TaupeRanger

I'm not sure what this comment means - we could always kill cancer cells, and the challenge has always been "how can we ONLY kill the cancer?" We've been burning cancer, cutting cancer out, and drugging cancer cells for decades or centuries depending on the method. What is changing is not the type of challenge, but the precision of our tools - and even then, it remains to be seen if we actually can get the precision while improving the lives of the patients.

What are you on about? May be 1 out of 100,000 users are using 5.5 Pro to make 10 "Long Documents" as defined in that tool EVERY day. What a silly thing to harp on.

Six 100,000 token Claude coding sessions use less energy than a dryer load, and less water than making one egg. If you are truly concerned about energy and water usage, AI is not even in the top 100 things you should be concerned about in your daily life.

The Startup Who Cried Unsafe, by AIsop

When left to their own devices, 99% of children are not interested enough in math, history, literature, languages, or almost any other school subject to engage with it willingly. Only teaching "interesting" things that kids are "interested" in is both impossible (too many varied kids per class for that to work 100% of the time) and even if possible, would leave kids with zero practical knowledge, because learning most of that stuff is not something kids inherently want to do.

College is different, because theoretically you should be taking classes that are relevant to your field (although there are still "core" requirements that are somewhat high-school adjacent).

Right. For every example of a doctor missing a diagnosis, there 100 examples of that doctor correctly telling people that they are likely suffering from a temporary condition that will work itself out or not be resolved by any further testing or medicine.

If what you say is true and it predicts the future, then everyone would be selling right now. The fact is, no one knows when or if the bubble will pop, and we will only be able to say in hindsight whether your comparison is correct.

The only delusion here is your comment. Claude and ChatGPT are extremely popular across millions of active daily users.

Nuance would make the points stronger, not weaker. If you complain about something while assuming everyone should agree with you without question, you are not contributing to the conversation, but merely whining.

It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.

The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:

> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.

"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.

Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.

> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.

No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.

No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.

> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.

Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?

> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.

> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.

> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?

One locust is an interesting bug. Billions of locusts are an apocalyptic nightmare.

but that's without internet search - everyone I know uses the models that search when they need to, and I'm sure GPT and Opus would agree on almost everything if 1) they searched when necessary, and 2) they were allowed to give context to their answers instead of being hamstrung to get specious "research" results.

What are you talking about? The models were not ALLOWED to have confidence (or the lack thereof). They were explicitly told to give a single label, and in most cases, all of them were correct depending on additional context they would surely have provided, especially with access to the internet (which some didn't have). This is just silly.

Do we really need one of these articles every month for decades?

This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.

Not likely. Original thinking in a "side project" is almost never about the code itself, but the ideas and end product implementation. You might be able to invent things like Carmack's BSP implementation, Torvald's Content Addressable Storage, etc. but even things like that can be aided by LLMs at this point, at least in the prototyping/idea phases. AI doesn't prevent you from having good ideas or doing original thinking if that is your goal.

Obviously true, but apparently we're in a hornets nest of anti-car coastal folks here? Very strange comment thread overall.

Traveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting to work and allowing society to run at levels of efficiency required to support the population is very clearly beneficial.

People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.

Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.

The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.

It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.

It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.

Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.

Not really. Osteosarcoma rates have remained very stable for decades. Some young people are getting diagnosed with colon/breast cancer at increasing rates, but most of that comes down to better diagnostics and imagining, catching things at earlier ages.

I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.”

Getting a feeling of "wanting to keep going" with something does not automatically make it an "addiction".

> I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with.

A tale as old as time, and a valid feeling, though not particularly helpful to dwell on since the technology will never go away and never get worse than it is right now.

> I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore.

Your brain will think about other important things and you don't need to become "lazy" just because a machine is doing something that used to require more effort on your part.

> I enjoy technical discussions with (human) co-workers.

So what? You can still have those discussion.

> I enjoy reading blog posts and tutorials and learning from other developers.

So what? You can still read those blogs, but the subjects might shift away from coding minutiae to other topics.

> I want to learn and grow and become better at what I am doing by trial and error and mistakes I make all by myself.

Going forward, that trial and error process will start to happen more at the product/project level rather than the source code level.

> I don’t want to be part of a trend/hype destroying our planet even faster than we already do without it.

It isn't. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There absolutely is an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the tech will only get better from here.

What do you mean? All of the comments that misunderstand the study are downvoted from what I see.

You failed to understand the results of the study and quoted a passage that does not in any way support your assertion.

Kind of a useless analysis if it doesn't compare the risk after stopping GLP-1s to the risk of NEVER taking GLP-1s in the first place.

We probably don't know the numbers yet, but one can easily envision a scenario like: risk of CE without GLP-1 weight loss: 20%. Risk after taking GLP-1s for 2 years: 10%. Risk after stopping GLP-1s: 12%. "Your heart attack chance goes up 20% after stopping GLP-1s!!!"

"You're not allowed to tell me that the fledgling technology that has been getting steadily better for the past 3 years is likely to continue getting better." ...and there's my cue to close the window.