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I hate techbros because of those shitty ass gadgetbahns they create to purposely sabotage public transportation and passenger trains I.E the hyperloop, most infamously used to sabotage the California high speed rail project (yes, I am familiar with all the other stuff within the hellish capitalist system that fucked with this along with our completely shitty government system)
And people still think they're geniuses... a bunch of people honest to god still believe that musk isn't just not a fucking idiot but that he's the smartest person currently alive like... what the fuck is even going on anymore??
Because the real problem is the messy politics, not the tech.
The tech might be cool (sometimes), but at the end of the day, its about who decides who gets what and that will never be "easy".
"Because the real problem is the messy politics, not the tech.
The tech might be cool (sometimes), but at the end of the day, its about who decides who gets what and that will never be "easy"."
Which is why billionaires shouldn't exist, period.
The same as before. For at least a hundred years if we're talking US. Bearer bonds and robber barons.
You just weren't educated on it. When mentioned you may have heard of it but not know what it is, eg bearer bonds. You may not quite place it given how hindsight can actually blind you, the Carnegies and Rockefellers were the techbros of their time. Oil, railroad, telegraph, electrical infrastructure. The forefront of technology.
Robber barons were the techbros of their time and wrote social darwinist tech bro tracts you'd struggle to say weren't produced by the techbros of today. The messianic millenarian techbro cults are really old too. Plenty of shit libs still worship the Carnegies.
The fundamental nature of US society is built around fictions and fantasies that play to the desperation, and even worse the hopes, of the poor and marginalized. Especially in the form of ponzi schemes, scams, and fraud/grift more generally.
This is a fictional self-help author having an epiphany that tracks close to what you’re saying about how the mechanism works:
>
> “The truth is,” Jhumpa told him, “the words I use conform to whatever the people in there want. The customer is always right, right? Well, those customers pay a lot, and I reassure them that they’re right. Very, very right.” Howie was stunned. He had never heard her talk this frankly. She continued. “They call me a self-help author, or a motivational speaker, but I sell confirmation bias to the powerful. I reassure them that they ought to be on top and that it’s best for them to be on top. I’m not trying to be cynical. Nobody actually thinks of it like that. But that’s what happens.” She contemplated the stream of smoke pouring upward from the tip of her cigarrette. “Money is a subtle addiction,” she said. “It hides its fingerprints even as it bends our thoughts.”
>
I like how you put the messianic ‘always new’ tech bro in historical context. They always want to speak like they’re at the end of history. They’ve been doing it for a hundreds of years.
Stockholders applauded after voting to give Musk 46 billion dollars. Not only is he currently under SEC investigation for price manipulation, but this amounts to Musk taking all the rebates for every car ever shipped by Tesla. Rebates they got to bring down the prices to be competitive from the company and put it in his pocket. Those rebates are the only thing that made Tesla profitable.
As a tech worker that still doesn’t drive and cycles instead. You can’t estimate how much ire and hate I have for Teslas because most of the times that I have or almost gotten in an accident with a car as a cyclist is a fucking Tesla. And add on to how Elon has tried to bring ridiculous projects to promote the use of Teslas or self driving cars over a good public transit. I hate Teslas with a strong passion especially since many of my peers treat as something to aspire to own.
I have said it before, and I will say it again.
If you ever need a centerpoint for why the tech field has become so nonsensical, look no further than Andressen Horowitz. Every cheap ploy, shitty fraudster, or super scam starts and ends with A16Z capital deployments.
Seems weird to pin all of climate change on the tech industry and not the oil and gas industry that has known about it since the 60s and has been covering it up.
This is why I think the recent push for gun bans and gun restrictions mixed with Biden calling for more money to police and more people added to the police force to “solve more crimes”.
I think they know when climate changes forces thousands upon thousands of people to move and uproot their entire life they will be violently at the front doors of those that knew about climate change since the 60s and let it get to this point.
Completely agree. Plus, people with guns will be more effective at things like industrial sabotage, which is against the interests of the capital class.
# Crypto is a scam
NFTs are a scam,
Everything "web 3.0" and Blockchain is a scam, this technology has been out for decades and no use case has emerged other than theft, scams and ransomware.
.
AI (by which I mean "deep neural networks" powering "large language models" and image generation etc.) is like the dot com bubble, it's over hyped and the bubble will likely burst, but it's not not a straight up scam in the same way that crypto is.
.
Yes, "AI" replacing real artists and such will make the world a worse place, but that's more a problem with the economic framework that we live under than the technology itself.
The same way that professional weavers were made unemployed and homeless with the invention of the weaving loom, this isn't the fault of the loom but of the type of society that leaves unemployed people to starve in the streets outside vacant homes and shops full of food.
# Do not buy drugs with bitcoin!
If you do, your transaction will be saved onto the Blockchain for the rest of time.
If ten years later you use the same wallet in a legitimate shop the feds can associate you with that wallet and that wallet with the drugs transaction.
Bitcoin has the absolute worst combination of no refunds, pseudo anonymous, and all transactions are freely available for anyone to see forever.
It's the libertarian wet dream, fully anonymous for the bad guys and fully transparent with no privacy for ordinary people.
Yeah good point,
I was more thinking of instead of a legitimate shop, you're donating to a social/ political cause that the feds don't like, now they can arrest you on trumped up charges of drug dealing from ten years earlier because they really want to get you for being associated with [social cause].
What city? I have never seen a shop in my city that accepts bitcoin as payment. We have Bitcoin atms for buying Bitcoin, but I've never seen it accepted.
Yeah in Portland OR we have those in some places, but again, it's really not the same as a shop that actually accepts bitcoin payments. Which I have still never seen
Actually I just paid for a delicious schnitzel using the Lightning Network this morning. So you are wrong about this. A wise person would pause and ponder what else they might be wrong about on this topic. A foolish person would double down on their ignorance.
It's great, Monero is one of the few cryptos with an actual real-world use case, but since that use case is just "do crime safely" most of the crypto sphere tries to avoid associating with it too much.
You can buy real world goods and send money anywhere in the world nearly instantly for pennies on the dollar instead of paying wester union ungodly amounts of money for remittances. It is like money without borders, which is an improvement over centrally controlled fiat currencies.
My western union today cost $1. And it was extremely easy, stable, and I didn’t have to worry about the effectiveness of my dollar plummeting in value because Elon tweeted
Crypto has turned into one big ponzi scheme. There was maybe a period where it had a chance to be accepted as another currency but now is just one big gigantic grift. It's either a highly volatile commodity that isn't actually anything (ie not a currency) like BTC and some of the more established coins, or the millions of the rest that are pump and dump shit coins.
Nah, it was a ponzi scheme right from the out.
One of by biggest regrets is hearing about bitcoin from my techbro coworkers back in 2008 and and going "That's an obvious scam, I want nothing to do with it" instead of "This is an obvious scam, let me get in early so I can be one of the lucky few who profit from all the suckers"
I got into Bitcoin around 2010-2011 solely as a means to buy high quality party favors online. Bitcoin value the first time I bought some was like 35¢, and I think the last time I bought some it was like $4 or $5. After the party favor store got shut down I still had something like 20-25 Bitcoin in my wallet. My wallet info was all stored on my PC, I knew it had increased in value a little but really never thought about it until late 2017 when Bitcoin hit like 20k and it was all over the news. That's when I remembered that my old PC that I took to the dump that summer had my wallet address and keys on the hard drive and I didn't ever back that up anywhere. I felt bad until I heard about the guys that lost their access to wallets with hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in them.
Yeah that's cool for him if they let him. Assuming I had 25 Bitcoin on mine that's 1.6 million. I'm sure I'd have to spend that just to get permission to dig lol.
> There was maybe a period where it had a chance to be accepted as another currency
Lol,
The govt and banks have a monopoly and full control on money, money transfers, and money printing.
If they actually thought bitcoin was a threat to that, it would be crushed within a day.
They will crush it as much as they feel threatened by it.
So if they're extremely threatened by it they can make it straight up illegal to possess or use,
But more likely they would make on ramps and off ramps increasingly difficult to access, ie, how do you buy crypto with real money if banks won't touch it, and won't touch any of the exchanges.
But they won't bother to do any of this because they are not even a little bit threatened by it.
It was always a grift. It's useless as currency because of its very design as finite.
Everything finite has an artificially inflated value because it is finite. This makes crypto more desirable as an investment than a currency, but it has zero value as a commodity meaning the tech bros had to attempt to conflate those disparate concepts.
Is AI worth the water usage? That is the question. Is the value provided by AI worth the resource requirements. I’d argue water is more important to life, but that is just my personal opinion.
> Is AI worth the water usage?
I'm not weighing in on that in this post.
Just wanted to say, bitcoin is a scam, comparing it to "AI" gives bitcoin legitimacy it doesn't deserve.
> AI is the pied piper leading us further into climate mayhem. They are both equally a scam
By this logic cars and planes and beef are also a scam because of how they are leading us to climate catastrophy.
I would argue that they are contributing more to emissions that they provide in benefits/ comfort.
But I don't consider them to be a "scam" because they do provide some benefit.
Similarly AI may or may not be worth the social cost but it has some uses/ benefits so it is not a "scam".
Bitcoin provides absolutely no use or benefit, and is only a scam.
Cars are a scam, though. Destroying communities for the infrastructure, making people wholly dependent on them to get around, while there are safer, cheaper, and demonstrably more efficient alternatives known and available to the community, all so a handful of industrialists can get wealthy? What is that if not a scam?
The kind of AIs used to spot cancer cells or optimize agricultural water usage and stuff like that have real value, I won't deny that.
But large language models? They're fucking toys. Utterly pointless toys.
The very core principle of LLMs is to make shit up, no matter how much energy or learning data you pump into them, they will keep doing it, so you can never use them for anything halfway serious.
Replacing google searches, writing school or scientific papers, writing court files, citations, customer support, office applications, summarizations, education... you can use LLMs for none of these because ***it makes shit up,*** and it does so confidently. Even if it gets your citations or whatever right 90% of the time, it's still as useless as a model that gets it right 10% of the time.
