this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
117 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37800 readers
351 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.

I always say about AI that it's not the tool but who's making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn't seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4's.

The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Replace belt sander with CBD. A compound with very real and tangible benefits for specific use cases, but is marketed as a modern day snake oil cure all.

Imagine seeing people regularly complaining on bluelight, erowid, or whatever forums educated drug users frequent these days, bitching that CBD didn't cure their asthma, or STDs, so therefore it has no medical value.

They know it's a tool, yet they keep complaining about how the gas station CBD isn't magic and failed to cure their gonorrhea, even though they already knew it was never going to be able to, no matter what the packaging said.

But my analogy wasn't meant to be critically analyzed and dissected, it was a throwaway example to highlight the problem of people on Lemmy, who actually know better, but keep whinging about LLM's providing bogus URLs for citations, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I mean, Lemmy definitely runs more techy than most other places, but I don't know if I'd go so far as to say the average user here knows any better than any Reddit idiot or something lol

And my point wasn't to peer review your example or anything, just to say that people keep complaining about it because these snake oil salesmen keep getting richer while using the same tired lines about how AI will do everything and anything, and do a handstand while it's at it.

It's like all the complaints historians keep finding about that one guy selling shitty copper bars or whatever. Nobody is gonna shut up about it until the bubble finally bursts and these AI companies can't unload their shitty copper on anyone anymore.