- chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish10 minutes
Little that happens in this country has a positive impact on society. The only positive things that have happened during my lifetime were the ADA in 1990 and legalized gay marriage between 2003 and 2015.
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish4 hours
If by “AI” they mean “oligarch-owned and controlled AI”, we have common ground here. But then again, that is true of anything owned and monopolised by these
peoplehumanoids. Case in point: only few people will agree that…- oligarch-owned media empires have a positive impact on society
- oligarch-owned social media networks have a positive impact on society
- oligarch-owned space companies have a positive impact on society
- …
The problem is not with the tech. The problem is that the tech is in the hands of a small clique of sociopaths.
- eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish2 hours
The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.
I don’t care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center, they’re still addictive and poisonous.
2 hoursThe tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.
LLMs are not addictive control machines. Social media engagement farming and native advertising/propaganda machines are addictive control machines. We consistently get the marketing functions fudged up with the utility of the thing itself. Like blaming violence on video games or talking about addictive qualities of children’s cartoons.
I don’t care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center
Cigarettes are actually a great example of engineered addiction. Historically, tobacco products had a mild addicting affect resulting from their short-term immediate stimulative benefits combined with the reliance on nicotine. But it wasn’t until the boom in marketing of the 1920s followed by the industrial scale experimentation of the formula in the 1940s that the addictive nature of the product surged.
The end result was an enormous increase in per-capita consumption, leaping from 54 cigarettes per person per year in 1900 to 4,345 cigarettes per person per year in 1963.
The quantitative surge in consumption radically changed the health consequences of cigarette use.
You could do similar analysis on everything from alcohol consumption to LSD. From TV to TikTok. At some point you have to draw a line between the utilitarian value of the thing versus the mass market distribution and profit-driven consumption behaviors. Otherwise, you just end up with 1920s Prohibition and a thriving black market that undercuts the policies you intended.
And then you get Joe Kennedy. Is that what you want for your country? More Kennedys?
- chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
Hmmmm, not much actual use for the hallucinating plagiarism machine, but I do see your point.
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish4 hours
Imo, LLMs do have a purpose (and their ethical sourcing problems, like you mentioned).
It’s just that right now, Silicon Valley sells it as the answer to every single problem out there when it clearly isn’t. A hammer is good for putting nails in the wall. Silicon Valley claims you can also use it to do your toenails, gullible managers mandate its use for that purpose, and now the waiting rooms are chock-full with people with broken toes…
Also, AI can be so much more than just LLMs.
- chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
I don’t disagree. Most generative AI models are some variant on “plagiarism machine”, but categorizing and identifying data are extremely useful things that AI does.
LLMs are good at quickly generating code, but the issue in software is rarely how fast humans can write code. In fact, more speed with less understanding is a really bad combination (I am a developer working DevOps and anecdotally I see way more large scale bugs now than I did 5 years ago).
Agentic AI is, unfortunately, just an LLM pretending to be a person, and that’s a really bad thing. Like so incredibly bad. Did you know that humans are statistically more likely to make mistakes when under pressure? Cause the LLMs sure do. Create a narrative of pressure and the LLM cracks like a rotten egg. Cause that’s more statistically likely!
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish2 hours
You’ve accurately described why having LLMs cobble together code is a terrible idea. With all the vibe-coded nonsense finding its way into production code because the amount of code generated in a short amount of time inevitably overwhelms human oversight, I wouldn’t want to work in cybersec these days.
That said, I do see applications for LLMs in areas where mistakes will not get people hurt or systems breached: they can
- provide a first layer of customer and tech support to solve the really stupid stuff that needs no human attention (“Have you made sure that the device is plugged in? Have you tried turning it off and on again?”). This can be particularly useful when paired with a source of truth it can draw from.
- do tedious tasks involving large amounts of text processing, e.g. automated translation, cross-referencing of legal texts.
- provide pre-college learners with a tutor that is available 24/7, can explain simple academic subject matters and answer questions that naturally arise as part of every learning process. Again, pair with a source of truth for more reliable results.