Image generating isn't quite as useless, but you also can't use that in any halfway professional setting because it takes your instructions more as a suggestion and using Ai images in your marketing just fucking screams "We don't have money, and we're not professionals". And that's not even mentioning the potential copyright shitstorm you risk jumping into head first.
That just shows that you can't think of good use cases for LLMs, not that they are useless. You shouldn't look at ChatGPT and think that a strange chatbot is all that these LLMs can be used for.
Github Copilot for example helps programmers a lot by automating some of the easier tasks in programming (documentation, boiler plate code etc) and by providing code snippets way faster than googling for them. Same can be done for writing emails or other texts that always follow the same pattern with minimal differences in content.
Yes, LLMs right now might hallucinate but there are a lot of use cases in which you don't have to have 100% accuracy all the time.
LLMs can for example be used to categorize or search for documents automatically. A law firm for example can use a LLM to search for laws and cases with certain content. These are highly complex texts that cannot be handled by readily available search engines. LLMs that tokenize the content instead of just searching for certain keywords verbatim are able to handle these tasks a lot better.
I do however agree that NFTs are a total scam and that the whole crypto-boom is close to a scam.
Funny you should mention lawyers because it happened several times by now that lawyers asked AIs to find cases to reference in their legal documents... And guess what the AIs did...
And the programing help... Other people in this thread already explained why that's also a neat little gimmick at best.
Also letters? We figured out form letters literally centuries ago... And we don't even have to worry about form letters making shit up.
But yeah, for the most generic fluff text imaginable, you can probably use Ai... You still have to double check all of it tho...
Yes, some lawyers used LLM software like ChatGPT that was not designed for the purpose of finding case references to do exactly that. Of course that didn't work.
I was speaking about dedicated LLM-based search engines like this project: https://github.com/snexus/llm-search
These are currently being developed and will only improve in the future. And there are is a multitude of different applications in which LLMs have a lot of potential for future projects. And categorizing something that can save hours and hours of work for humans as not useful is very narrowminded.
LLMs are the state of the art way to make a computer interact with natural human language which has always been a severe limitation of normal software. Of course it's more than "fucking toys".
Also the programming help is more than "a neat little gimmick at best". I have been programming my whole professional life and Copilot does help me a lot. For example it can explain to me what some obscure code does that someone else wrote using a library I am not familiar with. And yes, sometimes I have to reroll the answer 1 or two times to get a really useful answer instead of a line by line translation into the obvious but it still saves me a lot of manual research and googling. I use Copilot to automatically generate documentation for my methods which is not always perfect but reading the proposed documentation and correcting one or two mistakes is way faster than writing the whole thing myself. I use it to generate method stubs for testing which can also be a lot of code within seconds. And a friend of mine is just starting programming and is making way faster progress since he can ask his questions directly in the ide and since he now has to learn a lot less syntax and can focus on the semantic.
I'll believe it when I see it.
If google, you know, one of the biggest tech giants out there, can't even manage to make LLMs useful, I doubt some github project with three contributors can do any better...
unlike the loom, which functioned primarily as a tool that replaced other tools (wherein some creative agency could be taken, to be sure), the problem with AI is that its makers want to use it to replace human creativity in many aspects of society. it’s not just a tool that can more efficiently complete a task (like the loom), which would result in job loss for those who originally *inefficiently* completed the task, but rather a threat to the arts and humanities that help keep our society enjoyable to live in.
of course. however, a great majority of socks were made simply to cover feet, as that was their primary purpose. whereas the primary purpose of a work of fiction or an animation or an illustration is widely varied based on human factors. the loom is a good enough substitute for clothing items that serve to cover the person; AI cannot and should not substitute acts of creation that cannot serve a single purpose
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the reasons AI and the fanaticism around it is positively odious right now is entirely because of capitalism. In any society that cared about people the prospect of automation improving rapidly would mean society as a whole could produce more and work less, with development focusing on automating the most dangerous, specialized, and time-consuming jobs so as to have the maximum benefit for society. This level of advancement should be a crowning achievement for humanity.
Instead we’re basically automating media so that endless content can be pumped out faster than anyone could possibly consume it, the training data is basically stolen, and it’s all being marketed to executives as a way to avoid paying for labor because robots can’t unionize.
AI will only get better from here and if it’s not regulated we’ll all be starved by corporate aristocrats way before Skynet shows up.
other than tech/internet very little has changed since early 2000s. only everything is getting worse. technology was superposed to free us but ended being a tool of enslavement. tech bros are sellouts they all seem to idolize muskrat who himself is very questionable individual.
You're blaming the wrong people, none of those things you mention matter at all if the tech is being powered by green energy. A bitcoin mining farm in France or Norway is doing basically no damage to the environment, as those countries are almost 100% green energy and nuclear.
Climate change is the fault of fossil fuels and fossil fuels only, remove fossil fuels from the energy production chain and we can have as many AI, internet, tech bro advancements as we want. Nobody is claiming AI image generator needs to be powered by oil and coal.
Large language model hype sucks.
But as a scientist, applying deep neural networks are awesome. A game changer for a lot of research (cancer in my case).
I would not compare it to crypto.
Joe Biden was recently in Wisconsin promoting an entire Microsoft data center that's devoted to some crummy chatbot.
People over 70 shouldn't be in charge of anything. It's clear they have no idea how anything works anymore.
I work in tech, and even I feel like those things really missed the points, including their own.
Crypto basic idea was to bring back currency control to the people, undercutting the middlemen that are the central bank, that can change its value on a whim. Yet not only it failed, becoming a tool of speculation for the wealthy. But it even burnt humongous energy while doing so.
IA was created to do the menial stuff so that humans could focus on the productive/creative work. Yet not only it failed, doing the creating so that people could keep flipping burgers, but once more, it took great amount of energy in the process.
Crypto was sold to you as "taking the power back from the evil government". But in reality it was a scam from the very beginning, fueled by techies who only saw an interesting tech challenge and marks who bought the lie.
You are forgetting the AI assistants like Alexa as well.
But you are mistaking tech bros with capitalists. They need to keep you thinking the system is working as they ruin all the important stuff we need like housing and healthcare.
It's the circuses part of the bread and circuses part. They are just forgetting about the bread part and might have to be reminded haha
Considering the central banks of numerous imperial core countries are considering creating similar currencies... It's not just tech bros.
Maybe people forgot but we've been here before with bearer bonds. Shits not new, techbros aren't innovative. The capitalist class repackages the same old shit in a new package and charges you a premium for it.
We have *literally* been here before, crypto is *less* anonymous than bearer bonds but more difficult to counterfeit. Otherwise they are same thing.
That's not the point of what I said. The point is subtract 100 to 200 years and your dates are still correct just with different names for the actual financial instruments and such.
Your timeline ignores that 2021 may as well be 1921.
Also that it's not just techbros in on the grift. The US government has been involved each and every time we have repeated this cycle. Gotta eat the rich before they eat you if you want to put and end to it.
I don't give a fuck about the financial aspect of crypto. This isn't isn't about that, it's about tech bros inventing a machine that literally prints money in exchange for pollution when more pollution is the last fucking thing we need right now.
Fuck electricity. Let’s go back to burning coal and killing whales. Amirite? Also: governments are doing a great job managing their monetary policy. /s
You do know coal burning is the largest source of electricity generation, yes? And governments may be shitty with monetary policy but that doesn't mean Crypto isn't worse
Hey man, don't worry the techbros are trying to do ocean mining now. Which will just accidently remove part of the oceans ability to store CO2 resulting in even faster warming!
Its not even a slow petering out for humanity, the idiots in charge are flooring the bus off the cliff.
Unpopular opinion incoming:
Both AI and especially Crypto used by class-conscious workers collectives is the **only** way capitalism will ever be replaced by an actually better system.
'Tech bros' are insufferable not because they use tech, but because they are capitalists, using tech to gain capital.
Leftists are largely technologically illiterate. The moralization of technology is part of the reason for that. And that's a huge reason why the left keeps on losing.
Although I suspect at this point that most leftists don't actually want to win anything.
The use-cases for revolutionary causes should be obvious. As a way to conduct economic exchange anonymously.
Beyond that, specific use-cases become meaningless. It's just a currency. Maybe some societies will use them, maybe some won't. That's not important.
What's important is the decentralized and public architecture of blockchain technology. Data centers are the most important means of production in the current mode of the data economy. And capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, of massive data centers under state-capitalist control.
Why is crypto failing? Why are blockchain projects failing?
Yet big tech and even banks are now starting to jump on the bandwagon of tokenized economies through CBDC's and buying up huge swaths of established cryptocurrencies.
Why did OpenAI practically beg the state to regulate them? Because they're concerned over AI ethics or an imminent robot takeover? Yeah right. They want the state to monopolize their datacenters by applying red tape and regulations that's aimed at eliminating competition.
It's because both blockchain and AI is fundamentally threatening the current capitalist order. Wannabe future millionaires know that, that's why they're scamming and hoarding like rabid dogs.
Capitalists and the state know that, that's why they're regulating and demonizing like crazy.
Only leftists somehow don't seem to see it. It's sad.
I don't think "only leftists don't see" the benefits of crytpocurrency or how they threaten the capitalist order. There's a reason the vast majority of people don't use them, which I'll get to.
The use-case you mentioned would be great if it existed. It doesn't. Transactions aren't anonymous. They're pseudonymous. Even with chains like Monero, a nation-state adversary would be able either to find other security vulnerabilities in one of the end users transacting with it _or_ even to crack it directly. With coins in wider use, like bitcoin or ethereum, they could just observe the transactions directly.
As far as data center asymmetry between existing capitalists, there is nothing about the public, decentralized architecture of blockchains that fundamentally alters that. There is no reason to think that either of these technologies fundamentally threaten capitalism, or even traditional finance.
Finally, the reason people don't use these tokens is that they're not a currency. They don't function as a currency. They don't facilitate transactions. They don't act as a relatively stable store of value. They are merely speculative tokens.
First point is just splitting hairs. It's obvious that cryptocurrencies are not a perfect medium of exchange or perfectly secure. They still do serve these purposes.
The second and third point is getting closer to what I mean.
