Opinion | Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype?
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 1,096Joined 2 yr. ago
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world
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Unless you pay for expensive tags (like $20 per tag) or use really short range scanners (e.g. a hotel key), RFID tags don't work reliably enough.
Antitheft RFID tags for example won't catch every single thief who walks out the door with a product. But if a thief comes back again and again stealing something... eventually one of them will work.
But even unreliable tags are a bit expensive, which is why they are only used on high margin and frequently stolen products (like clothing).
All the self serve stores in my country just use barcodes. They are dirt cheap and work reliably at longer range than a cheap RFID tag. Those stores use AI to flag potential thieves but never for purchases (for example recently I wasn't allowed to pay for my groceries until a staff member checked my backpack, which the AI had flagged as suspicious).
I’m betting the owners of the NYT would LOVE to have an AI that would simply re-phrase “news” (ahem) “borrowed” from other sources
No way. NYT depends on their ability to produce high quality exclusive content that you can't access anywhere else.
In your hypothetical future, NYT's content would be mediocre and no better than a million other news services. There's no profit in that future.
It sounds like it should work to me.
As an example, as a kid I couldn't play first person video games until game developers worked out they need something in a fixed position taking over a significant portion of the screen (for example, a steering wheel in a car or the gun you're holding in a shooter).
Turn those fixed overlays off, and after just playing for a few seconds I'll be sick the rest of the day. If anything I'm even more sensitive now than when I was a kid - but with the right overlays I'm all good.
I'd bet Apple did a lot of research into motion sickness while developing the Vision Pro headset. Good to see some of that coming to other products.
Putting my developer hat on and reading various reports - this smells like Apple had a really bad data loss bug which they quietly fixed by attempting to automatically recover lost photos from some corner of the database that still might have the data. Such as the thumbnail database or a cache.
Backups people. Make sure you have good backups and for your most precious photos not just digital ones - print them. And send a physical copy to your grandparents as a gift - they'll love it and it will be one more place you can recover that photo of your kid's birthday if you ever need to
And if you don't want something in a photo... don't take the photo.
Some people claim they don't have cloud sync enabled and also a lot of the photos were deleted several years ago... on different physical hardware hardware (but somehow carried forward through device transfers).
If any of that is part of the hiring process - I don’t want the job.
If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
By far most important thing is to have good colleagues, because without good colleagues your job will be miserable or the company will not last (or both). Made the mistake of working for a shitty job at high pay once and it was one of the worst decisions of my life.
Don’t waste your life working for incompetent companies.
Also, as someone who has hired devs... if you have a public profile, and it doesn't make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist. Too many applications cross my desk to look at all of them properly, so a lot of good candidates won't even get considered. But if there's a GitHub or similar profile, I'm going to open it, and if I see green squares... you've got my attention.
You'll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it's your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.
If the EU finds apple guilty of "systematic" non-compliance, which will happen if they "continue their shenanigans for every judgement", then the DMA doesn't call for a fine. It calls for a TikTok style forced sale. Apple could be ordered to sell the iPhone to another company or face an outright ban in the EU.
Of course that's assuming the EU has the balls to actually enforce their own laws knowing full well the transatlantic political consequences.
we can be sure a megacorp like apple is pulling every lever at their disposal
Sure. But as far as I can tell the only lever at their disposal is to drag their feet and try to delay compliance as long as possible.
It's an effective strategy, but it's stupid. They're making a lot of people angry and that is never a good long term strategy.
Where will they get their info from with no one to scrape?
It's not like there's a shortage of human generated content. And the content that has already been generated isn't going anywhere. It will be available effectively forever.
just “standing on the shoulders of giants”.
So? If you ask an LLM a question, you often get a very useful response. That's ultimately all that matters.
I disagree. The real news is the free model will now search the internet for up to date answers, and for calculations it will write and execute a python script, then show you the result.
Paid users of ChatGPT have had those features for months, and they were a massive step forward in terms of how often the AI provides accurate answers.
you can run locally some small models
Emphasis on "small" models. The large ones need over a terabyte of RAM and it has to be high bandwidth (DDR is not fast enough).
And for most tasks, smaller models hallucinate way too often. Even the largest models are only just barely good enough.
Bus beats the pants off light rail in just about every respect you can think of
Um, no. The only reason I would ever set foot on a bus is if there was no rail option.
It’s quickly scalable up and down
It really isn't.
it can be rerouted on a whim
I was on a bus that was rerouted once - when a road closed unexpectedly. We were 10 minutes drive from home, and the new route took us 20 minutes in the opposite direction, we waited 30 minutes for a bus that could drop us off 45 minutes walk from home. Including the original bus trip it was about three hours and by the time we got home we were dangerously dehydrated (we had water with us, but not three hours worth).
The ability to reroute buses is not a positive attribute. It sucks.
it doesn’t require additional road or electrical infrastructure to operate
Yeah it does. You need bus stops. Bus lanes. And these days you need totally do need electrical infrastructure — according to my city, the total cost to the tax payer for diesel vs electric works out to $70,000 per bus if it's electric... and that includes spending a fortune on electrical infrastructure upgrades to be able to charge those huge batteries. Batteries a train doesn't need because they would never go hours between charging the train.
Spare parts are plentiful and the parts economy is competitive, maintenance overheads are lower, the fleet is amenable to reuse in non-PT contexts, etc.