- 3 hours
The speed and ease at which LLMs allow you to generate code is a bug, not a feature in my opinion. In my org, a group of 3 very junior engineers wrote a 5k line shell script for building k8s clusters according to our business specs and it’s fucking awful. The actual time to get it out the door was short, but now it’s basically impossible to change it without fucking up like 20 different things. The fucking thing will randomly quit because the shit ass LLM thinks
set -eis a good thing to use, and it’s full of unused variables everywhere. I had to add a feature to it (which is how I learned of its existence), and I spent a miserable week just reading the entire fucking thing so I could ensure that my change wouldn’t cause an oil refinery in the North Sea to explode due to a butterfly-effect series of bullshit.The frustration and toil you feel as a software dev is a feature. If something is making you mad and is taking forever to write, that’s a sign you probably need to change your approach. If you’re using an LLM to write a bunch of boilerplate, why not just eliminate the boilerplate or like, make a factory to spit out a bunch of it or something? Your discomfort is a powerful tool and you are not best served by ignoring it. Those junior devs would have written something much better if they had been forced to experience the true toil and suffering of writing a 5k line shell script.
- chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
is a bug, not a feature
Umm, excuse me. We’re delivering 400 points worth of story work with 40 points worth of dev time. Do you think that that’s somehow a bad thing? Our budget is stretching further than ever! (Once we figure out how to reduce token costs) /s
The issue is more that the triangle of code that works, code that scales well, and code that’s cheap will always, ALWAYS, prioritize works and is cheap, even if every action taken from then on costs more to make. I’ve been on a team that focused effort on keeping scalability a priority and every single thing we tried got kneecapped to “keep to the budget”.
- BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
I fall in the junior category, but with more experience prior to becoming a certified full stack dev than most juniors. I was a sys admin for a decade where I taught myself how to code to simplify my job. Plus I had 1 year at university 15 years ago. I use my company provided license with AI very sparingly and never let it implement code. Mostly I use it like a glorified stack overflow when I run into a problem that I can’t work out by myself. Usually, it will suggest some code that’s not good, but it’s enough to highlight a concept I’m ignorant to and then I can do what I need. If there’s a block of code that has something that I don’t understand, I can highlight it and ask it to explain. It’s usually pretty good at listing out what something is doing or at least supposed to do.
I would love if AI disappeared immediately, but it’s not going to happen. If someone is using, it should be used as a tool and not a replacement. If you can’t do the thing that it’s doing, then you shouldn’t be use it to do that thing. I probably ask it questions less than once a week, and again, never put in code that I don’t understand what it does and why.
I have a good friend that’s a senior dev at a company using Claude code. He’s become an AI code reviewer, but much to my dismay likes it. He’s vibe coding his own fuck around app with it and it’s writing the backend in C#, a language he doesn’t know being a frontend dev. It’s so infuriating to me that someone that I know to be intelligent is so damn stupid.
- 2 hours
I’ll say that given the way OpenAI and Anthropic have hideously overextended themselves (they have over a trillion dollars of financial commitments to companies like Oracle), it’s not impossible that the current crop of American LLM providers do just kinda… poof away. Traditional banks want nothing more to do with them, they’re getting majorly spooked. All that needs to happen is for private credit to lose confidence in them, which is already happening. When they’re out of cash, they’ll be on the hook for an absolute ridiculous amount of money and they’ll probably just get liquidated.
I’m sure there will be new companies that pop up, but they’re going to have to charge 10x what Anthropic is making enterprise customers pay, since inference likely still isn’t profitable at the price Anthropic is charging.
I don’t use LLMs as a knowledge base because if the problem is bad enough for me, I’m likely just grepping through kubernetes source code or something. That being said, I don’t necessarily have an issue with folks using an LLM that way as long as they fully understand exactly how bad it is at what it does. You’ll be fine if you lose access to LLMs, and that’s the number one thing in my book. Your friend? Not so much.