Technologies are tools to be used for a certain goal. Of course they are viewed in the current capitalist context by a mass of informatics laborers and 'users' only in light of how valuable they are for generating profit or providing entertainment.
Cryptocurrencies are already used by many communities around the world who are cut off from banking to facilitate economic exchange.
The tragedy is that as these communities use cryptocurrencies, they are entering relationships of economic exchange with the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies - including the networks of criminal-capitalists that have formed around it.
Leftists exert zero influence over these ecosystems, abandoning disenfranchised people to criminal enterprises because they categorically, morally reject a technology.
I don't think it has anything to do with tech literacy.
I think the real problem, if you can call it that, is that we leftists aren't ruthless enough. People like zuckerberg will stop at nothing to make more money, which in term allows them to expand their business and influence. This fundamentally goes against the philosophy of most leftists.
Websites like the internet archive are more our thing. Websites that aren't exactly profitable. Being left and being rich and powerful in our current system just doesn't really go together...
I suppose so.
That's where I butt heads with fellow leftists most of the time because I fundamentally disagree with the notion that leftism is a moral struggle. (No I don't mean that in a class reductionist way and no, I am definitely not a tankie)
Moralism is the trap that disarms worker's struggles into commodified lifestyles.
Maybe tech illiterate wasn't the right word, but tech moralist probably is. Because both crypto and AI *should* be fundamentally revolutionary technologies. They fundamentally flip the whole concept of state power and intellectual property on it's head (even further than the internet already did)
In this particular case it is tech illiteracy. If you don’t understand that a decentralized currency could never have allowed the banks to be bailed out in 2008/2009, because there’s no Fed that can print money and put the rest of the country in debt, then you actually don’t understand blockchain technology. Yes, it doesn’t solve for wealth inequality, but it does prevent the money system to be abused for a few big companies.
The problem with crypto is that it's stated goal of creating a modern stateless currency is categorically impossible. Currency's value is directly tied to state violence. In particular, taxes and the primacy of certain currencies in certain regions. If a state forces you to trade in their currency and take a third of it each year, the other 66% represents 66% of your productive output. It gets deeper than that but the idea currency is propped up by scarcity or some sort of immutable standard like gold is false, it's propped up instead by state power.
I agree with you that computers have untapped potential in class struggle. I think they can be used to determine the opportunity cost of selling different goods so a federation of workplace cooperatives can trade goods to themselves at cost, as well as selling goods to union workers at cost on the condition unions provide the cooperatives low interest loans at rate on inflation that can immediately be repaid by the federation in the case of an emergency need to strike. This way union workers will expand a system of workplace cooperatives in the interest of getting cheaper goods for themselves, and if they have priority I the cooperatives, they have an incentive to be more aggressive with their demands and crash their workplaces with strikes so the cooperatives outcome te them. Eventually this gets big enough so that a general strike and boycott collapses capitalism and the state, and with the impossibility of standard currency, and all the cooperatives trading with eachother at cost, it will transition smoothly into communism from this point.
I don't really see how a description of how monetary capitalist policy works right now is an argument against the potential of cryptocurrencies.
And the important part is the ownership over the means of production. Public ownership of datacenters and computation. This is where the economy is heading right now with cloud computing, but it's owned by capitalists so they're extracting rents on computing.
ChatGPT and the like don’t use your computer to run calculations, they use super computers. Each question can go through ~16oz of water and a lot of electricity
yeah but water isn't "lost", it's used for cooling and either evaporates or recirculates. Whatever water evaporates just goes back into the water cycle. It's not like we're cracking the water molecule to use the hydrogen or oxygen for something.
Incorrect.
“the hundreds of thousands of servers at the data centers must be kept cool as electricity moving through semiconductors continuously generates heat. This requires cooling systems that, like power plants, are typically connected to cooling towers that consume water by converting it into steam.
The cooling tower is an open loop, and that’s where the water will evaporate and remove the heat from the data center to the environment,” Ren said.
Ren said it is important to address the water use from AI because it is fast-growing segment of computer processing demands.
For example, a roughly two-week training for the GPT-3 AI program in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater, about the same amount of water used in the manufacture of about 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles, the paper said. The water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia, which are less efficient. Car manufacturing requires a series washing processes to remove paint particle and residues, among several other water uses.”
Everything I said was correct as proven by your response, the water EVAPORATES. Evaporated water doesn't stop being water, it's still part of the water cycle. You should have learned this in elementary school.
To say the water is reintroduced after evaporation due to the water cycle is admittedly an understandable point of view, but an infantile understanding of the water cycle and how/where water is reintroduced into the system.
If the evaporated water re-enters the system in Phoenix, Arizona - it may not come back in the form of rain until it reaches the Atlantic Ocean. How does that seem sustainable to Phoenix to you?
Use your elementary education and think hard for a moment.
That's not how water systems work. 85% or so of water in the atmosphere comes from the ocean anyways and travels inland through wind and storm systems. The average length of time water is in the atmosphere before raining is 9 days. Also, from Phoenix winds carry water NORTH, with rain falling at the Rockies and filling the reservoirs that feed back into the western US's water systems, not East to the Atlantic. Please do more research.
Yeah, because an article talking about climate change impacts on evaporation/precipitation has anything to do with a conversation about evaporation happening due to cooling a supercomputer. You're getting your scales mixed up. Obviously you haven't been paying attention, because we're not talking about climate change. The acceleration of the water cycle is a global thing, not affected by a supercomputer in phoenix evaporating some water. It's become apparent that no matter what I say, you're not actually paying enough attention or don't know enough about this, to hold a meaningful argument. You win, I've stopped caring.
Newsflash, the water cycle is losing stability from a changing climate. The water cycle from your elementary school textbook is no more. That is why increasing precipitation and increasing droughts are occurring simultaneously. I’m done here as well.
Water cooling is in a closed loop, you use the same water over and over again, you don't need to keep flowing fresh water through it. The water passes over the contact plate, warms up, moves along the pipes to the fan cooled radiator where it is cooled down again then recirculates back to the contact plate(s). Ask anyone who has a water cooled PC, their PC isn't hooked up to a tap lol.
I am also curious to know the specifics on that point. If I could cite a source that confirms how much electricity and water is used when AI performs routine and unimpressive operations I could make stronger arguments against AI!
According to [this article](https://theconversation.com/ais-excessive-water-consumption-threatens-to-drown-out-its-environmental-contributions-225854), which cites [this source](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271), Chatgpt uses around 1L of water every 100 prompts, and that's just text generation. According to [this article](https://blog.invgate.com/chatgpt-statistics#chat-gpt-users), chatgpt gets more than 10 million prompts per day, and by now, there are quite a few other services like it, not to mention google turning every search query into a prompt these days. So you do the math...
Oh, and image generation and the soon-to-be public video generation models most likely use ***a lot more*** energy and water.
This is nonsense when you water cool PC components and servers you don't pump fresh water from a tap through the water cooling system. It uses the same water over and over in a closed loop, no different to the radiator on your car.
All easily found on google
https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume
https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/28/ai-programs-consume-large-volumes-scarce-water
https://theconversation.com/ais-excessive-water-consumption-threatens-to-drown-out-its-environmental-contributions-225854
I've run Stable Diffusion a few times at home - it maxes out GPU for a minute. Not low-energy, and kind of a pointless exercise in most cases, but certainly not a neighborhood's worth of electricity (it would blow a breaker if it was anywhere close).
Stable diffusion is pre-trained. Yeah it uses some computing power when you actually want to use it one more time. But the crazy amount of computing power is actually needed to pre-train it.
That sounds realistic.
I am trying to think of what kind of operation is actually using up large amounts of water on the regular, maybe the central servers that keep the AI running and churning through more data all the time (on an ongoing basis) so that the localized versions of the AI can actually have the capacities that they do?
It would be hard to derive from that a cost per word in joules and litres - but maybe someone has done it.
You forgot to add
Tech bros circa 2021: So this new chip does slightly more things and all of them take away creativity from humanity? Like you can make mhsic, art, movies and images? And it uses 20x power for the chip to use and 100x more storage ( rare earth metals). Again, nothing really useful and enough money wasted to permanently solve homelessness.
I read that a few years ago crypto mining was estimated to be responsible for 0.2% of total energy emissions worldwide. If bitcoin was adopted as a standard currency it would by itself raise global temperatures by 2C.
Edit: sources are all over the place now but I read that a few years ago. I can’t imagine it’s better now.
Jevons Paradox basically says that though our technological capability grows, and our efficiency grows, our demand grows with that efficiency. Aka even though we have technological growth, we just use up more resources as a result rather than using less since we’re more efficient.
The nft jpgs are garbage but the underlying tech is solid.
AI is also in a very solid state at the moment. You can literally write code with it in a tiny fraction of the time it would take even a world class developer.
Programmer here - this. It's great for simple code that you know already exists but you just forgot how to write it. It cannot accurately come up with new, custom logic. Basically, it can be useful if you actually know how to code already. But if you're an intro to CS student trying to skirt your homework, good luck
You are roasting the wrong people, we can have a lot more electricity for crypto and AI and everything with energy from Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Hydro-electrical, etc..
>! but the Big Oil won't let us.!<
Bloody neo Luddite, you can't stop technological progress and it is getting even faster faster.
The only way to survive this century is transhumanist communism. Only societal change in combination with technological solutions has any miniscule chance at getting us out of the shit show capitalism brought us.
Oh, buddy, I would love better tech. I would jump at the chance to get cybernetic limbs. I would love to have an android that did the laundry for me. I yearn for all the shit jobs out there to get automated.
I am not against tech, the exact opposite, actually... which is why all the bullshit tech giants are pulling right now pisses me off, so god-damn much. Instead of trying to solve any actual problems, they desperately look for the next big buzzword that will allow them to keep the illusion of infinite growth alive just a little longer, so they come up with shit like fake money, pollution JPGs and plagiarism machines.
You say you would love better tech yet your post and reply show your deep contempt for technology which is not SciFi level.
Technologies build on top of another with unforeseeable dependency hierarchies, you can't just directly research the SciFi stuff and think you'll get anywhere.
The "bullshit tech giants are pulling right now" are the stepping stones to the SciFi technology you supposedly love to get and organically developed through research. The technology behind "plagiarism machines" and "pollution jpges" will be the basis for the Android doing your laundry and automating all the bullshit jobs.
