this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago

I think people care.

They care so much they actively avoid them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

Y'all remember when 3D TVs were going to be revolutionary?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

@Agent641 @dgerard remember when it was INEVITABLE that the deeds to your house were going to be an NFT?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (15 children)

Reducing computer performance:

Turbo button 🤝 AI button

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago (13 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago (11 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago

Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't get rid of hallucinations.

It might slightly increase accuracy, but it's still going to go wrong.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago

Tell your boss you talked to legal and they caution that all copilot data is potentially discoverable.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

same here, i mostly dont even use it on the phone. my bro is into it thought, thinking ai generate dpicture is good.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The only feature that actually seems useful for on-device AI is voice to text that doesn't need an Internet connection.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago

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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

Don’t care AND are not stupid.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

I would actively avoid the extra hassle of an AI computer.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

That's not fair! I care! A lot!

Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I've finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

Which laptop did you buy if you don't mind sharing?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

quite annoyed that the Snapdragon laptops are bootlocked cos they'd make great Linux boxes

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

How are they bootlocked? Just need the right iso. I have done it, because I didn't know they came with Linux for this particular client and they put windows on it, had to get a specific iso to reinstall when they borked it.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The average technical person realises ai is shit.
The average non-technical person doesn't need an ai computer, because chatgpt is free.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

not exactly true on the 2nd one, just because cpgt exist is not the reason an average person believes they dont need AI. they know AI is shit from the get-go, doesnt take a programming genius to realizing, when you know that only the corporations are the only ones obsessed with it, and it hadnt produced any valuble product.

and then had to deal with many AI system, like chat boxes, or google searches,, especially on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

they are useless... Copilot is not worth even $50 of an update

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

I will not go into ethics.

AI as in the current LLMs is useful. But it has to be used for the right things. It is not a search engine. It is not perfect at extracting information from text.

I am not a fan of AI "art", but I do actually find some AI music tolerable.

AI "art" has gotten worse in my opinion. It's more "correct", but has this nasty glow to it. I liked it better with the jank and seven fingers. It did not have the same AI slop glowy filter.

Development It helps speed up development, not by giving me code I can use necessarily. But because it shows me a path forward. I don't get stuck on tasks that should be easy anymore. I don't have to think long for it to suggest me a way to map x object to y datatype.

It's also useful for writing unit tests.

Summarization I use it to summarize articles with a custom prompt. While not perfect, it helps me decide if this is clickbait/interesting or not. I use the summaries to decide if I want to read the article or not.

Do you see any obvious issues with this? Give it a plan or something and ask if it sees any issues. It will come up with tons of bullshit and a few useful issues sometimes. It is like a sparring partner.

AI Dungeon AI Dungeon is fun, it was even fun when GPT2 was a thing, but now it's a lot better.

Low effort image recognition Set up a camera, send a picture regularly and ask "Is X in photo? Yes/No"

(I know there is better ways of doing this, and even great pretrained machine learning APIs for it)

HomeAssistant I have these sensors (give list of sensors). I want an automation that does x, y, z. It writes a working one in seconds.

Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can't trust it, but if you know a fair bit of math and know how to verify, it can help you use the right formulas. If you are stuck it can help you move forward.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

this post has been deleted as a prion

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

Your first line is a confession that you are a bad person.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,

I can trust a calculator that uses so little electricity that it works with ambient light. Why would I want to use an untrustworthy AI?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

Fucking blood diamonds that don't even cut glass.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

me: writing software for a calculator I don’t even own yet so I can maybe hopefully have a pocket version of one of the only good products of the first AI boom

them: Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

I will not go into ethics.

then stop wasting our fucking time

I didn’t read the rest of your post but it’s vaguely LLM-shaped so off you fuck

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