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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

    Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

    The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

    And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.


  • Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

    The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

    It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

    Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it



  • You’re making up a lot of stuff, Xerox had a gui UI for a whole decade before apple and they certainly weren’t the only ones.

    The MP3 player they made was literally just a feature limited version of already popular devices. I got my arcos a year before the first apple device was released and it had every single feature that apple would slowly add in every new expensive version over the next decade

    Apple does hype and marketing, that’s their innovation - taking a feature restricted version of a technology and getting celebrities and media idiots to pretend it’s the best thing in the world and actively ignore or discount the many better options.




  • The capitalist mindset really is a weird one, rent seeking is out of control. We’re talking about a tool that allows independent creators and hobby users to improve the quality of their projects but all you can think about is the possibility of getting a couple of dollars in royalties.

    Regular users being able to use advanced noise reduction allows regular people to better compete with corporations, it’s the sort of technology which can help displace the monopolies which rule the world. But you’re against it because they didn’t give you 6 cents for listening to your cover version of country roads



  • Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that’s really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool

    Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it’s commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.

    That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.

    Of course with progress on fusion it’s possible there won’t be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we’ll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that’s sold in small amounts for absurd prices.



  • Yeah its weird tech is moving so absurdly fast at that moment that people seem to have gotten used to huge breakthroughs and want one ever week, like with ai how astonishing developments aren’t even implemented yet but people are saying it’s not impressive or development has stalled.

    There’s a lot of really good stuff that’s coming to market slowly, the main problem is lithium is so cheap and easy at the moment that it’s not really worth it for anyone to take a risk on something new. It is happening but it’ll take a while for the special use cases to filter though and it to reach a more general market.

    Another good example is wave power, there are now working commercial devices and very successful test projects but because it’s complex and still has high planning and development costs associated with it everyone is sticking to wind and solar. There will be a point soon where tidal generation sneaks into common use just like desalination did

    Hardly anyone is even aware how many of the areas we got told would have water wars now have desalination partnerships and plenty of water to go round. They can even extract lithium in the same process and we’re starting to see that getting built too.

    I think the real thing is going to be when the various strands of ai combine with the incredibly good robotics we have developed over the last few decades, people are going to be shocked how much it’ll speed up every physical industry. Being able to show the robot ‘this surface here needs to be sanded smooth ready for spraying’ and it can understand the request, evolve a movement solution and continually check it’s work as it goes.

    The problem is everyone knows that’s coming and it’s a game changer so no one is really interested in the amazing advances we keep making or the more basic tools. Companies aren’t going to invest five years researching and developing the sort of product we can make now when they know other companies as already investing big in general purposes tools that’ll ruin all those markets.




  • Ah I should have guessed your opinion comes from a weird type of elitist nonsence but I can play that game too if you like…

    You’re only thinking about the world you know which appears to be shitty movies and being a gamer that’s decided you’re not like the degenerate games you’re high class, ok bud but I doubt that’s how s casual observer sees it and I think you know that which is why you put on such a show to p distance yourself from what you recognise if your set. So shove your classism up your ass and grow up.

    People with actual important things going on have been using vr for years, they did fucking surgery on a grape for fuck sake! While the surgeons were extoling the wonders of VR for complex remote surgery using hyper advanced robotics what the fuck were you doing? Bitching that the console noobs don’t have the same high culture as pc gamers?

    When the USAF flies the F-35 and the pilot puts on his HMDS with the Distributed Aperture System do you think it’s because they’re trailer trash junkies looking for a distraction or maybe because billions of dollars of research went into creating the absolute best control system and it turned out that’s very clearly VR?

    And the drone operators, the architects, the astronauts at nasa who use it… They just haven’t realised it’s stupid and useless, only an enlightened pc gamer like yourself is wise enough to realise there’s no use for it.

    • well that was cathartic, hope you don’t take anything I said personally and that you have a lovely day but I felt it appropriate.