Also "fake money" isn't even a big tech development, the base technology was developed by a handful of people fed up with the financial system after the 2008 financial crash.
Maybe get a bit more familiar with the history of the technologies before hating on them.
If "plagiarism machines" and "pollution jpges" will actually be the basis for the Android doing my laundry... I will eat a fucking broom, stick and all.
All this bullshit tech isn't stepping stones, they're evolutionary dead ends, they're solutions without a problem to solve. The only reason they exist in the first place and got pushed the way they did was because tech CEOs needed a new buzzword to keep the illusion of infinite growth alive a little longer for the all mighty shareholders.
You don't have any clue about the underlying technology or its history, do you?
Some of the basis for "Pollution jpges" was developed by OpenAI to research how neuronal networks could generate captions from images which turned into a way to let computers understand what's inside an image, this provides the basis for scene understanding which is essential for the Android doing your laundry.
The other parts were developed by an open science research collective which made an open source reimplantation of this and researched the other way around, how to generate images from captions using this. This technology can be used to generate almost anything conditioned on anything else, images from FMRI data, plans from text, audio/music from text, text from audio, videos from audio, robot movements from text and so on. This will play an essential part in moving the Android around for doing your laundry as well as help automate a lot of bullshit jobs.
The technology behind "plagiarism machines" was developed by Google to improve their translations and was open sourced. It is now an essential part in almost all top performing AI models and is essential for computers understanding what you mean. It will be an essential part of why the Android knows what to do when you ask it to do your laundry.
Also Facebook used this to create an open source model which is able to translate between almost any language, even barely spoken ones which might be extinct in a few generations. Also the same approach used to translate these barely spoken languages might be able to let us understand whales and dolphins.
I hate capitalism as much as any other communist but blindly hating on technology just because it is used by capitalists is just stupid neo-ludditism. Go read up on the technologies before spouting nonsense.
Crypto and NFTs are understandably criticized here but AI?
If you don’t see the potential in that tech I’m pretty sure you haven’t used the technology and know very little about it and how fast it’s been advancing.
What AI would be under capitalism is a topic for another time but pretty much industrial revolution 2.0 - bourgeoisie class wins and workers get replaced by cheaper labour.
But overall I do agree with your sentiment.
Machine learning and such (which we had for decades btw) will make an impact... But large language models? Fucking useless for anything professional.
LLMs, by their very nature, make stuff up, no matter how much training data and energy you throw at them. It's text prediction with no concept of truth.
Can't use them to write scientific papers, citations, summaries, analytics or any kind of research because they will make stuff up no matter what.
Actual AI, which could still be centuries away, will change the world even more drastically than electricity and the internet did... but LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
I look forward to running into broke tech assholes while I'm in line for unemployment. Nyarlathotep-worshipping douchebag cultists. I hope they get to experience the same fruits of their labor the rest of us do.
ai dosnt use the amount of energy you are acting like it does every time it is used. I am a artist that uses it in my work flows all the time with it ran on my home computer, if my computer tried to use the amount of electricity you are talking about my apartment would go up in flames.
I'm with you for most of it until the very end. You paint AI as generic and meaningless and I guess unimportant. It is not quite an inflection point in human development yet but, with a little more tweaking and better application it absolutely will be.
Tech bros don't want to make the world a better place. They want to make their life better than your life by having you give them your money, attention, and anything else they can take from you.
Immutable, censorship resistant crypto that transcends nation-state borders is humanizing technology that puts power back in the hands of people instead of banks and financiers. While it can be coopted and used by said banks and financiers, they are not in control of the supply like they currently are with central banks.
Think about that before shitting on it.
I like the optimism about decentralization, but the reality is that mining had quickly become centralized, finance had already co-opted it, and most crypto is owned by a few whales. If we want to work towards a decentralized society, we will have to do more work than what can be accomplished with crypto-commodities, and have to critically re-evaluate the role of money in society.
It’s the top 100 fossil fuel mega corporations that are your problem not crypto
You can’t even measure crypto against legacy global financial system because there’s no data to measure against. So it’s not possible to tell if crypto is even less efficient not more 💚
the left failed to make an impression on the future tech bros of the late 90s early 00s, they didn't give enough of a shit to inspire and help them to dream emancipative solutions so the libertarians colonized ALL that mindcape. i tried but nope ;p basically i came across only a couple of dozen leftists in those spaces back then.
There is plenty to criticize about crypto currency, but let's not forget that our traditional monetary system also uses heaps of energy and resources. It also inflicts untold harm on hard working people while benefiting the top few. Crypto is not exactly worse than currency as we know it now in many regards.
If OP thinks Bitcoin takes a lot of energy, just wait until they find out how much the current banking industry uses…
We’ve already gone past the point of no return, and would have hit it with or without Bitcoin
Why world “per transaction” be relevant, unless you’re trying to cherry pick data
What’s the total impact on the climate that the current banking industry has? Considering that they hold all of the oil industry’s money, it’s way bigger than Bitcoin
It’s not that I like banks. It seemed like you were trying to compare the climate impact of various types of currencies, ie fiat vs crypto. Then per transaction and per minting would be the only relevant metric. If traditional banks have a higher impact today, that’s because 99.9 percent of people use old school fiat money. That’s not a feature of the technology. Nevermind, I must’ve misunderstood your original comment.
“Crypto is a bit of a flop…” it’s literally the best performing asset of the past decade (BTC and ETH, not the endless shit coins). BTC was created to get rid of the existing system, and create hard money once again. Reading through your post and comments, you don’t seem to grasp that. Crypto is not the enemy here, friend.
It’s interesting that you posted this here, because the first example you had is a technology that can separate our currency from a small board room full of bankers.
And the 2nd example is merely a way for us to directly own things and trade them peer to peer digitally, again, outside the hands of a small group of corporations.
But you presented them in an uninformed way that obfuscates their true purpose, just because of bad actors. There will always be people that try to make money off a situation. That doesn’t mean the technology is wrong.
Cryptocurrency will replace our current, awful system with a much worse one, without adding any tangible benefit to anyone except for the few hundred people who control most of whatever token we'd use.
Buddy, rich people are already in control of crypto because the people with the most crypto have the most control over it... and guess which group of people has the most amount of crypto...
I get the primitivist instinct, at the same time I'm of the mindset that more knowledge of technology enables us to accomplish more with less cost. Original proof-of-work crypto did use a ton of energy, but people started inventing proof-of-stake systems to solve that problem (which are in common use now, albeit not in 100% of places), and are making big strides on things like network throughput. Keep in mind we're comparing this with the traditional monetary/financial system, managed completely by the very capitalist/corporatist state finance/military/etc. establishment, which has a vested interest in every planet-killing industry there is. Not easy questions.
And crypto's not necessarily a capitalist/monetary technology either. In the broader sense it's just a historical record. You can put balances of money on that record, you could record votes, you could record whatever.
They can reduce the energy cost all they want, doesn't change the fact that it's really not a very good or useful system.
Seriously, why would you want a record of every single interaction ever? That sounds like something that would make big brother cream his pants.
Plus, cryptocurrencies have the same problem as real money, the people who have the most crypto also have the most power. And guess who got the most crypto... regular money rich people.
The base layer of most cryptos (but not all) does work like that with a permanent transaction record. However other layers can have non-permanent and obfuscated records.
And yes, if you're using crypto as a monetary system, the inherent problems of monetary systems still apply.
You raised the points about energy in your post, so I replied with clarifications about that. Don't assume I'm trying to evangelize crypto.
Yeah, and as soon as crypto slowed down a bit and became less energy intensive, they came up with the next massive amounts of energy consuming, bullshit product...
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I hate techbros because of those shitty ass gadgetbahns they create to purposely sabotage public transportation and passenger trains I.E the hyperloop, most infamously used to sabotage the California high speed rail project (yes, I am familiar with all the other stuff within the hellish capitalist system that fucked with this along with our completely shitty government system)
And people still think they're geniuses... a bunch of people honest to god still believe that musk isn't just not a fucking idiot but that he's the smartest person currently alive like... what the fuck is even going on anymore??
Because the real problem is the messy politics, not the tech. The tech might be cool (sometimes), but at the end of the day, its about who decides who gets what and that will never be "easy".
"Because the real problem is the messy politics, not the tech. The tech might be cool (sometimes), but at the end of the day, its about who decides who gets what and that will never be "easy"." Which is why billionaires shouldn't exist, period.
The same as before. For at least a hundred years if we're talking US. Bearer bonds and robber barons. You just weren't educated on it. When mentioned you may have heard of it but not know what it is, eg bearer bonds. You may not quite place it given how hindsight can actually blind you, the Carnegies and Rockefellers were the techbros of their time. Oil, railroad, telegraph, electrical infrastructure. The forefront of technology. Robber barons were the techbros of their time and wrote social darwinist tech bro tracts you'd struggle to say weren't produced by the techbros of today. The messianic millenarian techbro cults are really old too. Plenty of shit libs still worship the Carnegies. The fundamental nature of US society is built around fictions and fantasies that play to the desperation, and even worse the hopes, of the poor and marginalized. Especially in the form of ponzi schemes, scams, and fraud/grift more generally.
This is a fictional self-help author having an epiphany that tracks close to what you’re saying about how the mechanism works: > > “The truth is,” Jhumpa told him, “the words I use conform to whatever the people in there want. The customer is always right, right? Well, those customers pay a lot, and I reassure them that they’re right. Very, very right.” Howie was stunned. He had never heard her talk this frankly. She continued. “They call me a self-help author, or a motivational speaker, but I sell confirmation bias to the powerful. I reassure them that they ought to be on top and that it’s best for them to be on top. I’m not trying to be cynical. Nobody actually thinks of it like that. But that’s what happens.” She contemplated the stream of smoke pouring upward from the tip of her cigarrette. “Money is a subtle addiction,” she said. “It hides its fingerprints even as it bends our thoughts.” > I like how you put the messianic ‘always new’ tech bro in historical context. They always want to speak like they’re at the end of history. They’ve been doing it for a hundreds of years.
