Canada restricts hate speech, as does most of Europe.

Yet its the US with the speech suppression issues going on right now.

A medicine dispenser application for a nurse is still just CRUD operations for the most part. There’s nothing innovative about how the code would be written in an application like that.

You’re both correct, and also wrong.

A lot of code already exists. Or at least in a close enough form that it can be easily adjusted to address a new situation.

When someone comes up with an idea for a new App at this point, it’s almost never because it’s an entirely new branch of computing. It’s very likely just CRUD with a visual design, and then a small more complex algorithm to mix the data around behind the scenes.

What’s the difference between a dating app and an automatic meal plan builder? The algorithm doesn’t care about whether or not the recipe swiped back when it matches it up to you.

You’re right that they’re not going to be inventing entirely new things most of the time, that’s just not what’s needed of them most of the time.

Being concerned about at technology and being against that technology are not synonymous.

Companies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.

The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.

Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.

I only park in one specific aisle at Costco. I will wait for someone to walk back to their car just to get a spot there.

That has nothing to do with the technology. The last crash was caused by a global virus, and the one before that was the banking system…

For an equivalent prompt and similar quality answer, yes. Inference prices are dropping.

However, higher quality answers (or more complex prompt handling) are currently going up in inference price.

The fun part will be once quality hits a point where the average user (or even business) doesn’t care about the incremental quality change any more. Then it’s going to be a race to the bottom for performance per dollar.

Who cares if the not all companies or investors make money? They can make their bets, some will win and some will lose. I just want better tech for cheaper prices.

They are making money, don’t confuse a lack of profit because of reinvest for failure. Amazon “lost” money for almost a decade.

Not every company needs to succeed either. Plenty of dead companies from the dot com bubble bursting, yet digital companies are more profitable than ever.

You clearly didn’t read the data. It wouldn’t matter if google was using 10x more. The difference between billions and quadrillions is literally a million times.

You’re doing the same shit on 100 different technologies that existed before LLMs but only this is a step too far?

Use your critical thinking skills.

Nah, these data centers are not even worth talking about being bad for the environment compared to almost everything else we do. Trying to use that as a primary focus here is just people looking for an excuse to hate the technology.

https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/

Here’s a beautiful article comparing the AI industry to Cattle farming. AI data center water use is measured in tens Billions of liters, while the beef industry is measured in Quadrillions.

You already shot down your own IP argument, I don’t need to help you there. AI companies don’t disproportionately steal from small creators, They may have done more of that in the first few iterations, but the datasets simply don’t do that anymore. There’s no need, they can train it on clean data, then just pull live from the web for specifics now.

I am dripping condescension because it’s fucking stupid. There are plenty of horrible things happening in the world today, AI datacenters are so far down the list that they do not deserve the amount of effort people are putting in to hate them while far more significant things go un-recognized. The reason for this? Because people are being misled, and instead of figuring out things themselves they take the shit they read at face value.

By that metric, so is everything “Healthy” or “Environmentally Friendly”

GPT technology ( a small subset of ML ) does do many things really well, and that’s a problem because it’s hurting some people by doing those things well enough to cause them to lose their job, or at the very least making them worried about losing their job.

When I see people begin their Anti-AI arguements with “it’s bad for the environment” I tune out completely. These motherfuckers have been driving gasoline powered vehicles around for decades, and are totally fine with natural gas fired power plants.

Fuck off.

Theft of ideas and IP?

Buddy, do you not fucking understand how society has improved over the last 10 thousand years? We even have a saying for it, “standing on the shoulders of giants” which as a saying/concept has been around for about the last 800 fucking years, and was made or remembered famously from Issac Newton in 1675.

If we didn’t use the ideas and learning from those that came before us, we’d still be living in caves.

Do you know what’s more recent than that saying? The entire concept of Intellectual property. Which has only been around a bit more than 500 years.

Buddy is complaining about giving money to large companies, then you look at their linked in profile and see a job history that includes Dropbox, Scribe, and a for-profit healthcare company.

There are snake oil artists using it and pushing it in many cases, but saying the whole thing is snake oil is dumb as shit. The core technology is already functional and useful in specific applications.

You are in fact in a bad echo chamber.

The average person uses it to figure out how to write a birthday card with a funny message in it, cheat on a school assignment, or just use it to search like google.

Why would they have a negative opinion of that?

which can be heard for hundreds of feet around them

From that linked article.

Hundreds of feet!

They aren’t building these 50 feet from residential properties. I don’t think this is an actual issue.

Watermarks for AI content is a non-starter, there’s no possible way to enforce this. Pandora’s box has been opened, and even if you mandated all the big AI companies do it, the open source models that exist (or will be developed) will be available to bypass it.

Nothing wrong with charging actual costs for electricity or expanding the grid with renewables. These are actually relevant ideas.

Noise pollution? I haven’t heard that one before. As long as the data centers aren’t running generators, the noise from them should be lower than almost any other industrial user.

History loves to repeat itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Some back of the napkin math says about $50 trillion dollars in value for the top 1% in the US. That would pay off the whole US Debt of $40 Trillion, with about $10 trillion left over.

However, there’s a caveat here. Given that’s about 3.5 million people (1% of the US population) that only works out to about $14 million dollars each.

While that’s a lot of money, it’s not really an egregious amount of money. If you limited the 1% to keeping say $10,000,000 each (get rid of the obscenely rich) you would only have about $15 trillion dollars, which doesn’t even pay off half the debt.