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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s because GPT5 was such a disappointment.

    Partly because they hyped it up beyond belief and partly because the results are actually bad. GPT3 to 4 was a big step up and with all the marketing people expected 4 to 5 to be just as big of a step. It turned out to be mostly a step sideways and in many aspects even a step back. Energy consumption is rumoured to be up, hallucinations are up and user experience is way down. At the same time all of the very public and high profile promises made are being broken and for a change people actually noticed.

    The sentiment in the market was down for a while, but GPT5 release really kicked everything into high gear. Earlier people were disapointed “AI” didn’t live up to the hype. Regular folks use it all the time as a replacement search engine, because Google had gotten so bad. But in businesses adoption was slow and where it was used the gains promised weren’t seen. If the product was given away for free, people would use it, but even modestly paid subscriptions weren’t taking off. But people thought: Hey, this is just the current level of tech, the next level is going to be so much better and improve a lot right? GPT5 proved that wasn’t really true, so people lost faith fast.

    LLM system are rapidly running into diminishing returns with larger models not yielding better results and sometimes even worse results. They also run into the issue they’ve poisoned the well. They used to train on data from the internet, but with the internet being flooded by output from older AI models, it’s eating it’s own shit. That’s really bad for the performance of the newer models. Especially on things like coding and such, where it relies on code examples to produce new code. With Stackoverflow dying due to a lot of things, but AI being a big factor, there isn’t as much of that as there used to be. Same for other stuff on the internet, once you kill the internet that great source of data is lost.

    Now I don’t think it’s as worse (or good depending on your point of view) as some articles make it out to be. Many companies still see AI as the infinite money well the marketing claims it to be. A lot of people use it all the time, even though they’ve had negative experiences with it. But it’s somewhat good to see some reality seeping in here and there.

    I fully expect the shit to hit the fan and the bubble to burst in a catastrophic way. This will be bad, way worse than when the dotcom bubble burst. It’s not going to be good for anyone. But better it burst soon than keep pumping it up further.




  • Well maybe one person is a little bit more impressed by some pretty pictures than another person. I really don’t see what that has to do with a company like Microsoft putting their money into this? They don’t make songs or movie trailers.

    To me I’m stunned but that’s just me, on top of this we’re only in year like 5 of AI going mainstream, where will it be in 10 years? 20 years?

    This is a common trap a lot of people fall into. See what improvements have been made the last couple of years, who knows where it will end up right? Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that. Improvements made in the past don’t guarantee improvements will continue in the future. There are ceilings that can be run into and are hard to break. There can even be hard limits that are impossible to break. There might be good reasons to not further develop promising technologies from the past into the future. There is no such thing as infinite growth.

    Edit:

    Just checked out that song, man that song is shit…

    “My job vanished without lift.” What does that even mean? That’s not even English.

    And that’s just one of the dozens of issues I’ve seen in 30 secs. You are kidding yourself if you think this is the future, that’s one shit future bro.


  • What’s your point?

    Sure that’s the point of venture capital, throwing some money at the wall and see what sticks. You’d expect to have most of them fail, but the one good one makes up for it.

    However in this case it isn’t people throwing some money at startups. It’s large companies like Microsoft throwing trillions into this new tech. And not just the one company looking for a little niche to fill, all of them are all in, flooding the market with random shit.

    Uber and Spotify are maybe not the best examples to use, although they are examples of people throwing away money in hopes of some sort of payoff (even though they both made a small profit recently, but nowhere near digging themselves out of the hole). They are however problematic in the way they operate. Uber’s whole deal is exploiting workers, turning employees into contractors just to exploit them. And also skirting regulations around taxis for the most part. They have been found to be illegal in a lot of civilised countries and had to change the way they do business there, limit their services or not operate in those countries at all. Spotify is music and the music industry is a whole thing I won’t get into.

    The current AI bubble isn’t comparable to venture capital investing in some startups. It’s more comparable to the dotcom bubble, where the industry is perceived to move in a certain direction. Either companies invest heavily and get with the times, or they die. And smart investors put their money in anything with the new tech, since that’s where the money is going to be made. Back then the new tech was the internet, now the new tech is AI. We found out the hard way, it was total BS. The internet wasn’t the infinite money glitch people thought it was and we all paid the price.

    However the scale of that bubble was small as compared to this new AI bubble. And the internet was absolutely a trans-formative technology, changing the way we work and live forever. It’s too early to say if this LLM based “AI” technology will do the same, but I doubt it. The amount of BS thrown around these days is too high. As someone with a somewhat good grasp of how LLMs actually work on a fundamental level, the promised made aren’t backed up by facts. And the amount of money being put into this aren’t near any even optimistic payoff in the future.

    If you want to throw in a simple, over simplified example: This AI boom is more like people throwing money at Theranos than anything else.







  • There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.

    This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.

    With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.

    This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.


  • An LLM cannot be anything other than a bullshit machine. It just guesses at what the next word would likely be. And because it’s trained on source data that contains truths as well as non truths, by chance sometimes what comes out is true. But it doesn’t “know” what is true and what isn’t.

    No matter what they try to do, this won’t change. And is one of the main reasons the LLM path will never lead to AGI, although parts of what makes up an LLM could possibly be used inside something that gets to the AGI level.




