s going to take some desperate forcing to get the resources distributed more widely than they currently are.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 2 days ago:
You’re using it wrong.
Your use case is different from mine.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 2 days ago:
Fast fashion (and everything else in the commercial marketplace) needs to start paying for their externalized costs - starting with landfill space, but also the pollution and possibly social supports that are going into the delivery of their products. But, then, people are stupid when it comes to fashion, they’ll pay all kinds of premiums if it makes them look like their friends.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
30 years ago I did a few months of 70 hour work weeks, 40 doing data entry in the day, then another 30 stocking grocery shelves in the evening - very different kinds of work and each was kind of a “vacation” from the other. Still got old quick, but it paid off the previous couple of months’ travel / touring with no income.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
That is also true, the cotton gin wasn’t the total economic turning point, and the Civil War pre-dated automation’s economic turning of the corner against some economic measures of slavery’s cost, but slavery has very difficult to quantify costs, it was an entrenched lifestyle much more than a pool of day labor hanging out at Home Depot waiting for work, where both employers and employees could easily change their ways on very short notice.
After the Civil War it looks like “free person” cotton harvesting labor persisted until about 1926 - that could have changed earlier, but farm owners needed a kick in the butt to figure out how to improve:
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
Replacing people is a good thing.
Yes, and no: npr.org/…/why-economists-got-free-trade-with-chin…
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society “needed” slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
Al Gore’s family thought that the political tide was turning against it, so they gave up tobacco farming in the late 1980s - and focused on politics.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
Shareholders only care about the value of their shares increasing. It’s a productive arrangement, up to a point, but we’ve gotten too good at ignoring and externalizing the human, environmental, and long term costs in pursuit of ever increasing shareholder value.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
CEOs are the figurehead, they are virtually bound by law to act sociopathically - in the interests of their shareholders over everyone else. Carl Icahn also has an interesting take on a particularly upsetting emergent property of our system of CEO selection: dealbreaker.com/…/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so…
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
No big employer… there are plenty of smaller companies who are open to do whatever works.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
Universal Base Income - it’s either that or just kill all the un-necessary poor people.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
we will be no closer to some kind of 8-hour workweek utopia.
If you haven’t read this, it’s short and worth the time. The short work week utopia is one of two possible outcomes imagined: marshallbrain.com/manna1
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
We shouldn’t be using it to replace artists, writers, musicians, teachers, programmers, and actors.
That’s an opinion - one I share in the vast majority of cases, but there’s a lot of art work that AI really can do “good enough” for the purpose that we really should be freeing up the human artists to do the more creative work. Writers, if AI is turning out acceptable copy (which in my experience is: almost never so far, but hypothetically - eventually) why use human writers to do that? And so on down the line.
The problem is that capitalism and greedy CEOs are hyping the technology as the next big thing, looking for a big boost in their share price this quarter, not being realistic about how long it’s really going to take to achieve the things they’re hyping.
“Artificial Intelligence” has been 5-10 years off for 40 years. We have seen amazing progress in the past 5 years as compared to the previous 35, but it’s likely to be 35 more before half the things that are being touted as “here today” are actually working at a positive value ROI. There are going to be more than a few more examples like the “smart grocery store” where you just put things in your basket and walk out and you get charged “appropriately” supposedly based on AI surveillance, but really mostly powered by low cost labor somewhere else on the planet.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
I’m about 50/50 between helpful results and “nope, that’s not it, either” out of the various AI tools I have used.
I think it very much depends on what you’re trying to do with it. As a student, or fresh-grad employee in a typical field, it’s probably much more helpful because you are working well trod ground.
As a PhD or other leading edge researcher, possibly in a field without a lot of publications, you’re screwed as far as the really inventive stuff goes, but… if you’ve read “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” there’s a bit in there where the Manhattan project researchers (definitely breaking new ground at the time) needed basic stuff, like gears, for what they were doing. The gear catalogs of the day told them a lot about what they needed to know - per the text: if you’re making something that needs gears, pick your gears from the catalog but just avoid the largest and smallest of each family/table - they are there because the next size up or down is getting into some kind of problems engineering wise, so just stay away from the edges and you should have much more reliable results. That’s an engineer’s shortcut for how to use thousands, maybe millions, of man-years of prior gear research, development and engineering and get the desired results just by referencing a catalog.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
I think a lot depends on where “on the curve” you are working, too. If you’re out past the bleeding edge doing new stuff, ChatGPT is (obviously) going to be pretty useless. But, if you just want a particular method or tool that has been done (and published) many times before, yeah, it can help you find that pretty quickly.
I remember doing my Masters’ thesis in 1989, it took me months of research and journals delivered via inter-library loan before I found mention of other projects doing essentially what I was doing. With today’s research landscape that multi-month delay should be compressed to a couple of hours, frequently less.
If you haven’t read Melancholy Elephants, it’s a great reference point for what we’re getting into with modern access to everything:
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
If you were too lazy to read three Google search results before, yes… AI is amazing in that it shows you something you ask for without making you dig as deep as you used to have to.
I rarely get a result from ChatGPT that I couldn’t have skimmed for myself in about twice to five times the time.
I frequently get results from ChatGPT that are just as useless as what I find reading through my first three Google results.
- Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says 4 days ago:
AI search is occasionally faster and easier than slogging through the source material that the AI was trained on. The source material for programming is pretty weak itself, so there’s an issue.
I think AI has a lot of untapped potential, and it’s going to be a VERY long time before people who don’t know how to ask it for what they want will be able to communicate what they want to an AI.
A lot of programming today gets value from the programmers guessing (correctly) what their employers really want, while ignoring the asks that are impractical / counterproductive.