masterspace @ masterspace @lemmy.ca

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2,065

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm trying to channel my younger GenX, and if it's a bit of a struggle for younger generations then I encourage them to embrace it. It's an unfortunate truth that not everything works like it works on an IPhone, and I can't overstate how important it is to learn some of the basics of the OS and troubleshooting for everyone's future.

Lol I'm a millenial software engineer. I grew up using Windows and was able to learn my way around a filesystem perfectly fine without ever having to compile any programs from source.

Don't put Linux's lack of stability on GenZ's use of apps.

I'm getting so sick of Microsoft and Apples bullshit that I'm about to switch personally, but from the research i did it sounds like the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is that there still aren't standard, unified, unchanging APIs that can be relied upon, so finding third party software and utilities is still a crap shoot compared to something like Windows that can still run binaries that targets it's 1995 era APIs.

Any software that requires me to compile it from source just to run it on my machine is fine for me, a software developer, and probably fine for my mum that just does word processing and browsing since she won't be installing things, but seems a little too friction filled for your average enthusiast?

Real shit im glad you're able to find a few diamonds in the rough -- BUT from the fashy techbros you mentioned to Corpo wide mainstream forcefeeding it, absolutely a net negative.

In what way are they causing more harm than they were with crypto, or with gamification, or with social media, or with whatever tech fad came before that?

The point is that tech bros and conman have always existed and have always been shilling overhyped shit. That's a reality of the world we live in, not a new invention of AI.

And by "few diamonds in the rough", I assume you mean a literal entirely new class of problems that computers were unable to solve for before?

Truly, I love new tech. Always have. I wanna love AI...but as things stand I come to the inevitable conclusion that it is tossing gas on the fires that are the climate crisis, on social and economic inequity and so, sweet summer child soooo much more. I'm far from a doomer.

Just because you bookend your doomer statement with 'i love tech' and 'im far from a doomer', doesn't make it not a doomer' statement. You literally start it by saying that your pessimistic conclusion is inevitable.

You can also really feel that the algorithm doesn't just blindly promote click/rage bait the way that reddit's does.

It still gets promoted some times, but the front page isn't constantly filled with it like Reddit's is,.

Way more arguments on Lemmy seem to end with the two users stop down voting each other, and then basically concluding 'that I see your point but still think you're wrong because youre over emphasizing x or y'.

Way more arguments on Reddit just end with an endless loop of insulting and talking past each other.

I think the effect is probably like 30% selection bias of people coming to Lemmy more intentionally, and 70% lack of bots. Between paid influence campaigns, and Reddit's own use of bots to juice engagement, my gut feel is that most of those endless arguments are either directly arguments with bots, or indirectly people who have grown so frustrated arguing with bots in other threads that they're no longer capable of rational discussion.

Also, Reddit comment quality has nosedived in the past year or so. Like, wildly nosedived. It used to be that there would be at least one comment in the top comments that adds some more interesting context to the story, these days, I almost t never see that on Reddit, but frequently do on Lemmy.

My guess would be that they need those shafts smooth, but if the outside is smooth it doesn't matter as much?

It would be hard to name a bad thing that cant be linked to capitalism.

Yes, so then maybe the problem is with capitalism, not with new technology.

This is a real "everywhere I poke hurts" ... "Yeah, cause your finger is broken", situation.

The argument you presented in your last comment wasnt 'whether it does more harm than good', but 'whether it can do more harm than good'.

If you want to talk about whether LLMs actually do more harm than good in the present world, then I would challenge you to name an ill effect that's the result of LLMs and not the result of capitalism.

Technology, be it physical, or computer based, has been automating people out of jobs literally since jump. You can either vainly fight technical progress or you can fight for a system that shares the rewards from that progress.

The same argument can be made about computers or the internet or government or schools or speeches or...

I literally use LLMs every day at work to help me code, and yes they are great, even for senior engineers who know what they're doing, it's like using intellisense or something like resharper on steroids.

Copilot Web, which is just combining Bing's substandard search engine with LLMs, has made it genuinely more useful and accurate than Google.

