AI needs to stop

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I saw an advert on the side of a truck the other day for an AI enhanced mattress, of all things!

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I think of AI like I do apps: every company thinks they need an app now instead of just a website. They don't, but they'll sure as hell pay someone to develop an app that serves as a walled garden front end for their website.
Most companies don't need AI for anything, and as you said: they are shoehorning it in anywhere they can without regard to whether it is effective or not.

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10 years ago everything was "smart" now it's "AI".

Goddamn marketing people.

Bill Hicks on marketing

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You can use the warhammer 40k nomenclature of abominable intelligence. I’m not a gaming nerd but find it fitting for fancy statistics in a trench coat.

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Fair enough. You'd be surprised how many people don't know you need clean them occasionally and think it's normal for stuff to go terribly wrong really quickly.

I got a new washer relatively recently and it's quiet enough that it's not really audible from the next room unless you tell it to do a really aggressive spin cycle with a big load.

In any case, I think the point of the timed wash features are to make it so your laundry finishes Right when you get home rather than overnight.

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Cool story bro. Keep being angry about the meaning of words I guess, if it makes you happy.

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It has represented over 1000 people so far.

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I think there's specific industrial problems for which AI is indeed transformative.

Just one example that I'm aware of is the AI-accelerated nazca lines survey that revealed many more geoglyphs that we were not previously aware of.

However, this type of use case just isn't relevant to most people who's reliance on LLMs is "write an email to a client saying xyz" or "summarise this email that someone sent to me".

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Thanks for the kind words, have fun “leveraging machine learning techniques” to “figure out” how much detergent you need

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Probably, but voting isn't supposed to mean, "I agree with what this blurb says." It's supposed to mean, "I think this topic is worth discussing.."

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You forgot the phase immediately preceding AI: 3d prints.

I mean, in this decade, I've heard of car and airplanes being marketed as having 3d printed parts.

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You're fooling yourself if you really think everyone hates it.

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I think AI is a great tool if used properly. However, it should be a background tool. The second you advertise it to the end consumer, it's going to be dogshit.

If someone asks me to build a sort-function for their table, I'm not gonna write an email: "Yes and I actually used radix sort for the table contents which makes it extremely fast and performant!!!". I'm writing: "Done".

The end consumer doesn't give a shit how it works, as long as it works.

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Yes. Microsoft Recall were a great idea..

Sarcasm

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That's really neat, thanks for sharing that example.

In my field (biochemistry), there are also quite a few truly awesome use cases for LLMs and other machine learning stuff, but I have been dismayed by how the hype train on AI stuff has been working. Mainly, I just worry that the overhyped nonsense will drown out the legitimately useful stuff, and that the useful stuff may struggle to get coverage/funding once the hype has burnt everyone out.

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I love these technical discussions. Just kicking each other in the nuts over and over.

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the people who matter, love it.

read "shareholders"

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Yeah, it's a lot like piss in a river. I just drink around the piss.

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I suspect that this is "grumpy old man" type thinking, but my concern is the loss of fundamental skills.

As an example, like many other people I've spent the last few decades developing written communication skills, emailing clients regarding complex topics. Communication requires not only an understanding of the subject, but an understanding of the recipient's circumstances, and the likelihood of the thoughts and actions that may arise as a result.

Over the last year or so I've noticed my assistants using LLMs to draft emails with deleterious results. This use in many cases reduces my thinking feeling experienced and trained assistant to an automaton regurgitating words from publicly available references. The usual response to this concern is that my assistants are using the tool incorrectly, which is certainly the case, but my argument is that the use of the tool precludes the expenditure of the requisite time and effort to really learn.

Perhaps this is a kind of circular argument, like why do kids need to learn handwriting when nothing needs to be handwritten.

It does seem as though we're on a trajectory towards stupider professional services though, where my bot emails your bot who replies and after n iterations maybe they've figured it out.

ozoned

Containerize everything!

Crypto everything!

NFT everything!

Metaverse everything!

This too shall pass.