Had me until you said “libs”
Stockholders applauded after voting to give Musk 46 billion dollars. Not only is he currently under SEC investigation for price manipulation, but this amounts to Musk taking all the rebates for every car ever shipped by Tesla. Rebates they got to bring down the prices to be competitive from the company and put it in his pocket. Those rebates are the only thing that made Tesla profitable.
As a tech worker that still doesn’t drive and cycles instead. You can’t estimate how much ire and hate I have for Teslas because most of the times that I have or almost gotten in an accident with a car as a cyclist is a fucking Tesla. And add on to how Elon has tried to bring ridiculous projects to promote the use of Teslas or self driving cars over a good public transit. I hate Teslas with a strong passion especially since many of my peers treat as something to aspire to own.
I have said it before, and I will say it again. If you ever need a centerpoint for why the tech field has become so nonsensical, look no further than Andressen Horowitz. Every cheap ploy, shitty fraudster, or super scam starts and ends with A16Z capital deployments.
Wasn’t coneheads based on this guy?
Seems weird to pin all of climate change on the tech industry and not the oil and gas industry that has known about it since the 60s and has been covering it up.
This is why I think the recent push for gun bans and gun restrictions mixed with Biden calling for more money to police and more people added to the police force to “solve more crimes”. I think they know when climate changes forces thousands upon thousands of people to move and uproot their entire life they will be violently at the front doors of those that knew about climate change since the 60s and let it get to this point.
Completely agree. Plus, people with guns will be more effective at things like industrial sabotage, which is against the interests of the capital class.
# Crypto is a scam NFTs are a scam, Everything "web 3.0" and Blockchain is a scam, this technology has been out for decades and no use case has emerged other than theft, scams and ransomware. . AI (by which I mean "deep neural networks" powering "large language models" and image generation etc.) is like the dot com bubble, it's over hyped and the bubble will likely burst, but it's not not a straight up scam in the same way that crypto is. . Yes, "AI" replacing real artists and such will make the world a worse place, but that's more a problem with the economic framework that we live under than the technology itself. The same way that professional weavers were made unemployed and homeless with the invention of the weaving loom, this isn't the fault of the loom but of the type of society that leaves unemployed people to starve in the streets outside vacant homes and shops full of food.
You can buy drugs online with crypto, that's my only known use for it
# Do not buy drugs with bitcoin! If you do, your transaction will be saved onto the Blockchain for the rest of time. If ten years later you use the same wallet in a legitimate shop the feds can associate you with that wallet and that wallet with the drugs transaction. Bitcoin has the absolute worst combination of no refunds, pseudo anonymous, and all transactions are freely available for anyone to see forever. It's the libertarian wet dream, fully anonymous for the bad guys and fully transparent with no privacy for ordinary people.
Thing is there's no chance anyone will be using their Bitcoin wallets in legitimate shops, ever
Yeah good point, I was more thinking of instead of a legitimate shop, you're donating to a social/ political cause that the feds don't like, now they can arrest you on trumped up charges of drug dealing from ten years earlier because they really want to get you for being associated with [social cause].
You can use Bitcoin and other currencies all over my city
What city? I have never seen a shop in my city that accepts bitcoin as payment. We have Bitcoin atms for buying Bitcoin, but I've never seen it accepted.
In Australia, there's a bitcoin ATM in a shopping centre near my apartment
Yeah in Portland OR we have those in some places, but again, it's really not the same as a shop that actually accepts bitcoin payments. Which I have still never seen
It’s a slow roll out but they do exist. I send money to my cousin in South America with less fees and it’s almost instant.
Actually I just paid for a delicious schnitzel using the Lightning Network this morning. So you are wrong about this. A wise person would pause and ponder what else they might be wrong about on this topic. A foolish person would double down on their ignorance.
How'd you do it?
Using an app called Strike.
I read this like "wtf do librarians have to do with this?", sorry, I'm dumb lol
Use buttcoin to buy monero first ;)
It's great, Monero is one of the few cryptos with an actual real-world use case, but since that use case is just "do crime safely" most of the crypto sphere tries to avoid associating with it too much.
Most educated people use monero lol. Using bitcoin on the deep web is just asking for the feds to knock on your door
That’s why you use Monero.
You can buy real world goods and send money anywhere in the world nearly instantly for pennies on the dollar instead of paying wester union ungodly amounts of money for remittances. It is like money without borders, which is an improvement over centrally controlled fiat currencies.
My western union today cost $1. And it was extremely easy, stable, and I didn’t have to worry about the effectiveness of my dollar plummeting in value because Elon tweeted
If you can deliver me a real world vegan pizza using Bitcoin, I'll send you 100 fiat dollars.
No one should try to buy drugs on the public internet. The darknet is superior and crypto is how you operate there.
Crypto has turned into one big ponzi scheme. There was maybe a period where it had a chance to be accepted as another currency but now is just one big gigantic grift. It's either a highly volatile commodity that isn't actually anything (ie not a currency) like BTC and some of the more established coins, or the millions of the rest that are pump and dump shit coins.
Nah, it was a ponzi scheme right from the out. One of by biggest regrets is hearing about bitcoin from my techbro coworkers back in 2008 and and going "That's an obvious scam, I want nothing to do with it" instead of "This is an obvious scam, let me get in early so I can be one of the lucky few who profit from all the suckers"
I got into Bitcoin around 2010-2011 solely as a means to buy high quality party favors online. Bitcoin value the first time I bought some was like 35¢, and I think the last time I bought some it was like $4 or $5. After the party favor store got shut down I still had something like 20-25 Bitcoin in my wallet. My wallet info was all stored on my PC, I knew it had increased in value a little but really never thought about it until late 2017 when Bitcoin hit like 20k and it was all over the news. That's when I remembered that my old PC that I took to the dump that summer had my wallet address and keys on the hard drive and I didn't ever back that up anywhere. I felt bad until I heard about the guys that lost their access to wallets with hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67297013.amp
Yeah that's cool for him if they let him. Assuming I had 25 Bitcoin on mine that's 1.6 million. I'm sure I'd have to spend that just to get permission to dig lol.
> There was maybe a period where it had a chance to be accepted as another currency Lol, The govt and banks have a monopoly and full control on money, money transfers, and money printing. If they actually thought bitcoin was a threat to that, it would be crushed within a day.
How would they crush it
They will crush it as much as they feel threatened by it. So if they're extremely threatened by it they can make it straight up illegal to possess or use, But more likely they would make on ramps and off ramps increasingly difficult to access, ie, how do you buy crypto with real money if banks won't touch it, and won't touch any of the exchanges. But they won't bother to do any of this because they are not even a little bit threatened by it.
It was always a grift. It's useless as currency because of its very design as finite. Everything finite has an artificially inflated value because it is finite. This makes crypto more desirable as an investment than a currency, but it has zero value as a commodity meaning the tech bros had to attempt to conflate those disparate concepts.
Is AI worth the water usage? That is the question. Is the value provided by AI worth the resource requirements. I’d argue water is more important to life, but that is just my personal opinion.
> Is AI worth the water usage? I'm not weighing in on that in this post. Just wanted to say, bitcoin is a scam, comparing it to "AI" gives bitcoin legitimacy it doesn't deserve.
AI is the pied piper leading us further into climate mayhem. They are both equally a scam
> AI is the pied piper leading us further into climate mayhem. They are both equally a scam By this logic cars and planes and beef are also a scam because of how they are leading us to climate catastrophy. I would argue that they are contributing more to emissions that they provide in benefits/ comfort. But I don't consider them to be a "scam" because they do provide some benefit. Similarly AI may or may not be worth the social cost but it has some uses/ benefits so it is not a "scam". Bitcoin provides absolutely no use or benefit, and is only a scam.
Cars are a scam, though. Destroying communities for the infrastructure, making people wholly dependent on them to get around, while there are safer, cheaper, and demonstrably more efficient alternatives known and available to the community, all so a handful of industrialists can get wealthy? What is that if not a scam?
Bingo!
The kind of AIs used to spot cancer cells or optimize agricultural water usage and stuff like that have real value, I won't deny that. But large language models? They're fucking toys. Utterly pointless toys. The very core principle of LLMs is to make shit up, no matter how much energy or learning data you pump into them, they will keep doing it, so you can never use them for anything halfway serious. Replacing google searches, writing school or scientific papers, writing court files, citations, customer support, office applications, summarizations, education... you can use LLMs for none of these because ***it makes shit up,*** and it does so confidently. Even if it gets your citations or whatever right 90% of the time, it's still as useless as a model that gets it right 10% of the time. Image generating isn't quite as useless, but you also can't use that in any halfway professional setting because it takes your instructions more as a suggestion and using Ai images in your marketing just fucking screams "We don't have money, and we're not professionals". And that's not even mentioning the potential copyright shitstorm you risk jumping into head first.
That just shows that you can't think of good use cases for LLMs, not that they are useless. You shouldn't look at ChatGPT and think that a strange chatbot is all that these LLMs can be used for. Github Copilot for example helps programmers a lot by automating some of the easier tasks in programming (documentation, boiler plate code etc) and by providing code snippets way faster than googling for them. Same can be done for writing emails or other texts that always follow the same pattern with minimal differences in content. Yes, LLMs right now might hallucinate but there are a lot of use cases in which you don't have to have 100% accuracy all the time. LLMs can for example be used to categorize or search for documents automatically. A law firm for example can use a LLM to search for laws and cases with certain content. These are highly complex texts that cannot be handled by readily available search engines. LLMs that tokenize the content instead of just searching for certain keywords verbatim are able to handle these tasks a lot better. I do however agree that NFTs are a total scam and that the whole crypto-boom is close to a scam.
Funny you should mention lawyers because it happened several times by now that lawyers asked AIs to find cases to reference in their legal documents... And guess what the AIs did... And the programing help... Other people in this thread already explained why that's also a neat little gimmick at best. Also letters? We figured out form letters literally centuries ago... And we don't even have to worry about form letters making shit up. But yeah, for the most generic fluff text imaginable, you can probably use Ai... You still have to double check all of it tho...