(As a fun bonus to all of this, Oracle is very likely to die if OpenAI can’t meet its commitments. Either way, Larry Ellison will probably stop being a billionaire, since almost all of his wealth is in Oracle stock).
- BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
The schadenfreude I will experience if I see these giants fall will be immeasurable. I’ll have to go visit my doctor have 4 hours, for reasons. I would love to see oracle, openAI, and anthropomorphic just dissolve, but it would be extra special if Microsoft was broken down to nothing. Google too, but while I don’t like Google, they’re definitely lower on the list than those first options, maybe ahead of Oracle, but mostly because I’m fortunate enough to not have to use any of their products.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish2 hours
We can figure out how to correctly use the hammer after we convince CEOs to stop bashing everyone’s feet with them. Until then, the foot bashers make it a moot point.
- FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
We can do both at the same time.
The computer science majors who are actually developing these technologies are not the CEOs who are exploiting them and creating all of the fallout in society. Addressing the CEOs and the rampant capitalist exploitation of AI is a completely different project than developing the technology.
Telling the scientists to stop until we’ve sorted out the CEOs doesn’t make any sense.
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish43 minutes
I sense a “we can’t let Chy-na get there first” type of argument, but I may be wrong.
The AI paradox: It’s both original (hallucinating) and plagiarizing (copying things, word-for-word).
- chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
Not a paradox. It plagiarizes because it isn’t capable of creating thoughts. It creates statistically likely combinations of tokens. Those “statistically likely” models were made by stealing a whole bunch of information.
The model hallucinates because it doesn’t actually know what any of the tokens mean, just that they exist in a likely probability space.
If you took two papers about a very similar subject, copied them both out in their entirety, then replaced similar phrases from one copy into the other, the resultant paper would both contain inaccuracies and would be plagiarism. That’s the same thing ai does, except the copies are the sum total of the digitized human written work. Increasing the number of sources you’re plagiarizing from doesn’t magically make it not plagiarism!
- 5 hours
I hate how tech bros make people hate all sorts of artificial intelligence by naming their fucking large language models AI. Without machine learning, I would have had to type this text all by myself. But look at me, speaking into a microphone. On the toilet! 😭
Fuck tech bros. Love tech. If it’s the good kind of tech. The one that doesn’t drink all our water and doesn’t consume all our electricity. And fucking graphics cards!
- eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish2 hours
It’s probably an llm doing the speech to text on your phone.
They’re actually kickass for low stakes translation of natural language.
It’s fucking stupid to use them to generate computer code listings based on pretending you’re talking to a person.
- 1 hour
Might be, but then it’s still open source and local on my hardware.
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish5 hours
Word! I wouldn’t even say that LLMs and other generative AI are a problem*. Locally run, i.e. in the hands of the people, and used on the right task, they can be a great tool! People are just fed up with centralised oligarch tech shoved down their throats in pursuit of the Epstein class’ pipe dream: lay everybody off, automate (almost) all production and keep the profits to yourself.
* well, as long as you don’t look to closely at how they were trained in the first place…
- 3 hours
Hey, I would even look forward to being laid off due to tech becoming so advanced I’m not necessary anymore. Imagine how much fun I could have not working. It’s the rich people eating up all the profit that makes me uneasy. But give me my time and enough money to play around and I’ll be happy being laid off. I will still do what I do today, but not 40 hours a week. And just for fun.
16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact
Going to need this group cross-referenced with the percentage of Americans who enjoy CSAM.
I love AI. It DOes all kinds of things NOT just make pictures. TRUST me I us ai every day. THE example I like to share is how it let’s me research different types of MACHINES.
- 7 hours
There’s no link in the article to the Pew Research study they’re supposedly citing and they write it out as if all Americans participated. Why do people cite polls as if they’re accurate? I’ve never participated in one and with all the propaganda Americans are fed I don’t see how any of them are believable.
- [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish5 hours
Because polls exist to try and get a representative sample, and they bank their whole reputation on it.
Just because you’ve never been polled doesn’t mean they don’t exist or work.
