shads

I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.

If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.

Your looking at this in a fundamentally different way, you seem to think it's like electricity or indoor plumbing, where it's primarily a benefit and enabler of further growth in society.

I see it like asbestos, or to borrow another posters example radium. A technology that has super narrow ETHICAL applications, but since we have elected to make it the only economic force that is driving large swathes of the world's markets, we are in the jam it into everything and see how it works out phase. Humanity keeps on making this one fundamental mistake and because we haven't completely collapsed society and killed ourselves en masse yet we keep on doing it thinking "this time it will turn out differently".

I am trying to convey that this is a poison whose LD50 is microscopic, why do we as a society all have to experiment with dosing ourselves to find out how much we can take before it corrodes us to death?

It's already taking a bite out of the computing landscape, it's damaging the environment, its increasing the wealth disparity, its causing actual fatalities and its destroying the ability of people at large to think and retain information. Software development is probably one of the strongest cases for LLM usage, so please tell me how many untrustworthy browsers do we need to offset the above mentioned costs?

If we had focussed a similar level of effort, and money, into transitioning away from fossile fuel based energy grids as we have on this nonsense the world would be in a better place, but it doesn't allow for the malignant growth of wealth to the 0.01% percent so it could never happen. Please make me understand why this is a good thing?

But they aren't distinct things, they are both heads of the same capitalism hydra. How much of the training data for these LLMs has been harvested directly from Social Media? I sure as shit don't know and I would argue nor do many other people.

Radium is probably a good analogy actually. Thank you. It's toxic in almost every application we can imagine, it's got a legacy that extends out to the current day, it formed a massive economic block, and it turns out it should only ever have been used under the strictest controls. We should never have had "entrepreneurs" being the driving force behind it.

It should have ALWAYS been a controlled substance that required people who understood and respected how fucking dangerous it is. Instead we are intent on jamming LLMs into every aspect of life regardless of how badly we suspect and/or know it will fuck everything up.

The problems are human nature, capitalism and greed. Doesn't mean we have to give in, and frankly all the appeasers out there that keep saying "You have to use it or you will be left behind." are effectively the drug pusher in the locker room telling the insecure young man "Oh yeah everyone else is juicing, you don't do it you won't be able to compete."

Nobody believes the drug dealers are handing out drugs because they are humanitarians, they have a financial interest in destroying that kids life while he tries to justify it to himself.

We know LLMs are harmful on SO many different levels, but the US economy would literally collapse if people acknowledged that and stopped supporting them. So we race headlong towards societal collapse to keep the plates spinning. Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and so many others should all be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity once the collapse occurs. The sooner our societies start stringing these monsters up rather than celebrating them the more hope we have as a species.

You haven't been keeping up to date on the damage they are doing to existing projects have you? Ask the team behind curl how useful the slop submissions are. They are reaching breaking point just keeping up the flood of crap. It's not that LLMs will out compete, they will overwhelm and infect.

How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you might credit. Rendering engines on the other hand, yeah there's not much variety there.

Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I'm afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilic terrorists faster than you can blink.

Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.

We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that's OK, we aren't allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?

Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?

At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of "AI" I'm really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.

So LLMs are going to achieve what Microsoft has been unable to, destroy open source and upend the world of coding. Nice. We really are living in the dumbest timeline. Can't wait for Nintendo's lawyers to decide they found a fragment of Nintendo code in the output of an LLM and start the lawfare to destroy the pesky breeding ground of emulator writers.

Said it in another thread, I have yet to meet a strong advocate for LLMs that isn't a cunt.

How do people gain the ability to make these major projects if not for cutting their teeth on the small ones though. We cut the apprentice and journeyman stages of mastering an art out, replace it with slop, and then ten years from now we wonder why kids these days are so incapable of actually creating anything.

I have talked to kids who have told me that the assignments they got at school were so trivial they just ran them through ChatGPT rather than waste their time. When I pointed out that the reason the assignments were "trivial" was to give them the skills and confidence to do the big projects when the time came I got, at best, blank looks.

I said it somewhere else, if you are using an LLM to generate unit tests I find it hard to be terribly mad at that. If it's scaffolding documentation, meh whatever. If it's generating the main body of your project, I have concerns. Plus I circle back to how can you open source code that may have been stolen from a copyrighted work?

And it's so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it's swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive "work" on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.

I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn't like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It's so insidious, by being "helpful" it reinforces its necessity.

I still don't think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it's amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?

Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can't be better it will be subsumed in slop.

Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these "AI" companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.

I'm not going to get too deeply into this because frankly I am not qualified. However people who I know that are well informed have talked about what it will take to overcome the cost and lead time issues with nuclear. Apparently there are two methods, one is we all agree to pay, A LOT, to cover the capital expenditure required to get a functional nuclear grid off the ground. The other involves a time machine and a jaunt back to the late 70s early 80s to squeeze an extra generation of nuclear R&D in.

Nuclear is either a great long term goal, or a smoke screen.

Just using publicly available figures, in 2025 worldwide nuclear generated 2667 TWh. In 2024 Australias energy generation was 265 TWh. So we would need to generate 10% of the total worldwide nuclear output just to supply demand in Australia. That's a phenomenal amount of construction we would need just to match today's demand.

Plus have you seen the amount of material involved in constructing a nuclear powerplant, they don't grow on trees and they are certainly not small. And yes I know we get to talk about SMRs now, they aren't ready yet, and will only ever be a component in an energy mix.

Inevitably when we talk about 20-50 year lead times and trillion dollar investments to meet current demand if we go nuclear the offered solution is to maintain coal and gas, put all that together and the economy and ecology arguments don't seem to hold water.

Plus you seem to assume renewable generation and storage technology are not improving at a rate of knots. Or that we can't recycle and remanufacture. Plus as we are all about to experience, local production and distribution are often significantly more resilient than highly centralised networks.

Australia should have owned solar technology, we did so much of the initial work to make it mass manufacturable but we as a Country gave up on it because the people who actually make money off our resources didn't want anything upsetting the coal applecart. It's too late for us to be the technology and industrial leaders in this sector, let's not fail to embrace it as consumers just so we can continue to line the same pockets.

Plus so much of this is ideological. I honestly have no fixed preference when it comes to which technology we use going forward. If a sound case could be made for nuclear energy being the absolute best way to go forward I would give it my full backing, but it's just not there. And I really don't want my power to be 8x more expensive at wholesale level (who knows how much on my power bill) just so team nuclear gets to have the win.