ragequittah

>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time.

What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.

If at any point in a natural conversation you're going to a trick a book taught you instead of just speaking your mind I'd argue it's a mask of a kind.

Example: if at the start of a conversation a personal anecdote comes to mind but you think 'no that's not what the book said, I should talk about the other person instead' I'd argue you're masking your natural persona. If your natural inclination is to raise an eyebrow but no that's not what I was taught smile instead, that's a mask. You see it often among high earning people and it's pretty transparent. Luckily you often also see people who are not at all like that everywhere and they're the ones I'll prefer having a drink with 10/10 times.

See the increase in CEO wages vs the increase in worker wages over the last 20 years of you want to know where that 5% will almost always go.

I just wonder if some people don't often get to their end years and regret putting on an inauthentic mask their entire life because a book told them to. Having dialogues with people like it's a transaction to win instead of a conversation.

>it's solely because that book made me more likable and personable.

This is the part that gets me to have an almost allergic reaction. It feels like an almost homogenization of people's personalities. In my mind I picture it like this: business man A reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. Businessman B also reads it. Business man A meets B and see that they're doing the psychological tricks of the book and think "wow this guy sure knows how to win friends and influence people like I do" so they get along fantastically.

It's similar to my aversion to books like "The Game" where some men seem to have the idea there's a surefire way to pick up women. Humans are diverse and should have differences in how they treat others and react. "Remember their name, smile, talk about the other person" and all the other tricks often gets me in the mindset of "this person is media trained / inauthentic".

Many of the research went under my radar when I was researching it ~15 years ago then. Specifically sucralose was what I was researching, because it's what I drank, and there seemed to be no real evidence of harm that I could come up with or that anybody arguing with me about it could point to. And everyone defending it (including me) always had the line about how extensively studied it was at the time.

But research kept coming in. In 2013 CSPI changed their sucralose recommendation from "safe" to "caution". Then in 2016 it changed it again to "avoid". [1] Insulin sensitivity was more of a concern as of 2018 [2]. Sucralose + carbs causing further insulin problems was added in 2020 [3].

There's several more but I'm not going to make an exhaustive list. The point is the more research done the more the sweeteners go from almost completely benign (which you could easily say about sucralose ~2010) to problematic. So saying "the science is in, these sweeteners don't cause cancer" seems off-putting to me after going through the journey of so much of the science being wrong. It reminds me that we didn't classify processed meat as carcinogenic until 2015. And we only classified nitrates as "probably carcinogenic" in 2010.

[1]https://www.cspi.org/new/201602081.html

[2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30005329/

[3]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32130881/

I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.

Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).

The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.

You're proving the idea that the science wins out though. The vaccine that caused problems in a vanishingly small amount of people was almost instantly recalled. I believe here in Canada we started giving it to people in February and stopped in March. The signal was so clear even though it was something like 1 in 50,000 people who had a problem.

We have giant populations of people who refused the vaccines. We also have a giant resurgence of measles now because those people are so large in number and so influential. Long covid is far more prevalent in those populations than anywhere else despite the seemingly blanket belief that covid was inconsequential among them.

The trials for the Pfizer vaccine came back as 95% effective. Not sure what paper you're holding saying blanket immunity for all time but it was probably political not scientific. It then did an insane pivot with omicron. Way too many mutations at once for any vaccine to accommodate.

The science is very broad and very clear on all of these matters. I feel bad if politicians or news agencies lied to you but my advice is to take an aggregate of every country / health authority in the entire world and disregard your own anecdotes / the Joe Rogans of the world. There's just no way that a conspiracy can be as far reaching as what you're implying.

Imagine seeing this as a jeapordy question. What is 2 Rs.

LLMs have some limitations same as humans. The limitations are very different between the two which is why LLMs are very useful to us. I personally can't write a perfectly functional fairly complex webpage in less than 30 seconds, but I can count letters. I'll let the LLM make the webpage and keep count of the letters for a trivia contest if needed.

Also get the latest version of chatgpt (extended thinking) to make you a 'tiptop 100% verified Trivia stack for (x TV show)' and you'll get better than what most pubs will come up with. I did this for the simpsons when someone said it couldn't be done because that sounded like something an LLM would be excellent at. Turns out I was right.

These comments show me how amazing the world of covid disinformation still is. After every country/health authority in the entire world studying it for so long and all coming to the exact same conclusions there's still those who are positive they know better. Billions of people being studied for years vs I heard it from some dude on Twitter.

I also did this as well as learned pfSense then OPNSense when pfSense went bad. Also made a pretty complicated XCP-ng setup. Learned all this with the ancient ChatGPT 3.5-4.0 models.

I can hear a subset of people cringe saying "but LLMs are BS machines and you aren't learning anything!" I heartily disagree on both fronts. The main thing holding users like me back from linux was always the snarky RTFM community and the fact that everything has 25 different answers (depending on distro, window manager, and many other factors). LLMs take care of all this friction for you very nicely.

I suppose if you turn off ray tracing and don't mind 1900x1200. I'm trying to push 1440p w/ ray tracing. Sometimes 4k if it's a good TV game. I'm constantly having to turn settings down to get >60 fps. These days more and more games seem like they expect some sort of ray tracing to get the full experience.

