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Comment Re:Inference will get cheaper (Score 1) 71

The difference between the AI slop machine and Amazon or Uber is that even when those were losing money, it was none the less clear that if they scaled up then scaling efficiencies would yield a lower cost/unit and they'd become profitable. The pathway to making money instead of setting it on fire clearly existed. It also existed because it was clear even before they super-scaled that Amazon and Uber were doing something useful for which where existed a demand.

So far all we are seeing with the generative AI delusion is an exponentially exploding waste of resources in order to pollute my Youtube feed with slop. Every enterprise is trying "AI" and essentially all of them are finding it does not do what the people selling the tin claim it can.

There were no Amazon, or Uber or Internet evangelists trying to convince everyone that those things were useful or invent uses for them because there was no need: the value was obvious and real.

Isn't Uber still losing money?

Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 247

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 247

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

Comment Re:PR article (Score 0) 247

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

Comment Re:Wrong Name (Score 2) 247

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 247

professions that most certainly require a lot of critical thinking. While I would say that that is ludicrous

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

Comment Re:Crap (Score 1) 247

Okay, but you have to admit it's useful to distinguish between the intelligence that AI seems to display, and that humans seem to display.

Comment Re:You have options (Score 1) 98

Use something better like notepad++, if you are still using notepad maybe change your workflow. I realize that this can be difficult if you are doing tech support on someone elses machine.

The thing with Notepad isn't that it's good... rather that it's everywhere.

Notepad is for when you're working but not on your machine. Not everyone's work flow is going to be 100% local and you probably won't have permission to install something on someone elses server.

No matter what the version, what the patch level, what the fuck is wrong with it, notepad is there and notepad works.

Sounds like MS are working on the last part unfortunately.

Comment Re: Legacy Media BEFORE the war. "Ukraine are Nazi (Score 1) 138

"Remember, Na-Zi means National SOCIALIST, and that's that fascism is."

Remember, the Nazis literally called themselves socialists to fool stupid people, and you also don't know what either socialism or fascism is if you think one is a type of the other.

History lesson Children.

First things first, the Nazis never called themselves Nazis... We did that. I mean the German exiles in Britain and the British press were very happy to run with it. The Nazis just called themselves "Germans".

Secondly, one of the core tenants of Fascism is the transformation and rebirth of language, the idea was that you could control the way people thought if you controlled the language they used (which as history has shown was bass-ackwards, language evolves to reflect what people think and not the other way around). Hitler tried to purge the German language of anything he felt was foreign, in particular the French words in pre Nazi German. Socialism was one of these words he wanted to change the meaning of. he, and I quote "wanted to take the meaning of Socialism back from the Bolsheviks". Hitler defined socialism as more a form of civic pride, patriotism border-lining on jingoism. Obviously this didn't work as we kept using the Bolshevik definition of socialism (I.E. collective ownership) and keep using that definition to this day.

Drinky is quite right however, only complete idiots try to claim the Nazis were in any way socialist (as we describe socialism).

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