Not seeing this discount in Australia

I almost wish I hadn’t started using FBReader. It’s ruined me for everything else.

Everytime I try a different reading app it just feels wrong.

The way things are going, I wonder how long before a politician admits that it is more efficient to have the kids positively identify themselves and then be forced to provide their if details to which ever paedophile asks. We can’t have the inefficiencies of yesteryear in our modern world kiddy fiddlers need to move fast and break stuff.

After all it turns out the people agitating for these laws, when the mask is ripped off them like a pirate ghost at the end of a Scooby Do episode, the villain was the people who most directly benefit from government mandated doxxing all along, like fucking Meta and OpenAI. What a fucking amazing coincidence.

Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t visit the US right now even if FIFA were paying me that much to attend.

Sure, why not! Thanks for getting back to me, again. Its little cultural things like this that I enjoy the most.

Oh and to be clear, it’s not spicy autocorrect that is the disease, it’s just a symptom. It’s the combination of late stage capitalism and the incipient death of the USA as a haegemonic force. I’m almost certain China will throw a bunch of safeguards and restrictions on “AI” once they are assured of their economic, cultural and political dominance.

What this all comes down to is that we are talking about tech that has existed for decades, the big difference is that we now have the capability to run massive parallel computation, yes there have been advancements in technique and efficiency, but one of the major reasons we aren’t seeing widescale software patents on all this stuff is that it’s all fundamentally existing art done much faster and wider than we could before.

The biggest thing that is being enabled by all these technologies is the grift economy. Name me any other technology where we would accept circular “investments” to make up a significant proportion of the world’s economic activity.

I am less interested in the anecdotal “evidence” on either side of the argument, I consider individual artists not liking the output of LLMs to be about as worthwhile as the former big business lackeys turned AI start up founders who talk about how employees should be using agentic workflows or get left behind. I am concerned about the teachers who keep telling me that they have kids who are allowing chatbots to entirely replace their critical faculties, the managers who are frothing to sack all their human staff to replace them with barely, if at all, functional agents. I worry about how many people are letting themselves get caught up in the fantasy that there is some sort of intelligence in this high speed Chinese room.

I also worry that worldwide we are going whole hog on a technology that just isn’t what people are being tricked into thinking it is.

I personally think that the generative AI bubble is this generations leaded petrol or radium. Eventually we will realise how hideously corrosive it is and by that stage the generational damage will be done, and as bad as it is for the economy, it’s going to be far worse for our kids and I don’t think it’s OK that we are throwing them under the bus so that Nvidia can be the richest company ever and the US can pretend to not be in the grip of a recession. I don’t think a bunch of virtual junior devs is worth it at that cost.

I wrote this on the board but my form was not as good as it might have been, the students corrected the mistakes I made and left me the following note: オッケー、まかせろ

Would this be an appropriate response, or would it come across as incorrect, rude or condescending?

先生方、ご意見をいただきありがとうございます。

So I’m curious about a few points you mentioned, Neural Networks are a whole new thing? You know the prior art for that goes back almost a 90 years right? Neural Networks at scale, yeah maybe.

Do you believe that the publishers will realise the limitations of generative AI before or after they have completely decimated the gaming industry, because as much as we like to talk about what devs are doing with generative AI they aren’t the people with money.

Across multiple industries we are seeing people being forced to engage with tools that actively slow them down, there has been study after study showing that use of generative AI has negative impacts on memory, cognitive ability and productivity. Who is going to wrangle these “virtual junior devs” when everybody drops out of a fraught industry to breed alpacas or hand make timber furniture?

Very soon I suspect we will see the end of free access to current gen models, there will be a generation or two of diminished free models then the screws will start to turn. Simply put the companies doing the training will be wanting to monetise usage to offset the training costs. The companies can’t afford to lose money hand over fist forever and every local model that doesn’t phone home to rack up charges will be considered a “lost sale”. BTW I don’t consider myself amazingly computer savvy, but my OS doesn’t “come with” a word processor or music player I need neither on a day to day basis. I can and have installed them as I need them. I think you will find that a lot of very capable people in tech view generative AI like smart home devices, what’s that old joke about “the only smart device in my house is a printer and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it starts acting funny”. Oh and let’s be honest Amazon would rather you were renting a PC in the cloud and accessing it via what is essentially a modern equivalent of a dumb terminal, why would they let you run a “local” model when they could be chucking the generative AI fee on your monthly rental?

You seem to be seeing end state solutions here, I’d contend that we are a ways off any of this stuff working as it’s currently being sold to us. The problem I forsee with this is that the bubble bursting isn’t going to be a simple “Oops looks like we unbalanced the economy… Silly us.” it seems to me it will be more like a whole bunch of rich people trying to explain to the general populace why they deserve to keep all the money when they have been manipulating the worldwide economy to feather their nests. Especially if the collapse happens fast enough to crater stock markets across the western world.

If the US economy wasn’t grift maxxing these days I am reasonably sure assessed risk would have escalated past potential gains long before now and fiscal watchdogs would be asking some very difficult questions of Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. Unfortunately we got generative AI hitting its stride as we were recovering from the Covid economic instability and the market manipulation presidency starting.

You again? What part of the fossil fuel industry do you work in?

Nobody believes EVs are without drawbacks, but your blind hatred of renewables and EVs comes across as more unhinged every time I see your name on a comment. I’ve engaged with you in good faith before and you have shown yourself to be a bad actor. If you can’t figure out why moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing at least shut up and let the rest of the world get on with it.

Hey, I randomly selected a language to go first and it ended up being Czech. I got a reply under my note: Ano! Yea! But I must admit I am reasonably certain it was a machine translation. I don’t believe there were any Czech speakers in the class.

My friend was SUPER excited by the new language and apparently it sparked a good conversation in her class, she couldn’t wait to see what’s next.

Thank you again!

Σας ευχαριστώ

And

Faleminderit shumë

I really like that I am seeing common or similar words between languages.

Obrigado

The Greek part was copied off the web. I meant that I hope I can correctly write the Greek characters on the whiteboard. Hope they are legible.

Well I hope you can steer clear of any further problems. I fear you might just be ahead of the curve that’s coming for all of us. My country is already starting to slide towards shadowy figures exerting control over our officials to pass laws that are not in the best interests of the public… And looking at what is happening in USA, all very concerning.

Спасибо Or хвала ти

Is Cyrillic or Latin more used in Serbia? I like the novelty of trying to write Cyrillic clearly enough to be read but want to make sure I am using the more common form.

Kiitos

The lack of “Please” took me a moment to process, but I guess it’s just a linguistic niche that the language didn’t need to fill, and the use of “Thank You” made it redundant. Cool, thank you!

The sort of change that’s needed across many parts of the world these days my friend. But until that day, stay safe and don’t get into any trouble you can’t handle.

Cool, thank you!

Thank you I appreciate the offer, I fear that even if the world wasn’t in the state it is I would not have the financial means to take a trip like that right now. I think this will be on my list for once the kids have left home, and hopefully the world has achieved some level of equilibrium by then.