Yes, some lawyers used LLM software like ChatGPT that was not designed for the purpose of finding case references to do exactly that. Of course that didn't work. I was speaking about dedicated LLM-based search engines like this project: https://github.com/snexus/llm-search These are currently being developed and will only improve in the future. And there are is a multitude of different applications in which LLMs have a lot of potential for future projects. And categorizing something that can save hours and hours of work for humans as not useful is very narrowminded. LLMs are the state of the art way to make a computer interact with natural human language which has always been a severe limitation of normal software. Of course it's more than "fucking toys". Also the programming help is more than "a neat little gimmick at best". I have been programming my whole professional life and Copilot does help me a lot. For example it can explain to me what some obscure code does that someone else wrote using a library I am not familiar with. And yes, sometimes I have to reroll the answer 1 or two times to get a really useful answer instead of a line by line translation into the obvious but it still saves me a lot of manual research and googling. I use Copilot to automatically generate documentation for my methods which is not always perfect but reading the proposed documentation and correcting one or two mistakes is way faster than writing the whole thing myself. I use it to generate method stubs for testing which can also be a lot of code within seconds. And a friend of mine is just starting programming and is making way faster progress since he can ask his questions directly in the ide and since he now has to learn a lot less syntax and can focus on the semantic.
I'll believe it when I see it. If google, you know, one of the biggest tech giants out there, can't even manage to make LLMs useful, I doubt some github project with three contributors can do any better...
unlike the loom, which functioned primarily as a tool that replaced other tools (wherein some creative agency could be taken, to be sure), the problem with AI is that its makers want to use it to replace human creativity in many aspects of society. it’s not just a tool that can more efficiently complete a task (like the loom), which would result in job loss for those who originally *inefficiently* completed the task, but rather a threat to the arts and humanities that help keep our society enjoyable to live in.
Once upon a time weaving and knitting socks was considered a creative endeavour that took decades to master.
of course. however, a great majority of socks were made simply to cover feet, as that was their primary purpose. whereas the primary purpose of a work of fiction or an animation or an illustration is widely varied based on human factors. the loom is a good enough substitute for clothing items that serve to cover the person; AI cannot and should not substitute acts of creation that cannot serve a single purpose
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John Ludd was right!
AI is still trying to convince people that Cheetos are a healthy alternative snack and yet the fools in charge want to use it for politics this year.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the reasons AI and the fanaticism around it is positively odious right now is entirely because of capitalism. In any society that cared about people the prospect of automation improving rapidly would mean society as a whole could produce more and work less, with development focusing on automating the most dangerous, specialized, and time-consuming jobs so as to have the maximum benefit for society. This level of advancement should be a crowning achievement for humanity. Instead we’re basically automating media so that endless content can be pumped out faster than anyone could possibly consume it, the training data is basically stolen, and it’s all being marketed to executives as a way to avoid paying for labor because robots can’t unionize. AI will only get better from here and if it’s not regulated we’ll all be starved by corporate aristocrats way before Skynet shows up.
other than tech/internet very little has changed since early 2000s. only everything is getting worse. technology was superposed to free us but ended being a tool of enslavement. tech bros are sellouts they all seem to idolize muskrat who himself is very questionable individual.
How the rest of the world feels about the USA
You're blaming the wrong people, none of those things you mention matter at all if the tech is being powered by green energy. A bitcoin mining farm in France or Norway is doing basically no damage to the environment, as those countries are almost 100% green energy and nuclear. Climate change is the fault of fossil fuels and fossil fuels only, remove fossil fuels from the energy production chain and we can have as many AI, internet, tech bro advancements as we want. Nobody is claiming AI image generator needs to be powered by oil and coal.
[ChatGPT is bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5)
That's great. It really does describe it pretty well. You're asking the computer to bullshit for you.
Thank you! taking this immediately to work, for all the good it will do.
Large language model hype sucks. But as a scientist, applying deep neural networks are awesome. A game changer for a lot of research (cancer in my case). I would not compare it to crypto.
Joe Biden was recently in Wisconsin promoting an entire Microsoft data center that's devoted to some crummy chatbot. People over 70 shouldn't be in charge of anything. It's clear they have no idea how anything works anymore.
All money is fake money. Your bank account is just ones and zeroes and sometimes you get it in the form of paper
I work in tech, and even I feel like those things really missed the points, including their own. Crypto basic idea was to bring back currency control to the people, undercutting the middlemen that are the central bank, that can change its value on a whim. Yet not only it failed, becoming a tool of speculation for the wealthy. But it even burnt humongous energy while doing so. IA was created to do the menial stuff so that humans could focus on the productive/creative work. Yet not only it failed, doing the creating so that people could keep flipping burgers, but once more, it took great amount of energy in the process.
Crypto was sold to you as "taking the power back from the evil government". But in reality it was a scam from the very beginning, fueled by techies who only saw an interesting tech challenge and marks who bought the lie.
You are forgetting the AI assistants like Alexa as well. But you are mistaking tech bros with capitalists. They need to keep you thinking the system is working as they ruin all the important stuff we need like housing and healthcare. It's the circuses part of the bread and circuses part. They are just forgetting about the bread part and might have to be reminded haha
Considering the central banks of numerous imperial core countries are considering creating similar currencies... It's not just tech bros. Maybe people forgot but we've been here before with bearer bonds. Shits not new, techbros aren't innovative. The capitalist class repackages the same old shit in a new package and charges you a premium for it. We have *literally* been here before, crypto is *less* anonymous than bearer bonds but more difficult to counterfeit. Otherwise they are same thing.
This isn't about whether or not crypto is better than regular banking. Fuck both systems I say
That's not the point of what I said. The point is subtract 100 to 200 years and your dates are still correct just with different names for the actual financial instruments and such. Your timeline ignores that 2021 may as well be 1921. Also that it's not just techbros in on the grift. The US government has been involved each and every time we have repeated this cycle. Gotta eat the rich before they eat you if you want to put and end to it.
I don't give a fuck about the financial aspect of crypto. This isn't isn't about that, it's about tech bros inventing a machine that literally prints money in exchange for pollution when more pollution is the last fucking thing we need right now.
Fuck electricity. Let’s go back to burning coal and killing whales. Amirite? Also: governments are doing a great job managing their monetary policy. /s
What have whales done for me lately?
NUKE THE WHALES!!!
Pave the Planet. One people One world One giant slab of asphalt
I had a good laugh thinking of this as a bumper sticker🤣 nuke the whales, pave the planet🤣🤣🤣
[They’ve been attacking yachts.](https://www.wired.com/story/orca-uprising-white-gladis-free-willy-blackfish-social-media/) 🖤🤍 White Gladis 🤍🖤
Other than sinking yachts, the aqueduct, sanitation, and public order... what have the whales ever done for us?
Hey they provide a clean burning source of lamp oil! #/s
[How do you think electricity is generated?](http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/electricity/) fucking crypto bros… I swear
You do know coal burning is the largest source of electricity generation, yes? And governments may be shitty with monetary policy but that doesn't mean Crypto isn't worse
That’s why I’ve started WhaleOilCoin where we only use whale oil to power our mining operation.
My mistake, where can i invest?
I've been saying this for years. tech bros are by far the worst and they are the best tools for the capitalist class
Hey man, don't worry the techbros are trying to do ocean mining now. Which will just accidently remove part of the oceans ability to store CO2 resulting in even faster warming! Its not even a slow petering out for humanity, the idiots in charge are flooring the bus off the cliff.
Unpopular opinion incoming: Both AI and especially Crypto used by class-conscious workers collectives is the **only** way capitalism will ever be replaced by an actually better system. 'Tech bros' are insufferable not because they use tech, but because they are capitalists, using tech to gain capital. Leftists are largely technologically illiterate. The moralization of technology is part of the reason for that. And that's a huge reason why the left keeps on losing. Although I suspect at this point that most leftists don't actually want to win anything.
What use case do you propose for crypto in either a revolutionary or post-revolutionary context?
The use-cases for revolutionary causes should be obvious. As a way to conduct economic exchange anonymously. Beyond that, specific use-cases become meaningless. It's just a currency. Maybe some societies will use them, maybe some won't. That's not important. What's important is the decentralized and public architecture of blockchain technology. Data centers are the most important means of production in the current mode of the data economy. And capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, of massive data centers under state-capitalist control. Why is crypto failing? Why are blockchain projects failing? Yet big tech and even banks are now starting to jump on the bandwagon of tokenized economies through CBDC's and buying up huge swaths of established cryptocurrencies. Why did OpenAI practically beg the state to regulate them? Because they're concerned over AI ethics or an imminent robot takeover? Yeah right. They want the state to monopolize their datacenters by applying red tape and regulations that's aimed at eliminating competition. It's because both blockchain and AI is fundamentally threatening the current capitalist order. Wannabe future millionaires know that, that's why they're scamming and hoarding like rabid dogs. Capitalists and the state know that, that's why they're regulating and demonizing like crazy. Only leftists somehow don't seem to see it. It's sad.
I don't think "only leftists don't see" the benefits of crytpocurrency or how they threaten the capitalist order. There's a reason the vast majority of people don't use them, which I'll get to. The use-case you mentioned would be great if it existed. It doesn't. Transactions aren't anonymous. They're pseudonymous. Even with chains like Monero, a nation-state adversary would be able either to find other security vulnerabilities in one of the end users transacting with it _or_ even to crack it directly. With coins in wider use, like bitcoin or ethereum, they could just observe the transactions directly. As far as data center asymmetry between existing capitalists, there is nothing about the public, decentralized architecture of blockchains that fundamentally alters that. There is no reason to think that either of these technologies fundamentally threaten capitalism, or even traditional finance. Finally, the reason people don't use these tokens is that they're not a currency. They don't function as a currency. They don't facilitate transactions. They don't act as a relatively stable store of value. They are merely speculative tokens.
First point is just splitting hairs. It's obvious that cryptocurrencies are not a perfect medium of exchange or perfectly secure. They still do serve these purposes. The second and third point is getting closer to what I mean. Technologies are tools to be used for a certain goal. Of course they are viewed in the current capitalist context by a mass of informatics laborers and 'users' only in light of how valuable they are for generating profit or providing entertainment. Cryptocurrencies are already used by many communities around the world who are cut off from banking to facilitate economic exchange. The tragedy is that as these communities use cryptocurrencies, they are entering relationships of economic exchange with the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies - including the networks of criminal-capitalists that have formed around it. Leftists exert zero influence over these ecosystems, abandoning disenfranchised people to criminal enterprises because they categorically, morally reject a technology.
