Imagine that, a new fledgingly technology hamfistedly inserted into every part of the user experience, while offering meager functionality in exchange for the most aggressive data privacy invasion ever attempted on this scale, and no one likes it.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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TechTakes
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Gen AI should be private, secure, local and easier to train by it's users to fit their own needs. Closest thing to this at the moment seems to be Kobold.
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I think people care.
They care so much they actively avoid them.
Y'all remember when 3D TVs were going to be revolutionary?
3D TVs I can see happening, if there's some breakthrough that fixes the current tech shortcomings .
But NFTs, and blockchain in general? Hahahahhah.
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Reducing computer performance:
Turbo button 🤝 AI button
now that you mention it, kinda surprised I haven't ever seen a spate of custom 3D-printed turbo buttons from overclocker circles
I had one on my PC in the late 90s, early 2000s.
it could turn on the RGB! though that would imply that the RGB could be turned off in the first place, which is optimistic on my part
it's the button for more RGB
saw a microphone with RGB and i'm like wtf is this thing supposed to do, flash disco lights when you're on stream shouting slurs at your esteemed fellow gamers
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Maybe I'm just getting old, but I honestly can't think of any practical use case for AI in my day-to-day routine.
ML algorithms are just fancy statistics machines, and to that end, I can see plenty of research and industry applications where large datasets need to be assessed (weather, medicine, ...) with human oversight.
But for me in my day to day?
I don't need a statistics bot making decisions for me at work, because if it was that easy I wouldn't be getting paid to do it.
I don't need a giant calculator telling me when to eat or sleep or what game to play.
I don't need a Roomba with a graphics card automatically replying to my text messages.
Handing over my entire life's data just so a ML algorithm might be able to tell me what that one website I visited 3 years ago that sold kangaroo testicles was isn't a filing system. There's nothing I care about losing enough to go the effort of setting up copilot, but not enough to just, you know, bookmark it, or save it with a clear enough file name.
Long rant, but really, what does copilot actually do for me?
I use it to speed up my work.
For example, I can give it a database schema and ask it for what I need to achieve and most of the time it will throw out a pretty good approximation or even get it right on the first go, depending on complexity and how well I phrase the request. I could write these myself, of course, but not in 2 seconds.
Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
Then there's just convenience things. At what date and time will something end if it starts in two weeks and takes 400h to do? There's tools for that, or I could figure it out myself, but I mean the AI is just there and does it in a sec...
it’s really embarrassing when the promptfans come here to brag about how they’re using the technology that’s burning the earth and it’s just basic editor shit they never learned. and then you watch these fuckers “work” and it’s miserably slow cause they’re prompting the piece of shit model in English, waiting for the cloud service to burn enough methane to generate a response, correcting the output and re-prompting, all to do the same task that’s just a fucking key combo.
Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
how in fuck do you work with strings and have this shit not be muscle memory or an editor macro? oh yeah, by giving the fuck up.
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presumably everyone who has to work with you spits in your coffee/tea, too?
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Apparently it's useful for extraction of information out of a text to a format you specify. A Friend is using it to extract transactions out of 500 year old texts. However to get rid of hallucinations the temperature reds to be 0. So the only way is to self host.
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't get rid of hallucinations.
It might slightly increase accuracy, but it's still going to go wrong.
Well, LLMs are capable (but hallucinant) and cost an absolute fuckton of energy. There have been purpose trained efficient ML models that we've used for years. Document Understanding and Computer Vision are great, just don't use a LLM for them.
Our boss all but ordered us to have IT set this shit up on our PCs. So far I've been stalling, but I don't know how long I can keep doing it.
Tell your boss you talked to legal and they caution that all copilot data is potentially discoverable.
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same here, i mostly dont even use it on the phone. my bro is into it thought, thinking ai generate dpicture is good.
It's a fun party trick for like a second, but at no point today did I need a picture of a goat in a sweater smoking three cigarettes while playing tic-tac-toe with a llama dressed as the Dalai Lama.
It's great if you want to do a kids party invitation or something like that
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The only feature that actually seems useful for on-device AI is voice to text that doesn't need an Internet connection.
As someone who hates orally dictating my thoughts, that's a no from me dawg, but I can kinda understand the appeal (though I'll note offline TTS has been around for like a decade pre-AI)
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Don’t care AND are not stupid.
I would actively avoid the extra hassle of an AI computer.
My problem is that it's not that fucking useful. I got the Pixel 9 specifically because of its advertised AI chip for the assistant and I swear it's just gotten worse since the Pixel 7. I used to be able to ask Google anything through the assistant, and now 90% of my questions are answered with "can't find the information."
They also advertised (or at least heavily alluded to) the use of the AI chip when you are in low network areas but it works just as good outside of 4g+ coverage as it ever did without the stupid chip.
Whats the point of adding AI branded nonsense if there's no practical use for it. And that doesn't even start to cover the issues with AI's reliability as a source of information. Garbage in = garbage out.
When Gemini can find the information, they added flowery "social" bullshit before, in the middle and after the information I asked for wasting my time
i dint get a pixel for that reason after PIxel 5a died, the exonys chip is significantly weaker than other flagship phones, and they sacrificed thier battery power/efficiency capacity since 5A(which was a very defective phone) just to prop up AI.
We know google was saving money on not using QUALCOMM/snapdragon chips, which most others are using. AI is just thier excuse so they can put less effort into making quality product.