Capitalism, wildly uneven distribution of societal resources, and exploitation all suck, but what LLMs can do on a technical level is pretty wild and would be universally praised if it weren't for the job loss implications.

Yeah, it 100% is. Im guessing that the biggest difference for me being out of shape to me being in shape was like 2 point difference on the 10 point attractiveness scale, and there's a night and day difference with how people treated me.

A bit of that is just being naturally more confident when I'm in shape and better looking, but outside of that there was everyone treated me, even before I interacted with them. And that's everyone, from romantic options, to colleague, to random strangers, to close friends, to family.

The first time I got in really good shape I actually got really depressed for a while because of how much better people treated me just because of how I looked.... Though of course even then, it was easier to come out of a depression when you're in shape and everyone wants to fuck you.

More accurate meme:

Also, tabloid journalism predates magazines.

Some of the replacement stuff is bad, but some is good. I personally get more out of my favourite podcasters going in depth on their feelings on a game than I get out of whoever is running reviews at IGN right now.

Like even in movies, pre-youtube, pre-social media, people flocked to individual reviewers they liked, more so than publications. It's why Roger and Ebert / Siskel got so huge, people agreed with their tastes, trusted them, and sought them out specifically. That's not that different from today's world of following your preferred YouTuber or podcaster, but rather than everyone following the few individual who can publish, you end up with a giant web of individuals following and influencing each other's opinions.

And to be clear, I think games reviewing has merit and value, it's just that outside of reviewing and technical analysis, there's not much in the way of stories to cover on a regular basis. So you end up with dedicated games journalists having to write about tripe half the time just to fill word / article counts.

I mean I also grew up in the 90s reading video game magazines, I'm just still growing up.

There is definitely journalism around consumer media.

Yes, see my comment about tabloid filler

I mean what is games journalism? How many full time, major publication, food-packaging-industry journalists are there? Where's our aluminum can reporters? Who's covering the waxed cardboard beat? Where's the lifers on butcher paper?

I mean food packaging is a $500 Billion dollar a year industry, roughly double the size of the video games industry, why are there zero full time journalists focused on them?

I grew up reading a ton of early video game blogs like Joystiq, but games journalism has always been a breath away from celebrity chasing, drama stirring, tabloid filler.

There's one end of it that analyzes the in depth technical details of engines which is interesting to some, and there's one end that is reviewing and discussing games as art, but otherwise there's very little journalism to do full time on any given industry. Journalists should follow the story, not insist on finding one in the industry where they want to look.

When I switch copilot to a reasoning model like o1, and am working through some really annoying bug I'll often get rate limited.

But the rate limiting is per model, so I can switch over to say the Claude model, and then use that til I'm rate limited, then switch to another.

Pretty much literally having to give each LLM a nap and only play with one at a time.

Bruh, I get how you feel, but your complaints are with capitalism, not algorithms that are wildly better than previous ones at fuzzy pattern matching.

Here is an example of how AI has already literally revolutionized science through one targeted project:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI

This work won the Nobel prize in chemistry.

And my best friend literally did his PhD in protein crystallography, is at MIT doing a protein structural analysis Post Doc, and the work of the new AI based protein structural predictions has literally completely changed the direction of their lab's research, basically overnight.

Because, yes AI algorithms literally are able to solve a new class of problems. It's literally what this old pre-LLM xkcd is talking about: https://xkcd.com/1425/ and while it's asking for confirmation of a 'bird', identifying photos of say, cancer, is the literal exact same problem from an algorithm standpoint, and is a huge amount of other fuzzy pattern matching problems.

Yeah there's a lot of dumb tech bros over hyping AI, and a lot of giant corporations that care about using it for literally nothing but getting personally richer, but you're going to be misinformed the other direction about its genuine usefulness if you just read nothing but AI doomer blogs from people who don't actually bother trying to use or understand the technology.

Lmao, and all that history and economics taught you just these two lessons?

• If something wasn't illegal previously, that makes it impossible to make it illegal
• Marketing is cool and awesome, and totally a necessary part of society that has always existed in every society, so there's no point trying to ban it

Let me guess, you went to American schools? Learned all that America History (TM)?

So do you work for the marketing industry or is it a loved one of yours?