Honestly, overuse of AI in the West is likely going to compound our societal incompetence and accelerate our decline

Can this AI power a smart speaker that can actually reliably manage timers and alarms, manage my lights, play music, convert units, and find my TV remote? No?

That’s literally all I’ve ever wanted out of any of this and nobody has been able to pull it off. Every single option is awful, takes like 10 seconds to respond for no reason other than to upload my whole shit directly to the NSA, and has maybe a 1 in 3 chance of being so comically wrong that it’s a nuisance.

“Alexa, set a 5 minute tea timer.” “Buying 5 kilograms of Earl Grey Tea on Amazon.” “NO NO NO NO”

“Hey Google, what’s 1/4 cup in ml?” “Playing the Quarter Life Crisis podcast on Spotify.” “NO NO NO NO”

The people in Dune were about this one

I’m gonna ask my AI what I should do about this.

i’ve yelled at a couple cs students about learning things for real and they’ve at least stopped telling me about it

it’s tolerable to use it to get a lead on something you don’t understand well enough to formulate search terms but you have to do extra work to verify anything it spits out

This is the cognitive issue. When not exercised, parts of your brain will atrophy. You will start to outsource your thinking to the black box. You are not built different. It is the expected effect.

Tools not systems

AI coding for my general workflow. I do not recommend this in the slightest.

Yes, I use stack overflow like God intended.

I’ve run some underwhelming local LLMs and done a bit of playing with the commercial offerings.

I agree with this post. My experiments are on hold, though I’m curious to just have a poke around DeepSeek’s stuff just to get an idea of how it behaves.

I am most concerned with next generation devices that come with this stuff built in. There’s a reactionary sinophobe on youtube who produced a video with some pretty interesting talking points that, since the goal is to have these “AI assistants” basically observe everything you do with your device (and are blackboxes that rely on cloud hosted infrastructure) that this effectively negates E2E encryption. I am convinced by these arguments and in that respect the future looks particularly bleak. Having a wrongthink censor that can read all your inputs before you’ve even sent them and can flag you for closer surveillance and logging, combined with the three letter agencies really “chilling out” about eg Apple’s refusal to assist in decrypting iPhones, it all looks quite fucked.

There are obviously some use cases where LLMs are sort of unobjectionable, but even then, as OP points out, we often ignore the way our tools shape our minds. People using them as surrogates for human interaction etc are a particularly sad case.

Even if you accept the (flawed) premise that these machines contain a spark of consciousness, what does it say about us that we would spin up one-time single use minds to exploit for a labor task and then terminate them? I don’t have a solid analysis but it smells bad to me.

Also China’s efforts effectively represent a more industrial scale iteration of what the independent hacker and opensource communities have been doing anyway- proving that the moat doesn’t really exist and that continuing to try and use brute force (scale) to make these tools “better” is inefficient and tunnel visioned.

Between this and the links shared with me recently about China’s space efforts, I am simply left disappointed that we remain in competition and opposition to more than half of the world when cooperation could have saved us a lot of time, energy, water, etc. It’s sad and a shame.

I cherish my coding ability. I don’t mind playing with an LLM to generate some boilerplate to have a look at, but the idea that people who cannot even assess the function of the code that is generated are putting this stuff into production is really sad. We haven’t exactly solved the halting problem yet have we? There’s no real way for these machines to accurately assess code to determine that it does the task it is intended to do without side effects or corner cases that fail. These are NP-hard problems and we continue to ignore that fact.

The hype driving this is clear startup bro slick talk grifting shit. Yes it’s impressive that we can build these things but they are being misapplied and deferred to as authorities on topics by people who consider themselves to be otherwise Very Smart People. It’s… in a word… pathetic.

I’m excited that another country is continuing to research AI and LLMs without burning the planet to the max degree. The technology might have better uses in the future but commercializing it now, especially to the ridiculous degree we see in the US (why does my fridge need chatgpt?) Is absolute folly if not a war crime on all future generations who will suffer from the unnecessary emissions

Luckily ChatGPT and deepseek can’t plumb worth a fuck so I’m not too worried about it coming for my job.

Until robots develop the dexterity to crawl under a home, isolate broken plumbing, repair and test after, my job will be human only.

It may be a petty thing, but I hate how people rely on AI programs to make pfp’s and thumbnails. I’d rather get a shitty crayon drawing that you even put thirty seconds into.

The only ethical use of AI was when DougDoug made it try to beat Pajama Sam.

this is me with google maps

There is “use the machine to write code for you” (foolish, a path to ruin) and there is “use the machine like a particularly incompetent coworker who nevertheless occasionally has an acceptable idea to iterate on”.

If you are already an expert, it is possible to interpret the hallucinations of the machine to avoid some pointless dead-end approaches. More importantly, you’ve had to phrase the problem in simple enough terms that it can’t go too wrong, so you’ve mostly just got a notebook that spits text at you. There’s enough bullshit in there that you cannot trust it or use it as is, but none of the ego attached that a coworker might have when you call their idea ridiculous.

Don’t use the machine to learn anything (it is trained on almost exclusively garbage), don’t use anything it spits out, don’t use it to “augment your abilities” (if you could identify the augmentation, you’d already have the ability). It is a rubber duck that does not need coffee.

If your code is so completely brainless that the plagiarism machine can produce it, you’re better off writing a code generator to just do it right rather than making a token generator play act as a VIM macro.