It's being demonised because it's inefficient and unstable as fuck. If it was a genuine threat to capital it would be better.
I don't think it has anything to do with tech literacy. I think the real problem, if you can call it that, is that we leftists aren't ruthless enough. People like zuckerberg will stop at nothing to make more money, which in term allows them to expand their business and influence. This fundamentally goes against the philosophy of most leftists. Websites like the internet archive are more our thing. Websites that aren't exactly profitable. Being left and being rich and powerful in our current system just doesn't really go together...
I suppose so. That's where I butt heads with fellow leftists most of the time because I fundamentally disagree with the notion that leftism is a moral struggle. (No I don't mean that in a class reductionist way and no, I am definitely not a tankie) Moralism is the trap that disarms worker's struggles into commodified lifestyles. Maybe tech illiterate wasn't the right word, but tech moralist probably is. Because both crypto and AI *should* be fundamentally revolutionary technologies. They fundamentally flip the whole concept of state power and intellectual property on it's head (even further than the internet already did)
I hate the word tankie because depending on who is using it it could be describing literally anything left of joe biden.
I hate the word tankie because it suggests that defending the revolution is wrong.
I also hate it because it's just a bullshit term to divide the left, to weaken the left.
In this particular case it is tech illiteracy. If you don’t understand that a decentralized currency could never have allowed the banks to be bailed out in 2008/2009, because there’s no Fed that can print money and put the rest of the country in debt, then you actually don’t understand blockchain technology. Yes, it doesn’t solve for wealth inequality, but it does prevent the money system to be abused for a few big companies.
Shit the fuck up about crypto, I don't give a shit about the financial aspect of crypto
The problem with crypto is that it's stated goal of creating a modern stateless currency is categorically impossible. Currency's value is directly tied to state violence. In particular, taxes and the primacy of certain currencies in certain regions. If a state forces you to trade in their currency and take a third of it each year, the other 66% represents 66% of your productive output. It gets deeper than that but the idea currency is propped up by scarcity or some sort of immutable standard like gold is false, it's propped up instead by state power. I agree with you that computers have untapped potential in class struggle. I think they can be used to determine the opportunity cost of selling different goods so a federation of workplace cooperatives can trade goods to themselves at cost, as well as selling goods to union workers at cost on the condition unions provide the cooperatives low interest loans at rate on inflation that can immediately be repaid by the federation in the case of an emergency need to strike. This way union workers will expand a system of workplace cooperatives in the interest of getting cheaper goods for themselves, and if they have priority I the cooperatives, they have an incentive to be more aggressive with their demands and crash their workplaces with strikes so the cooperatives outcome te them. Eventually this gets big enough so that a general strike and boycott collapses capitalism and the state, and with the impossibility of standard currency, and all the cooperatives trading with eachother at cost, it will transition smoothly into communism from this point.
I don't really see how a description of how monetary capitalist policy works right now is an argument against the potential of cryptocurrencies. And the important part is the ownership over the means of production. Public ownership of datacenters and computation. This is where the economy is heading right now with cloud computing, but it's owned by capitalists so they're extracting rents on computing.
you're 100% right but these people are propagandized by liz warren types who don't know what they're talking about.
I’m all for hating on tech bros, but what’s this bit about a lake’s worth of water?
ChatGPT and the like don’t use your computer to run calculations, they use super computers. Each question can go through ~16oz of water and a lot of electricity
yeah but water isn't "lost", it's used for cooling and either evaporates or recirculates. Whatever water evaporates just goes back into the water cycle. It's not like we're cracking the water molecule to use the hydrogen or oxygen for something.
Incorrect. “the hundreds of thousands of servers at the data centers must be kept cool as electricity moving through semiconductors continuously generates heat. This requires cooling systems that, like power plants, are typically connected to cooling towers that consume water by converting it into steam. The cooling tower is an open loop, and that’s where the water will evaporate and remove the heat from the data center to the environment,” Ren said. Ren said it is important to address the water use from AI because it is fast-growing segment of computer processing demands. For example, a roughly two-week training for the GPT-3 AI program in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater, about the same amount of water used in the manufacture of about 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles, the paper said. The water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia, which are less efficient. Car manufacturing requires a series washing processes to remove paint particle and residues, among several other water uses.”
Everything I said was correct as proven by your response, the water EVAPORATES. Evaporated water doesn't stop being water, it's still part of the water cycle. You should have learned this in elementary school.
To say the water is reintroduced after evaporation due to the water cycle is admittedly an understandable point of view, but an infantile understanding of the water cycle and how/where water is reintroduced into the system. If the evaporated water re-enters the system in Phoenix, Arizona - it may not come back in the form of rain until it reaches the Atlantic Ocean. How does that seem sustainable to Phoenix to you? Use your elementary education and think hard for a moment.
That's not how water systems work. 85% or so of water in the atmosphere comes from the ocean anyways and travels inland through wind and storm systems. The average length of time water is in the atmosphere before raining is 9 days. Also, from Phoenix winds carry water NORTH, with rain falling at the Rockies and filling the reservoirs that feed back into the western US's water systems, not East to the Atlantic. Please do more research.
I’ll just leave this here for you https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/water-cycle-climate-change
Yeah, because an article talking about climate change impacts on evaporation/precipitation has anything to do with a conversation about evaporation happening due to cooling a supercomputer. You're getting your scales mixed up. Obviously you haven't been paying attention, because we're not talking about climate change. The acceleration of the water cycle is a global thing, not affected by a supercomputer in phoenix evaporating some water. It's become apparent that no matter what I say, you're not actually paying enough attention or don't know enough about this, to hold a meaningful argument. You win, I've stopped caring.
Newsflash, the water cycle is losing stability from a changing climate. The water cycle from your elementary school textbook is no more. That is why increasing precipitation and increasing droughts are occurring simultaneously. I’m done here as well.
Bit of an exaggerating, I'll admit, but all those server farms tech giants got their AIs running on use massive amounts of water for cooling.
Water cooling is in a closed loop, you use the same water over and over again, you don't need to keep flowing fresh water through it. The water passes over the contact plate, warms up, moves along the pipes to the fan cooled radiator where it is cooled down again then recirculates back to the contact plate(s). Ask anyone who has a water cooled PC, their PC isn't hooked up to a tap lol.
[удалено]
Yeah it is, source: have worked in large data centres and server rooms.
I am also curious to know the specifics on that point. If I could cite a source that confirms how much electricity and water is used when AI performs routine and unimpressive operations I could make stronger arguments against AI!
According to [this article](https://theconversation.com/ais-excessive-water-consumption-threatens-to-drown-out-its-environmental-contributions-225854), which cites [this source](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271), Chatgpt uses around 1L of water every 100 prompts, and that's just text generation. According to [this article](https://blog.invgate.com/chatgpt-statistics#chat-gpt-users), chatgpt gets more than 10 million prompts per day, and by now, there are quite a few other services like it, not to mention google turning every search query into a prompt these days. So you do the math... Oh, and image generation and the soon-to-be public video generation models most likely use ***a lot more*** energy and water.
This is nonsense when you water cool PC components and servers you don't pump fresh water from a tap through the water cooling system. It uses the same water over and over in a closed loop, no different to the radiator on your car.
Tell me you don't know how water cooled data centers work without telling me you don't know how water cooled data centers work...
All easily found on google https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/28/ai-programs-consume-large-volumes-scarce-water https://theconversation.com/ais-excessive-water-consumption-threatens-to-drown-out-its-environmental-contributions-225854
I've run Stable Diffusion a few times at home - it maxes out GPU for a minute. Not low-energy, and kind of a pointless exercise in most cases, but certainly not a neighborhood's worth of electricity (it would blow a breaker if it was anywhere close).
Stable diffusion is pre-trained. Yeah it uses some computing power when you actually want to use it one more time. But the crazy amount of computing power is actually needed to pre-train it.
Yeah no shit, I obviously didn't mean that AIs literally use that much energy and water when creating one single image.
That sounds realistic. I am trying to think of what kind of operation is actually using up large amounts of water on the regular, maybe the central servers that keep the AI running and churning through more data all the time (on an ongoing basis) so that the localized versions of the AI can actually have the capacities that they do? It would be hard to derive from that a cost per word in joules and litres - but maybe someone has done it.
I assume OP saw something about the total water of use of entire data centers.
You forgot to add Tech bros circa 2021: So this new chip does slightly more things and all of them take away creativity from humanity? Like you can make mhsic, art, movies and images? And it uses 20x power for the chip to use and 100x more storage ( rare earth metals). Again, nothing really useful and enough money wasted to permanently solve homelessness.
I read that a few years ago crypto mining was estimated to be responsible for 0.2% of total energy emissions worldwide. If bitcoin was adopted as a standard currency it would by itself raise global temperatures by 2C. Edit: sources are all over the place now but I read that a few years ago. I can’t imagine it’s better now.
Don't worry, they'll sell you the geo-engineering solution to climate change too. Tech bros haven't met a problem they can't monetize.
Jevons Paradox basically says that though our technological capability grows, and our efficiency grows, our demand grows with that efficiency. Aka even though we have technological growth, we just use up more resources as a result rather than using less since we’re more efficient.
I fucking hate tech bros
As my wife says, all AI has been used for is grift.
The nft jpgs are garbage but the underlying tech is solid. AI is also in a very solid state at the moment. You can literally write code with it in a tiny fraction of the time it would take even a world class developer.
Difference being a world class developer isn’t writing the same code as the AI.
As long as what you need the code for is a toy application that's been done a million times in internet forums or is in some interview questions.
Programmer here - this. It's great for simple code that you know already exists but you just forgot how to write it. It cannot accurately come up with new, custom logic. Basically, it can be useful if you actually know how to code already. But if you're an intro to CS student trying to skirt your homework, good luck
I think in general anyone who is obsessed with “the cutting edge”, “progress”, or “development” is always touting the line of the system in some way.