It's also quite nice to actually hit 165 fps in some less demanding games on my 165 hz monitor.

>material conditions are much, much worse than ours.

I wonder how much better (or worse) off they are with mental health. What I see in our culture is a bunch of people scrambling to sell a bunch of plastic bobbles in order to afford a bunch of other plastic bobbles. None of it seems to make us particularly happy while it completely destroys the planet we're living on. In fact a whole lot of our 'material conditions' seem to isolate us and make this time in history uniquely depressing.

Questions like this are irrational though. Nobody wants to know how many of a type of letter are in a word. Ask it a real question from your real life that needs a real answer it's fairly magic at getting the correct answer. And if you don't think so at this point my guess is you simply haven't used it enough.

Here I'm on a 5800x and a 4070ti super and it's woefully inadequate for some games. Though I suppose if you play at 1080p (which is hard to look at these days for me) you might be OK on low-medium settings in some newer games. I can't see you getting very far with something like Forza Horizon 6 or Death Stranding 2 though.

I believe Steam Deck is a major exception. Given how fast they sold out I also wonder how many Valve produced this batch. Most vendors of PC parts are seeing steep declines. Also after seeing 2-3 price increases in everything (Switch, Playstation, XBOX, etc.) people are likely getting it now because the prices aren't going down anytime soon and will probably just go up again for a couple of years.

I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.

I fail to understand why people think LLMs working in tokens (and thus having a hard time counting letters) is such a huge gotcha. Ask it to write you a bash script that counts the amount of p's in a word you input it'll do it fine. Then ask it to write that script in C, JavaScript, Lua, and a few other languages. Then ask your family members to do the same. The gotcha can go both ways.

It's going to be exactly like Wikipedia on schools. People don't like me using AI for answers? Ok I'll use AI for the answer ask it to cite the source it used and then skim and paste the source. AI sti did all the work but the anti-ai crowd can't reflexively say it's probably wrong or a dream or whatever people are on about ITT.

The plastic bobbles and SaaS economy that is actively destroying our planet seems like the opposite of survival. We're collectively working ourselves into the death of our planet just because how else do we pay the bills?

I cancelled my subscription so not really defending them myself but if all of their customers were humans who used it normally I bet they could serve everyone. It's when someone presses a few keys walks away and a bot uses tokens for 72 hours straight that it becomes a problem. Then people buy 3 accounts and do that for weeks at a time.

Could you do that as a human? Sure but you'd likely burn out after a couple of weeks. Also the human would probably use those tokens far more effectively and would not need as many. It's feels the same as someone installing a crypto miner on their servers in my mind. Abhorrent behavior.

This reminds me of what happened around the time I hit year 3 in school. You could no longer buy used textbooks like everyone did from time immemorial because there was online drm making sure you had the latest textbook to take the latest quiz. I'm sure it's got even worse in the 20 years since.

I think comparing intellectual property theft to slavery and stealing land is where I start leaning towards the argument being absurd. The stolen books are still on store shelves. People are likely still buying them at about the same rate as before.

And as far as it being for the greater good that seems to be the promise of many of these companies. What will inevitably get in the way is greed and money, the very same reasons we're arguing about IP theft. Good or bad I see no way out of this but through at this point.

I mostly hate it because the token crunch is now coming for us regular users because of people like this. A few people always ruin it for the rest of us.

I understand but I think this will be quite a quaint idea soon in all honesty. Imagine these things are able to progress the world of science, math, physics, and whatever else (they already are) and we stopped them because someone didn't make enough royalties first. That to me would be more repulsive. We stop/slow the progress of all humanity because there wasn't enough temporary gain for x individual who wrote y book. And if it all turns out to be bogus nonsense then I doubt x individual who wrote y book loses much in the process anyway.

I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.

If people didn't make their decisions based on ads they wouldn't exist.

I've been reading that we've hit a wall since chatgpt 3.5 [1]. Then 6 months later when the models are significantly better the goalposts are moved and we've hit the wall again. It's a very strange thing to watch so many people be so confidently incorrect so many times in a row. Not even saying you're wrong, just that historically this argument has been a losing bet.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2023/04/26/openai-ce...

I always find this argument to ring hollow. Maybe it's because I've been through it with too many technologies already. Digital photography took out the art of film photography. CGI took out the wonder of practical effects. Digital art takes out the important brush strokes of someone actually painting. The real answer always is the mediums can coexist and each will be good for expression in their own way.

I'm not sure you immediately lose meaning if someone can make a highly personalized version of something easily. The % of completely meaningless video after YouTube and tiktok came about has skyrocketed. The amount of good stuff to watch has gone up as well though.

Can't the expression come from the person prompting the AI and sometimes taking hours inpainting or tweaking the prompt to try get the exact image / expression they had in their mind? A good use I've found is to be able to make scenes from a dream you had into an image. If that's not an expression of something then I'm not sure anything is.

Apologies median wages was the wrong statistic to choose because the top x% rise has been astronomical. The productivity has gone up along with CEO wages. That money does get made even if the workers never see it. Or if they do see it they immediately give it back (and then some) when they pay their rent.