I don’t actively seek out media from both sides of political issues because in the US we don’t really have ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ media, we have media all owned by billionaires that mostly stay center-right on most subjects, and let the occasional center-left viewpoint slip through so they can seem to be unbiased. Unless I’m reading Jacobin or other actually-leftist (read:socialist) papers/magazines, all I get is right-wing perspectives.
So that seems like more of a lack-of-understanding problem, not an ‘LLMs are bad’ problem as it’s being portrayed in the larger thread.
I’m also not expecting people to be able to understand complex technical troubleshooting or anything either.
No, you’re just calling them stupid for not having spent the time to learn things you with your technical expertise and high comfort level with technical subjects think ought to be pretty simple. I agree that everyone could benefit from increasing their computer literacy, but I also understand that people prioritize the things they care about and that they’re not stupid for not caring to learn the stuff you think they ought to.
You should check your sources when you’re googling or using chatGPT too (most models I’ve seen now cite sources you can check when they’re reporting factual stuff), that’s not unique to those those things. Yeah LLMs might be more likely to give bad info, but people are unreliable too, they’re biased and flawed and often have an agenda, and they are frequently, confidently wrong. Guess who writes books? Mostly people. So until we’re ready to apply that standard to all sources of information it seems unreasonable to arbitrarily hold LLMs to some higher standard just because they’re new.
There is (or at least used to be) a debug command to write-protect a hard drive. No idea what it’s for or why such a thing exists, but you flip a certain bit from 0 to 1 and drive no write. I won $100 once at work with this knowledge. We had a training course about how much better the new version of windows at the time was and how much harder it was to break - so hard they’d pay $100 (in early 2000s money) to anyone who could unrecoverably break their demo windows install during the 10 minute presentation. The instructor (who worked for Microsoft) said he’d been doing this for 6 months and they’d never had to pay out that prize before, much less 30 seconds in.
“Listen, I enjoy hanging out with you, but sometimes people just need some time alone and don’t feel up to hanging out.” is probably a good place to start.
The Bullwinkle Show (1959-1963) is a riot and definitely should not have been around children. It’s as much of a riot as an adult as I remember it being as a kid (though I only ever saw it on re-runs, I’m not quite that old.)
If your goal is to, say, kill all of the tigers in the world, why would you be okay with making more baby tigers? Yeah the baby tigers are cute and can’t hurt anyone yet, but baby tigers don’t stay babies for long, and 100% of the large, angry tigers who like to eat people used to be baby tigers.
The goal of communism is not to turn every person into a capitalist, it’s to create a society/economy that meets the needs of all of its members instead of just those of the rich. Encouraging the working class to start businesses is just like making more baby tigers: it’s working in the opposite direction of your goal.
Sure, it happens all the time. Someone shows me a piece of evidence that I trust, or points out that I missed something in what they had originally said, or whatever. What else is there to do in that situation other then go ‘Oh. You’re right, my bad.’?
But I’m kinda weird, I enjoy having my beliefs and ideas challenged and I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong and updating my worldview to reflect the most accurate information I have access to.
How exactly? Bad information is bad information, regardless of the source.
My point wasn’t ‘google is more expensive than chatgpt’, it’s that ‘google is also expensive, just not as expensive as chatgpt.’ It’s probably safe to say that no one has ever just done one google search or just asked one question of chatgpt, so the one-use cost is practically irrelevant compared to the average or collective use case.
Yeah, nobody has ever written a book that’s full of bullshit, bad arguments, and obvious lies before, right?
Obviously anyone who uses any technology needs to be aware of the limitations and pitfalls, but to imagine that this is some entirely new kind of uniquely-harmful thing is to fail to understand the history of technology and society’s responses to it.
Fair enough.
Yeah, the intergration of AI with chat will just make it eat even more power, of course.
Per: https://www.rwdigital.ca/blog/how-much-energy-do-google-search-and-chatgpt-use/
Google search currently uses 1.05GWh/day. ChatGPT currently uses 621.4MWh/day
The per-entry cost for google is about 10% of what it is for GPT but it gets used quite a lot more. So for one user ‘just use google’ is fine, but since are making proscriptions for all of society here we should consider that there are ~300 million cars in the US, even if they were all honda civics they would still burn a shitload of gas and create a shitload of fossil fuel emissions. All I’m saying if the goal is to reduce emissions we should look at the big picture, which will let you understand that taking the bus will do you a lot better than trading in your F-150 for a Civic.
And the biggest hole in yours is that you can’t imagine that people have better shit to do than learn your job alongside their own just to make it a little easier on you. Call me when you’re spending hours every day studying up on medicine and law so that you can also find the answer to your simple medical/legal questions in 30 seconds online just like doctors and lawyers can.
What you have is a magical thing called ‘job security’ that others would kill for. You are needed to figure out complex technical computer shit because other people have other shit they want to be doing with their time. If they actually did as you suggested you wouldn’t have a job anymore. But instead of viewing that as a positive - instead of feeling needed and valued for something that you contribute to society - you choose to view it as a negative: any inconvenience exists solely to make your job harder, and how dare people not devote even more of their life to making yours a little easier? I know, I felt exactly the same way when I worked IT, and it’s a big part of why I left.
Yes, companies are simplifying and refining things, in some cases they do remove functionality, that’s just the way technology works. My dad called himself a shade-tree mechanic, but when I was growing up there was nothing on a car he couldn’t fix. Nowadays he takes it to the shop not because he’s prevented from fixing it but because cars have gotten vastly more complicated in the ensuing ~40 years and he - despite being a very capable and technically-minded person - just couldn’t keep up with it anymore because the business of doing his job and raising his family was more important.
If you want to be angry at companies for obfuscating or removing functionality then brother I’m right there with you. Just don’t be making assumptions about other peoples’ intelligence just because they don’t have the time or interest to sink countless hours into this just to make your life a little easier.
But the reason they were installed in those places is because the power is cheap. Which is a particular irony in Texas because despite having cheap power we never seem to have enough of it. Every summer ERCOT rolls out warnings that are like ‘zomg you guys I didn’t realize it gets hot in Texas in the summer, y’all are gonna have to turn off your air conditioners so we don’t run out of power. What? Of course we’re not turning the AC off in our offices, are you crazy?’ Yeah, sorry chum, I’m not suffering through 100+F degree heat just so some rich asshole can make a bit more money today.
I wasn’t listing other bad things, this is not a whataboutism, this was a specific criticism of telling people not to use one thing because it uses a ton of power/water when the thing they’re telling people to use instead also uses a ton of power/water.
Oh, you mean like people have been saying about books for 500+ years?
The point isn’t that it’s restrictive, the point is that words have precise technical meanings that are the same across authors, speakers, and time. It’s rigorous because of that precision and consistency, not just because it’s restrictive. It’s necessary to be rigorous with use of language in scientific fields where clear communication is difficult but important to get right due to the complexity of the ideas at play.
I have bad eyes and a love of computers/gaming, so I spent 30 years hunched over a keyboard squinting at the monitor. It fucked my back all the way up, I’ve had chronic back pain every day for ~20 years now. Fortunately nowadays I have a recliner and monitors/keyboard on arms so I can see while in a comfortable position. Take care of your back, kids.