I want my emails to be a series of noises that only computers can hear and communicate with

Ypu know what I don’t hear on lemmy? People complaining that crypto world consumes more energy than AI world and one of those is far more useless in grand scheme of things.

So how comes it is A issue for AI, but everyone seemingly has forgotten about crypto?

Last I heard, securing one transaction on chain is equalivent to powering US household for many days (feel free to fact check). In comparison, generating LLM text for entire hour on your PC is pretty much the same as gaming for two hours (very approx., your gpu is unlikely at 100% load), which means gaming world is far more destructive energy wise. Are you getting triggered yet?

I think you misunderstood me here as we’re in agreement already

I don’t think accuracy is an issue either. I’ve been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It’s really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other.

The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.

So is the computer you’re using

For sure, and I agree. But that isn’t what happens around here. Instead we turn to panic rather than skepticism. We are cynical more than anything. And I don’t trust cynicism about topical subjects.

This wasn’t well reasoned objectivism. It was journalist and artist fearing for their jobs about technology they don’t understand. They generate a lot of content to generate panic. The mob saw the panic and adopted it. You’re not a true lefty unless you accept that AI is some new danger to the threat of the lowly creative.

They’re trying to compare “AI” to fire. If you don’t see the point, I can’t blame you.

I think it’s probably a bit early to tell for certain on that assessment. There is definitely pros and cons to all technology. Electricity production causes environmental damage, building wooden houses require logging. Plastics are a byproduct of a withering industry. Asbestos might have saved more lives than it took, but there were probably much better ways to solve fire resistant buildings.

Why all these destructive things? Capitalism requires maximizing profits above all else. So, really the question is how will capitalism fuck us over with AI? So, so many ways. That’s why it’s important that we build community understanding of this technology in order to combat it. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay. So we either put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not here or we can embrace it and learn how it works and how to defeat it and come up with open source tooling to combat it.

I’m in the latter camp. I love technology breakthroughs and want to learn first hand the capabilities to understand how it will be used against me and how I can use it.

Well, it’s a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it’s easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there’s an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it’s just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.

With asbestos you get some convenience, but it’ll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.

Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?

Some people think you can use it as a replacement for therapy or to fight loneliness. Turns out, simply reading fiction is better.

https://neurosciencenews.com/reading-emapthy-loneliness-28972/

Well for me, I enjoy pair programming my own projects with offline models. I also bounce ideas off it to attempt to ground myself in some type of reality (some models are better for this than others… probably has risk of delusions of grandeur. Some models will just verbally suck you off which is annoying).

I built ansible tooling for deploying k3s kubernetes and Ceph-backed Proxmox clusters and VMs and containers and services. Utilized the help of LLMs to structure my playbooks and figure out how roles work.

I love learning new things and LLMs have a lot to offer in that regard. You have to watch out for the bullshit and independently look at other sources as well, but it’s a great starting point and I can sometimes have sone deep conversations around some topics.

What’s the business case for AI?

printing money by deception. oh and also votes, probably.

Restricting our energy use is not a very good end game. We need to learn how to unlock more energy production without destruction of the environment. This will happen through technological development. Temporarily rationing or conservation may be needed, but permanent is not the answer.

That’s probably going to be one of the main weapons against us, the media generating fake news using AI to control us.

It’s much better to be a critical thinker than mindlessly accepting whatever BS from some grifter just because it’s “accepted wisdom” in a completely brainwashed society.

I am biased, I am having a ton of fun with LLMs and they are helping me achieve some personal goals. Do they use energy? Sure. Will new, more powerful technologies come along later that require even greater amounts of energy? I hope so one day. We need to find cleaner more abundant energy sources.

Sounds like most of Lemmy. Honestly sometimes I feel it’s worse than Reddit with the constant bashing on anything except Linux, Firefox, or - for some reason - Steam. Still glad I left Reddit though.