  • She did a follow-up on this on a recent Q&A with Adam Savage. She doesn’t use it at all, because her stump is too small. This means she has almost no leverage and strength in the stump. She said she likes the aesthetics but it’s not practical.

    Imho she needs something with like a servo assist or something hydraulic. But that means stuff like a power supply, pump, sensor, controller, plumbing etc. It would get messy fast for something that’s on your hand. If it’s more of the hand it could make sense, but the loss of only the little finger probably has almost zero impact on the use of the hand.


  • Because they operate on a very outdated understanding of how the world works. In their mind they own the games, they made them after all. The people “buying” the games don’t really buy them, they just get a copy of the software and the license to use that copy. That license is limited in what you can and can’t do. You can play them by yourself in your own home. You can even play with other people if they are physically in your own home. However if you want to do anything beyond that, it’s outside of the license and thus not allowed. If you want to put on an event featuring their games, you need to apply for a license to do so and probably pay Nintendo for that license. Nintendo wants to limit the license even further lately, limiting playing inside your own home to their rules and limiting resale of the game (license).

    This may sound crazy, and it is, however this is very much how music still works. And how movies and TV series used to work, and partly still do. It’s a limited license for enjoying the media in your own home only. Technically when you throw a party, you would have to apply for a license to play the music you already own. When money is involved, like a bigger event and you don’t play by their rules, expect to get sued. This is why the entertainment industry is so huge and the people in the top make so much money.

    In the West we’ve accepted this doesn’t apply to video games for the most part. Copying the game is a no-go, but using a game for entertainment purposes is allowed. When a streamer plays a game, they add enough of their own value for it not to be considered a violation. Even at large events, it’s usually allowed. Although depending on the context, often license deals are made for the really big events.

    There’s gray areas as well, such as game modding or using the assets of a game to create a new game. This is also usually accepted, with services like Steam activily supporting mods and such. Most game devs like it when a community forms around their games and support mods. But not Nintendo, they hate this. They go after anyone doing this. Famously almost destroying the careers of people playing modded Nintendo games for entertainment. (Especially SMW romhacks). And people have to go through all sorts of hoops not to attract the eye of Nintendo (like how Ship of Harkinian does things). Another gray area is music in video games, usually that music has a rather open license. But not always and services like Twitch have made deals with the music industry in order to keep existing. That means upholding things like DMCA and muting or even disabling videos which contain copyrighted music. One recent example of this is Death Stranding, which contains so much copyrighted music it’s problematic for everyone involved.

    It has taken a very long time for the music industry to get around to the concept of streaming music. And even then the license is super limited and people don’t own the music they pay for. Same for movies, TV series and other media. It has made them rich for decades, why give that up? Nintendo has always had the same mindset when it comes to video games and aren’t going to change.

    Personally I don’t know why we put up with the BS system for music and other media. Especially the length of time for copyright these days. But large companies like Disney have so much power, it isn’t going to change quickly. I feel the only reason we have music streaming at all is because the piracy got so bad they had to. And even then they fought it hard, demanding tens of thousands of dollars from little Timmy who downloaded a Metallica song.




  • One common misconception I’ve seen is people suddenly being afraid of their PTFE items they use at home. For example coated pans or PTFE cutting boards. They throw them out, because they think these will hurt them.

    However this is not true. The long chain molecules used in the final product are perfectly safe. They get all their useful features from being big molecules and being very inert. That’s why they are used in the first place. As such these molecules can’t interact with biologics at all. You can safely eat them, they will just pass through your body. They don’t interact with anything and are too big to get incorporated into anything.

    The issue with stuff like PTFE is the production. That’s where a lot of small PFAS molecules get used and after they’ve been used they can’t easily be used again. So it’s discarded as waste. But it turns out these smaller molecules can interact with biologics and not in a good way. And as they are still pretty inert, they don’t break down at all. Hence the term forever chemicals.

    Back in the day Dupont studied if those smaller PFAS molecules they were discarding into the world’s water by the boatload could do any harm. They quickly found out yes, it can do a lot of harm. But to not hurt the bottom line (number must go up), they kept it a secret. This has damaged the environment in a very significant way.

    When this came to light, they set out to design a new small molecule to use in the production. One that would be safe. So they did and used that, which satisfied the public for a time. However later it was proven this is a fantasy. The new molecule is just as bad as the previous one. And it turns out any variant of these kinds of molecules are just as harmful. That’s why we now collectively call this class of molecule PFAS. Dupont probably knew about this, as the properties that made them useful in the production are the same properties that make it so dangerous to biologics. However since stuff like PTFE is too important in our modern world, we kept making the stuff. Only recently have we found out how big of a problem we are creating with that.

    So when you have PTFE or similar items, please keep using them. The damage for these items is already done and the end product is safe. It would be a waste to have done the damage and then not even use the end product. But when buying new stuff, be on alert. Try to find out if PFAS was used in the production of the item and try to avoid where possible. There has been talk of laws in the EU which would require the label on a product to show if PFAS was used, so people can avoid it. But we aren’t there yet.

    If we were smart, we would ban it altogether. But like I said, too much of the modern world depends on these kinds of materials. So that’s probably not going to happen.