LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Good job assuming - go back to school because you don't know shit. I've been doing computer builds for over 3 decades.

Tell me you don't work in semiconductors without telling me you don't work in semiconductors.

Protip: The Ryzen 5500 is a cut-down 5600G - tons of room for QA errors during that laser-locking process. First CPU had I/O problems. Second one had a faulty PCI Express bus. Third one was outright DOA (and these are ALL AMD RMAs.) So no, the problem isn't me, it's AMD. All the problems went away the second I tossed a 3600X into the socket. It's the CPU. It isn't me. But you say what you must to make yourself feel better.

The bubble is bursting. These days, you need about a million views per month, every month to have a career on YouTube that actually pays the bills. For one person. If someone else does the video editing for you, add their cost.

A million views equals $5k. The kids realise that as soon as they don't live at home anymore. Pretty much all big YouTubers theses days make their money from Patreon, merchandise or sponsors.

The algorithm is likely optimising not for your pleasure but for ad revenue.

I see a TON of what is essentially an entire video of product placement, thinly veiled as "10 kitchen gadgets you need to know" or "12 new must-have tech gadgets", probably because a year ago I clicked on one or two of those before realising that they're not really interesting tech news but just full-out advertisement.

It keeps doing that even after I've clicked a ton of them away as "not interested".

It also keeps recommending me old videos from my subscribed channels that I've already watched. WTF?

The algorithm is shit these days.

Revenue is a bullshit number. YT keeps its actual profits (which is the number that matters) a secret.

I should be more specific, though. I mean "dying" not in the immediate sense, that's why I said slowly and it'll be around for years to come. But the time where everyone wanted to be a YouTuber because it's easy money are over. You need over a million views per month, every month to make YouTube a viable career choice these days.

Lots of even big channels these days are largely and openly finances by Patreon or sponsors. That means that they are no longer tied to YouTube in any meaningful way. Which means the platform is now interchangeable and the moment a competitor appears with similar numbers of users, the content creators can move elsewhere.

I was there when the dot-com bubble burst (for some reason I hear that in the voice of Elrond in my head, despite it's not actually that long ago, anyway) - I saw first hand how quickly your entire business can disappear when your only leg is "I'm very popular and have lots of users". The first company I worked for went from "we're in the top three" to "we're a subsidiary of someone else and btw 90% of you can go" in a week.

Again, no.

I do realize that most advertisement these days is not a direct incentive to buy but brand marketing.

What do you think does it do to your brand imagine if your brand keeps pissing me off? My ex insisted on using YT for music over loudspeakers and to do that from her phone (no adblocker). I'm a man, but if for whatever reason I ever find it necessary to buy women's period products, I know which brand I absolutely for 100% will completely avoid.

There isn't any meaningful competition.

I've tried Rumble myself both as a viewer and as a content producer (very small channel), and it's just... not even in the same league, barely on the same continent.

But there's always a chance a competitor suddenly appears when some VCs with deep pockets decide it's worth the gamble.

Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?