disqard

If you (and GP) haven't already seen this, you'll at least get a chuckle out of it:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Concur. I've kept my subscription primarily as a way to support the project.

Can you name the CFO? I could not find any such person.

> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

> dumb and weak

Like, "losers and suckers"?

I haven't seen this articulation before, and I'm going to remember this one!

In return, I'll share my own reasoning:

Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.

However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.

And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.

I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.

This entire thread is amazing!

It's like a kaleidoscope: Human words --> LLM Training --> chatbot-isms --> lovely parody catch-phrases (and this thread will get ingested soon, and be used to train...)

I didn't see anyone else link Keiji Matsuda's "Hyper-Reality", so here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

Yeah, Scratch helped bootstrap so many folks, but that was a generation ago -- I can't imagine exhorting children to learn to code with Scratch (or any other Visual Programming Language) in good faith today.

If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.

Yup, Dilbert's "easiest round of layoffs ever".

I have done the same for many years now, and I feel like it's going to be an annoying false positive for people like us.

I remember when the "hacker vs. cracker" distinction went away because Hollywood co-opted the former and it became de facto "hacker == bad guy"

Insightful, and scary! Imitating an imitation machine... even if no one is trying to intentionally do so, McLuhan's "we become what we behold" is inescapable.

Under-rated take, thanks for stating this!

Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.

This sounds like PG's essay on the front page (today or yesterday).

"In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs."

This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".

Good luck! Big fan of your work for many, many years. Thank you for the amazing resource that is Adafruit.

I'm so sorry to read about your experience in this thread.

I will comment, that once you left, the next person who joined won't have the benefit of your experience, allowing them to be similarly exploited... and the cycle continues.

I think GP is also specifically alluding to a recent surge of feeling like we're living in a post-Truth society now.

I'm not advocating for being this way... but if you're starting a company primarily so you can have an "exit strategy", then it is natural to primarily virtue-signal to Wall St (instead of "solve a real problem")

tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.

Among the tech giants, what is Meta's "AI play"?

Is it: "we'll serve Black Mirror ads (generated via AI) into people's AR/VR glasses, since they'll wear them all the time"?

> bot behavior

Freudian slip?

That's a pretty good steelman.

I do think there's a gestalt (esp. among younger folks) of "AI is bad", to put it bluntly. An anecdote I saw today was:

parent: we're having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight.

kid: oh, that's just AI.

(i.e. "that's made-up" or "that's silly" or "that's just lies") -- none of which are a positive sentiment)

I imagine the meme "you are like a little baby, watch this", as the POTUS performs over 3700 trades.

He's smart! This is how one converts insider information into money.

He also does not pay taxes! That makes him a good businessman.

/s

Your comment made me go read TFA, and yes, that is rather pretty handwriting.

Your argument has merit.

I'm just going to point out that NCSA Mosaic was released in 1993, and the hand-wringing over it being an absolute memory pig is more 1999 than 2019.

But your overall point is well-taken.

I recommend this too!

I like my Dell Precision T7910 (dual-socket Xeon FTW) a lot.

What are you using?

I love this too! What do you think of the "halfway faked" devices like the Yoto player [0]? My kid uses it to listen to audiobooks -- it has no actual content on the card, just rfid telling the device (now set this as the current album for playback).

[0] https://us.yotoplay.com/

I'm loving the Wodehouse references in this thread.

In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!

Right, I've also heard your (1) above expressed as "she basically stole from the wrong set of people -- rich and powerful".

Kinda-sorta off-topic (but not really), it reminds me of Charlie Javice. She sold a database of college loan applicants to JP Morgan for $175 million -- it later turned out that she had fabricated most of that data.