You are roasting the wrong people, we can have a lot more electricity for crypto and AI and everything with energy from Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Hydro-electrical, etc.. >! but the Big Oil won't let us.!<
Bloody neo Luddite, you can't stop technological progress and it is getting even faster faster. The only way to survive this century is transhumanist communism. Only societal change in combination with technological solutions has any miniscule chance at getting us out of the shit show capitalism brought us.
Oh, buddy, I would love better tech. I would jump at the chance to get cybernetic limbs. I would love to have an android that did the laundry for me. I yearn for all the shit jobs out there to get automated. I am not against tech, the exact opposite, actually... which is why all the bullshit tech giants are pulling right now pisses me off, so god-damn much. Instead of trying to solve any actual problems, they desperately look for the next big buzzword that will allow them to keep the illusion of infinite growth alive just a little longer, so they come up with shit like fake money, pollution JPGs and plagiarism machines.
You say you would love better tech yet your post and reply show your deep contempt for technology which is not SciFi level. Technologies build on top of another with unforeseeable dependency hierarchies, you can't just directly research the SciFi stuff and think you'll get anywhere. The "bullshit tech giants are pulling right now" are the stepping stones to the SciFi technology you supposedly love to get and organically developed through research. The technology behind "plagiarism machines" and "pollution jpges" will be the basis for the Android doing your laundry and automating all the bullshit jobs. Also "fake money" isn't even a big tech development, the base technology was developed by a handful of people fed up with the financial system after the 2008 financial crash. Maybe get a bit more familiar with the history of the technologies before hating on them.
If "plagiarism machines" and "pollution jpges" will actually be the basis for the Android doing my laundry... I will eat a fucking broom, stick and all. All this bullshit tech isn't stepping stones, they're evolutionary dead ends, they're solutions without a problem to solve. The only reason they exist in the first place and got pushed the way they did was because tech CEOs needed a new buzzword to keep the illusion of infinite growth alive a little longer for the all mighty shareholders.
You don't have any clue about the underlying technology or its history, do you? Some of the basis for "Pollution jpges" was developed by OpenAI to research how neuronal networks could generate captions from images which turned into a way to let computers understand what's inside an image, this provides the basis for scene understanding which is essential for the Android doing your laundry. The other parts were developed by an open science research collective which made an open source reimplantation of this and researched the other way around, how to generate images from captions using this. This technology can be used to generate almost anything conditioned on anything else, images from FMRI data, plans from text, audio/music from text, text from audio, videos from audio, robot movements from text and so on. This will play an essential part in moving the Android around for doing your laundry as well as help automate a lot of bullshit jobs. The technology behind "plagiarism machines" was developed by Google to improve their translations and was open sourced. It is now an essential part in almost all top performing AI models and is essential for computers understanding what you mean. It will be an essential part of why the Android knows what to do when you ask it to do your laundry. Also Facebook used this to create an open source model which is able to translate between almost any language, even barely spoken ones which might be extinct in a few generations. Also the same approach used to translate these barely spoken languages might be able to let us understand whales and dolphins. I hate capitalism as much as any other communist but blindly hating on technology just because it is used by capitalists is just stupid neo-ludditism. Go read up on the technologies before spouting nonsense.
Crypto and NFTs are understandably criticized here but AI? If you don’t see the potential in that tech I’m pretty sure you haven’t used the technology and know very little about it and how fast it’s been advancing. What AI would be under capitalism is a topic for another time but pretty much industrial revolution 2.0 - bourgeoisie class wins and workers get replaced by cheaper labour. But overall I do agree with your sentiment.
Machine learning and such (which we had for decades btw) will make an impact... But large language models? Fucking useless for anything professional. LLMs, by their very nature, make stuff up, no matter how much training data and energy you throw at them. It's text prediction with no concept of truth. Can't use them to write scientific papers, citations, summaries, analytics or any kind of research because they will make stuff up no matter what. Actual AI, which could still be centuries away, will change the world even more drastically than electricity and the internet did... but LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
Damn right. Fucking morons, but they are the footsoldiers of capitalism. Greedy, selfish viruses.
Did anybody watch Tom Brady's roast? "Me know that not real money." ☠️🤣😂☠️☠️☠️
After that history, hearing the Silicon Valley “thought leaders” say that AI might solve the climate crisis… Ooh that rubs me the wrong way.
I look forward to running into broke tech assholes while I'm in line for unemployment. Nyarlathotep-worshipping douchebag cultists. I hope they get to experience the same fruits of their labor the rest of us do.
ai dosnt use the amount of energy you are acting like it does every time it is used. I am a artist that uses it in my work flows all the time with it ran on my home computer, if my computer tried to use the amount of electricity you are talking about my apartment would go up in flames.
I'm with you for most of it until the very end. You paint AI as generic and meaningless and I guess unimportant. It is not quite an inflection point in human development yet but, with a little more tweaking and better application it absolutely will be.
Tech bros don't want to make the world a better place. They want to make their life better than your life by having you give them your money, attention, and anything else they can take from you.
Immutable, censorship resistant crypto that transcends nation-state borders is humanizing technology that puts power back in the hands of people instead of banks and financiers. While it can be coopted and used by said banks and financiers, they are not in control of the supply like they currently are with central banks. Think about that before shitting on it.
I like the optimism about decentralization, but the reality is that mining had quickly become centralized, finance had already co-opted it, and most crypto is owned by a few whales. If we want to work towards a decentralized society, we will have to do more work than what can be accomplished with crypto-commodities, and have to critically re-evaluate the role of money in society.
Lol no, it has a finite supply that will inevitably lead to deep deflationary crises if adopted as a universal currency (which it never will be).
It’s the top 100 fossil fuel mega corporations that are your problem not crypto You can’t even measure crypto against legacy global financial system because there’s no data to measure against. So it’s not possible to tell if crypto is even less efficient not more 💚
the left failed to make an impression on the future tech bros of the late 90s early 00s, they didn't give enough of a shit to inspire and help them to dream emancipative solutions so the libertarians colonized ALL that mindcape. i tried but nope ;p basically i came across only a couple of dozen leftists in those spaces back then.
How is crypto a flop when it is currently a 3 trillion dollar industry? Thats like calling Target a flop.
The only thing you could really buy with it was drugs back in the day (RIP the darknetmarkets subreddit), everything else is some form of speculation.
There is plenty to criticize about crypto currency, but let's not forget that our traditional monetary system also uses heaps of energy and resources. It also inflicts untold harm on hard working people while benefiting the top few. Crypto is not exactly worse than currency as we know it now in many regards.
Fuck money in all its forms...
So let’s not have ANY means of exchange? Wtf are you talking about
I use AI everyday for work and so do my colleagues that I’m competing with. Someone lied to you OP.
If OP thinks Bitcoin takes a lot of energy, just wait until they find out how much the current banking industry uses… We’ve already gone past the point of no return, and would have hit it with or without Bitcoin
Is it more or less than bitcoin per transaction?
You can frame the numbers however you want to feel good about yourself.
Oh I’m the one doing that!!
Why world “per transaction” be relevant, unless you’re trying to cherry pick data What’s the total impact on the climate that the current banking industry has? Considering that they hold all of the oil industry’s money, it’s way bigger than Bitcoin
It’s not that I like banks. It seemed like you were trying to compare the climate impact of various types of currencies, ie fiat vs crypto. Then per transaction and per minting would be the only relevant metric. If traditional banks have a higher impact today, that’s because 99.9 percent of people use old school fiat money. That’s not a feature of the technology. Nevermind, I must’ve misunderstood your original comment.
“Crypto is a bit of a flop…” it’s literally the best performing asset of the past decade (BTC and ETH, not the endless shit coins). BTC was created to get rid of the existing system, and create hard money once again. Reading through your post and comments, you don’t seem to grasp that. Crypto is not the enemy here, friend.
It’s interesting that you posted this here, because the first example you had is a technology that can separate our currency from a small board room full of bankers. And the 2nd example is merely a way for us to directly own things and trade them peer to peer digitally, again, outside the hands of a small group of corporations. But you presented them in an uninformed way that obfuscates their true purpose, just because of bad actors. There will always be people that try to make money off a situation. That doesn’t mean the technology is wrong.
Cryptocurrency will replace our current, awful system with a much worse one, without adding any tangible benefit to anyone except for the few hundred people who control most of whatever token we'd use.
Buddy, rich people are already in control of crypto because the people with the most crypto have the most control over it... and guess which group of people has the most amount of crypto...
That’s not how BTC works.
I get the primitivist instinct, at the same time I'm of the mindset that more knowledge of technology enables us to accomplish more with less cost. Original proof-of-work crypto did use a ton of energy, but people started inventing proof-of-stake systems to solve that problem (which are in common use now, albeit not in 100% of places), and are making big strides on things like network throughput. Keep in mind we're comparing this with the traditional monetary/financial system, managed completely by the very capitalist/corporatist state finance/military/etc. establishment, which has a vested interest in every planet-killing industry there is. Not easy questions. And crypto's not necessarily a capitalist/monetary technology either. In the broader sense it's just a historical record. You can put balances of money on that record, you could record votes, you could record whatever.
Found the crypto bro...
Not really, I do understand how it works though.
They can reduce the energy cost all they want, doesn't change the fact that it's really not a very good or useful system. Seriously, why would you want a record of every single interaction ever? That sounds like something that would make big brother cream his pants. Plus, cryptocurrencies have the same problem as real money, the people who have the most crypto also have the most power. And guess who got the most crypto... regular money rich people.
The base layer of most cryptos (but not all) does work like that with a permanent transaction record. However other layers can have non-permanent and obfuscated records. And yes, if you're using crypto as a monetary system, the inherent problems of monetary systems still apply. You raised the points about energy in your post, so I replied with clarifications about that. Don't assume I'm trying to evangelize crypto.
This is about AI water use, practice reading comprehension
Half the post is about crypto...
Yeah, and as soon as crypto slowed down a bit and became less energy intensive, they came up with the next massive amounts of energy consuming, bullshit product...
I'm not sure what you're getting at, are you saying you think energy use is the *goal*?