I don't really see how busses are that different from trains. Pretty much the only difference is metal wheels vs rubber wheels. I would think the metal ones last longer.
Ultimately, a bus is always slower than driving. Light rail, on the other hand, is often faster than driving.
It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users
Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn't the problem.
The problem with twitter is Musk fired all the people who spent their day figuring out how to hide (or just delete) shitty content.
it’s all CGI
Crushing the industry I work in, and my dad worked in, is CGI? I'm pretty sure that's very real.
I love listening to digital music on as much as anyone. More than most people. But it will never replace physical instruments for me and I don't like to see a company celebrating that transition - even if I admit it's very much real.
I think the world was a better place when all 50 people on a train carriage listened to the one musician who brought a guitar onto the train and called out asking them to sing a favourite song next.
Spotify pays more to artists than physical stores selling CDs ever did. And they certainly pay better than FM radio.
Sure - if you were one of he top 1000 artists in the world the old system paid more... but it's not like those artists are starving now — Spotify alone pays millions per year to the top thousand artists, and they also get paid by YouTube, Apple, TikTok, etc etc.
The real way to make money in the music industry is and always has been live performances. A solo artist can make a couple hundred bucks a night doing simple cover songs, and a popular band can make a lot more.
The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.
That forces music services to compete on the overall experience (and price), while video services pretty much exclusively compete based on what content is available and literally none of them offer all of the things a person wants to watch. So nobody will ever be happy with any streaming service.
The real difference is you can watch what you want to watch on demand instead of being limited to their selection of shows on their schedule.
Also, you can sign up for a month, watch a series, then cancel and sign up to some other service. Pay for several services and sure, it's expensive. But one or two? Still a hell of a lot cheaper than Cable ever was.
The fact most content is crap is irrelevant - there's more good content available than any reasonable person has time to watch.
Some of us don't like watching beloved musical instruments destroyed. We also don't like how so many people think watching TikTok on an iPad is "music".
When my father died, my sister didn't give a shit about the house. She just wanted the guitar - which our father (a drummer) inherited when the lead guitarist in his band died. The guitarist had two dozen guitars but was his favourite.
It's close to a century old, nobody knows what trade secrets the luthier who created it used to get that sound, and no other instrument sounds the same. It's been used on stage in countless live performances on every continent in the world and has been used to record over a hundred songs in professional recording studios. It was used to play music at the funeral of both the previous owners and it's literally impossible to replace.
I get it, not every instrument is that special... but this instrument wasn't that special either when the first guitarist ever picked it up. Nearly all instruments have the potential to become that special... and Apple created a video dedicated to destroying a bunch of them while also implying that listening to an MP3 is as good as an actual instrument. No way.
Yeah I've given up on integration tests.
We have a just do "smoke testing" — essentially a documented list of steps that a human follows after every major deployment. And we have various monitoring tools that do a reasonably good job detecting and reporting problems (for example, calculating how much money to charge a customer is calculated twice by separate systems, and if they disagree... an alert is triggered and a human will investigate. And if sales are lower than expected, that will be investigated too).
Having said that, you can drastically reduce the bug surface area and reduce how often you need to do smoke tests by moving as much as possible out of the user interface layer into a functional layer that closely matches the user interface. For example if a credit card is going to be charged, the user interface is just "invoice number, amount, card detail fields, submit, cancel". And all the submit button does is read every field (including invoice number/amount) and send it to an API endpoint.
From there all of the possible code paths are covered by unit tests. And unit tests work really well if your code follows industry best practices (avoid side effects, have a good dependency injection system, etc).
I generally don't bother with smoke testing if nothing that remotely affects the UX has changed... and I keep the UX as a separate project so I can be confident the UX hasn't changed. That code might go a year without a single code commit even on a project with a full time team of developers. Users also appreciate it when you don't force them to learn how their app works every few months.
That's FUD.
Sure - the concrete in a large hydro dam requires a staggering amount of electricity to produce (because the chemical reaction to produce cement needs insane amounts of heat), but there's no reason any CO2 needs to be emitted. You can absolutely use zero emission power to high temperatures needed to produce cement.
And not all hydro needs a massive concrete wall. There's a hydro station near my city that doesn't have a dam at all - it's just a series of pipes that run from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain. There's a permanent medium sized river that never stops flowing that comes down off the mountain - with an elevation change of several hundred metres. It provides more power than the entire city's consumption and does so while only diverting a tiny percentage of the river's water. As the city grows, the power plant can easily be upgraded to divert more of the water though pipes instead of flowing uselessly down towards the sea.
Covid and Russia's war created massive fluctuations recently but if you look through that noise global CO2 emissions are pretty much flat and have been for a few years now. They are almost certainly going to trend downwards going forward (a lot of countries already are seeing downward movement).
The simple reality is fossil fuels are now too expensive to be competitive. Why would anyone power an AI (or mine crypto) with coal power that costs $4,074/kW when you could use Solar at $1,300/kW (during the day. At night it's more like $1,700 to $2,000 with the best storage options, such as batteries or pumped storage). Or wind at around $1,700.
Nuclear is $8,000/kW unless you live in Russia, where safety is largely ignored.
Hydro can be cheap if you happen to be near an ideal river - but for most locations it's not competitive with Solar/Wind. So hydro is safe as a long term power generation method into the future, but it's never going to be the dominant form of power unless (like my city) you happen to have ideal geology.