Earthing? How is that a scam?
I know for sure that bad earthing in my current residence has been creating significant problems for with appliances.
Sometimes my UPS giving errors, which also, might be due to bad earthing.
Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.
Regardless of how much of a bubble we’re in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It’s proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it “magic beans” is just wishful thinking at best.
ulterno@programming.dev 2 days ago
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Hah, see that’s what I thought when various family members asked if I had heard about it. Turns out, if our electronics need grounding, so must our bodies…
ulterno@programming.dev 2 days ago
our bodies ⏚⏚⏚
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 2 days ago
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that’s great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.
But yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to complain about how “inefficient” an early technology is and also call it “magic beans”.
Zaleramancer@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Those are only conflicting statements if you believe that the market will not embrace worse products. It totally will so long as you have a group of people who lack the critical analysis skills to compare the products and arrive at the conclusion that the new one is worse.
It doesn’t help that the potential drivers of this action are massive conglomerates, so if a sweeping change comes from the top-down and is paired with a lot of propaganda (Marketing) then people will have no choice but to accept it as the standard.
I think that a lot of criticism about the actual quality of AI art is mixed, though. I feel like it has flaws, but I’ve seen arguments about flaws I don’t think are actually real problems with the technical quality.
LukeZaz@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Can’t say I’ve seen B anywhere. All I’ve seen is “tech billionaire CEOs want LLMs to take all our jobs and turn us into slaves,” not so much belief that they can. Perhaps you’re misinterpreting?
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Option A feels mostly like sour grapes to me. Crossover with the humanities and fine arts is significant.
B is feeling a bit less imminent too, but it wasn’t clear a couple years ago that more compute isn’t all you need. AGI is still bound to happen eventually, seeing as NGI did.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
are those competing?
It’s being rushed to market and is still very inefficient, but part of the reason it’s being rushed to market is because companies are getting ahead of themselves about the opportunity to fire human employees.
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 2 days ago
companies are getting ahead of themselves about the opportunity to fire human employees
But then if they produce garbage with AI people will buy the non-garbage product
Either it produces something of value or it doesn’t, if it’s producing garbage, lowering output, etc then it’s not a threat to our jobs because most people don’t like garbage, if it’s producing genuine value then it will be.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Early cars weren’t a threat to streetcars and trains and urban planning but modern cars have reshaped every North American city. You can criticize the inefficiency, poor quality, energy waste, etc. of the technology today while also pointing out the dangers of tomorrow.
Zaleramancer@beehaw.org 3 days ago
Hey! Are you up to talking about your opinions on the value of current AI technology? I’m personally opposed due to how our society has chosen to organize itself, but I think the basic concept is interesting.
leftytighty@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Agreed. I’ve been following the technology of neural networks and generative AI since before LLMs were the new hotness and it’s fascinating and powerful stuff.
My qualms with what’s happening now are more about how we organize our economy and society. Rushing them to market, aggressively trying to cull workers, etc. are critiques of capitalism not AI. In a different world we would all be excited about the prospect of having to work less and reap the benefits of AI, but we wouldn’t be reopening coal plants and leaving people to starve on the street.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.
millie@beehaw.org 3 days ago
Your estimation of what constitutes “objective reality” is in fact the opinion that you’re being asked about.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.
Twitter wasn’t profitable for its entire existence, it’s often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.
Same for doordash and uber eats.
Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they’re not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.
None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).