    Vr has proven to institutions that have the money and tech to use it that it’s incredibly useful, as tech improves and ecosystems get established we will see it move towards ubiquity there’s no doubt about that.



  • Ha ok, we’ll see how that prediction pans out.

    Yes the expensive and complex products available today limit the audience which in turn lowers the attractiveness of the market to creators which further inhibits uptake, the exact same thing is clearly visible in the home computer adoption curve and many similar developments.

    First adopters create an ecosystem of markets which results in a growing diversity of established use cases - many ideas fail but some prove to be very efficient and effective as part of a workflow which over going becomes the standard way of doing things.

    As there are more things for which vr becomes established it transitions from being something major creators don’t really bother with to something that they make a show of supporting - especially as the general ecosystem has become established so things like which menu style to use or how to orientate views have become easy choices. This changes vr from being niche special use to a fairly general tool that a lot of people are used to using.

    At that point we’ll see a lot of cheap consumer devices which results in a lot more development on the market, especially as natural language input through LLMs make control interfaces easier and similar generative ai make creating vr environments easier.

    Vr is going to be something that most people are used to using somewhat regularly, I don’t think it’ll replace screens but there’s a lot of things that we currently do on a screen that will just make more sense in vr


  • If you ask it to make up nonsense and it does it then you can’t get angry lol. I normally use it to help analyse code or write sections of code, sometimes to teach me how certain functions or principles work - it’s incredibly good at that, I do need to verify it’s doing the right thing but I do that with my code too and I’m not always right either.

    As a research tool it’s great at taking a basic dumb description and pointing me to the right things to look for, especially for things with a lot of technical terms and obscure areas.

    And yes they can occasionally make mistakes or invent things but if you ask properly and verify what you’re told then it’s pretty reliable, far more so than a lot of humans I know.


  • Why would I rebut that? I’m simply arguing that they don’t need to be ‘intelligent’ to accurately determine the colour of the sky and that if you expect an intelligence to know the colour of the sky without ever seeing it then you’re being absurd.

    The way the comment I responded to was written makes no sense to reality and I addressed that.

    Again as I said in other comments you’re arguing that an LLM is not will smith in I Robot and or Scarlett Johansson playing the role of a usb stick but that’s not what anyone sane is suggesting.

    A fork isn’t great for eating soup, neither is a knife required but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly useful eating utensils.

    Try thinking of an LLM as a type of NLP or natural language processing tool which allows computers to use normal human text as input to perform a range of tasks. It’s hugely useful and unlocks a vast amount of potential but it’s not going to slap anyone for joking about it’s wife.


  • But this is not true, everyone has been asking for better internet speed and natural language computing. 5G was required because everyone is online all the time, yeah people aren’t hyped about it because it’s boring but if we didn’t have 5g and archaic infrastructure didn’t scale with demand then you bet people would be yelling about it - when a train goes by there’s a hundred people using mobile internet, likely none of them care about 5g but they love being able to work, chat and browse the internet on their journey.

    Ai is absurdly beneficial to people already and it’s incredibly early days, again people aren’t going to be especially hyped by most it’s uses, in fact they won’t notice most of them but it’ll help fix a lot of things that really annoy or negatively affect them.

    As someone who has spent a lot of time learning about and designing GUIs I can tell you that designing a system to give all the different user sets and types the controls they need is super complex - as someone who actually programs them I can assure you implementing whatever system is created to do this is even more painfully difficult. Now imagine not having to do that, imagine I can make a tool and the user just has to say ‘import this old file in an obscure format then do these obscure but relatively simple things…’ this is huge from a development point of view and even huger from a user point of view.

    Ever have a family member ask you for the tenth time how to find their emails? Or hand you a device you’ve never seen before and say ‘can you change the font size’ and you have to go through menus and Google how to do it? Soon it’ll be fairly standard to just tell things what you want and for them to actually understand.

    This is just one small benefit that LLMs and natural language computing bring, I could list other benefits for days