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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to leverage one AI beast against the other? (google.com)

shanen writes: File this under "rage against the machines"? Or as some kind of joke?

So here's the background: The google is trying to sell me cloud storage. The sales pitch is simple enough. Frequent nagging about running low on storage space. I do not even know which of my google accounts this is based on because two of my universities have foisted secondary accounts on me.

However I suspect that a lot of the data is basically garbage photos. Now I could just delete masses of stuff at random (and this is probably where I will wind up), but there are actually two potentially large categories of images that could be reduced from megabytes to a few hundred bytes each without major loss. It's an obvious AI application of pulling some text and the metadata from the images and tossing the originals.

However when I asked the (increasingly evil) google's Gemini about this, the response was NOT helpful. Gemini admits that it's an obviously useful thing to do, but also spewed a lot of BS about why google isn't going to do it. Gemini also spewed a lot of even less useful verbiage about how to implement it using the google's tools--but I do NOT want to go back to my programming days. I'm content with a few minor noddies these years... My take is that the non-evil google could offer the tool and get "payback" in the form of learning more about what the images mean, but the google obviously disagrees. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting the massive blather from Gemini.

But does some other AI offer such a tool that could be applied to my google account? The other AI company could positively justify it by learning about images or perhaps negatively justify it by depriving the google of the business.

Or maybe you want to share some hints about how you manage your file bloat in these AI days? Me? I think we are collapsing through the singularity even as I type... And the other side doesn't look so good. I did a lot of kinds of work over the years, but most of my jobs already look like they are obsolete or extinct. And I made my living at a wide spectrum of trades from low to high skills... Or perhaps you want a link to a short video of the best job in the world: "Mayor of Prairie Dog Town greeting the citizens with veggies!" That's job no AI can handle yet!

Comment Not an actual case of cryocide, so what's the... (Score 1) 80

Mod FP funny, and if that moderation had happened sooner, then maybe the humorous opening FP would have been more productive. But I don't have another joke to add, so I'll fork (as is my tendency in most cases).

New Subject:

Not an actual case of cryocide, so what's the problem here?

Near as I can tell (without actually breaking down and reading everything) is that she died, was pronounced and certified as dead, and he didn't incinerate or bury her corpse, but chose to freeze her remains. Minor question about how long that process took, but not too interesting.

Now imagine that it was a case of cryocide. Imagine that she was still alive when she pushed a button to carefully freeze herself BEFORE she was actually dead. On the one hand, the cause of death is now a kind of suicide, but on the other hand, if the freezing is carefully done with the intention of minimizing the damage and the hope of being revived in the future, then we may be looking at an entirely fresh can of worms.

I actually imagine this as an opening for a series of SF stories called "Cyocide Crybabies" about waking up in worlds gone wrong. Any leads? Or even interest?

Comment Re:Does this mean it'll stop sucking? (Score 1) 23

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Submission + - The AI Bubble That Isn't There (forbes.com)

smooth wombat writes: Michael Burry recently said he believes the AI market is in a bubble. Why should anyone listen to him? He's the guy who famously predicted the subprime mortgage crisis and made $100 million for himself, and $725 million for his hedge fund investors, by shorting the mortgage bond market. Will he be right in his most recent prediction? Only time will tell, but according to Jason Alexander at Forbes, Burry, and many others, are looking at AI the wrong way. For him, there is no AI bubble. Instead, AI is following the pattern of the electrical grid, the phone system and yes, the internet, all of which looked irrational at the time. His belief is people are applying outdated models to the AI buildout which makes it seem an irrational bubble. His words:

The irony is that the “AI bubble” narrative is itself a bubble, inflated by people applying outdated analogies to a phenomenon that does not fit them. Critics point to OpenAI’s operating losses, its heavy compute requirements and the fact that its expenses dwarf its revenues.

Under classical software economics, these would indeed be warning signs. But AI is not following the cost structures of apps or social platforms. It is following the cost structures of infrastructure.

The early electrical grid looked irrational. The first telephone networks looked irrational. Railroads looked irrational. In every major infrastructural transition, society endured long periods of heavy spending, imbalance and apparent excess. These were not signs of bubbles. They were signs that the substrate of daily life was being rebuilt.

OpenAI’s spending is no more indicative of a bubble than Edison’s power stations or Bell’s early switchboards. The economics only appear flawed if one assumes the system they are building already exists.

What we are witnessing is not a speculative mania but a structural transformation driven by thermodynamics, power density and a global shift toward energy-based intelligence.

The bubble narrative persists because many observers are diagnosing this moment with the wrong conceptual tools. They are treating an energy-driven transformation as if it were a software upgrade.

Comment Will it help you avoid paying money to the google? (Score 1) 23

Not an unreasonable FP, but now you can reply to yourself to clarify what you mean. Perhaps under a more thoughtful and substantive Subject? I'm too happily retired to care about your apparent focus, and I don't see how to make any more jokes under the current conditions so thoroughly dominated by Poe's Law, so I'm switching to a practical topic:

The google is nagging me, even leaning on me, to buy some storage. But "Who steals my data, steals trash." I'm quite sure that my stored data is strongly dominated by worthless garbage. Will the google's AI help me throw away the trash?

I didn't think so.

However, I'm sure there is at least one large category of images that could be reduced to a few hundred bytes per image. This is actually the kind of task AI is good for, but "Don't be evil" has been completely redefined now. It's a Level 3 lie, but "evil" now means "anything that might impede or reduce the google's profits".

So I'll just start throwing away stuff at random. And feeling even more disgusted with the google and even more eager to go ANYWHERE else.

Wait a minute. I finally did think of a joke. Hilarious to remember my positive sentiments about the google of yore. So different from today's sentiments towards one of the truly great corporate cancers.

Comment Re:way more than some irrationality (Score 1) 56

I think we are going to see a 'correction' we go down 10% or or less from recent highs and trade sideways for a while.

Most of the big guys in AI are already down more than 10% in the past week. Today isn't looking any better. Once Nvidia reports tomorrow after the bell will we see stabilization, assuming they have good news to report.

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