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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.
Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with "We’re living through a technological paradigm shift."... and right there I didn't bother reading the rest of it because I don't want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, there's this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinued... you know... AR... the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [...], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).
I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, 'Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email' and more 'Copilot, lock on the the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor'.
I think that 'giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf' is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenwed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
I am neutral on MSFT - to me it's a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it's not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it's really impressive how they've gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple's 1984 ad, via the "Halloween Papers" era where they were every Linux weenie's biggest boogeyman, to today's bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they're not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot's Recall feature also know they're the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
perhaps… one of the most
Load bearing words!
life’s complexities
I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.
‘Life’s complexities’ sounds like an adam curtis bit.
I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:
monterey jack lactose per 10 grams
https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/
It's absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has "site:reddit.com" attached to it.
And no, the site didn't tell me how much lactose there was per gram
StrokeSimulatorGPT
"My name is Scroder Cher. I take care of the place while the Master is away."
I can’t decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it
CEO of cloudflare says he’ll donate the bandwidth for Wordpress dot org to shut mullenweg up https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can't judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.
what's the over/under on the spruce pine thing causing promptfondlers and their ilk to suddenly not be able to get chips, and then hit a(n even more concrete) ceiling?
(I know there may be some of the stuff in stockpiles awaiting fabrication, but still, can't be enough to withstand that shock)
Building 5-7 5GW facilities full of GPUs is going to be an extremely large amount of silicon. Not to mention the 25-35 nuclear power plants they apparently want to build to power them.
So on the list of things not happening...
that would be 25-35 reactors, as long as cooling is available you can just put them in one place. 5GW is around size of largest european nuclear powerplants (Zaporozhian, 5.7GW; Gravelines, 5.4GW; six blocks each) or around energy consumption of decently-sized euro country like Ireland, Hungary or Bulgaria. 25GW is electricity consumption of Poland, 30GW UK, 35GW Spain
this is not happening hardest because by the time they'd get permits for NPP they'll get bankrupt because bubble will be over
Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.
If we're lucky, it'll cut off promptfondlers' supply of silicon and help bring this entire bubble crashing down.
It'll probably also cause major shockwaves for the tech industry at large, but by this point I hold nothing but unfiltered hate for everyone and everything in Silicon Valley, so fuck them.