Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023
What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.
Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.
That’s bullshit. Democrats all over the place are saying this is likely to be a close election and people really need to get out and vote to beat Trump.
The only sense it’s true that Democrats are taking about it being rigged are that actual, known attempts to rig it, like the fake electors scheme and the storming of the capital, along with the grotesque gerrymandering, all of which is verifiable.
LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.
Back in the 80s, when this came out, my coworker across the aisle thought it was the funniest cartoon ever. He laughed his head off, cut it out of the paper, and put it on his cube wall where it stayed for at least a decade.
I came here to say I think it’s funny that in 1994 Larson drew the gun rights alien with a red baseball hat.
Here’s an odd one my wife and I were just talking about. Some years ago, we were redoing our kitchen and the contractor told us to go buy the kitchen faucet we wanted. We went off, looked at several, and picked the one we thought looked the best with what we were doing.
When the contractor went to install it, he opened the box and a battery pack fell out. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a faucet would need batteries. It turned out that you can turn it on and off by touching it anywhere (handle, faucet itself, whatever), you just leave the physical handle open and set where you want it, then you can touch on and off. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and we’d never use it.
Flash Forward to now and it’s one of the most used conveniences we’ve ever bought. All those times your hands are covered in raw meat or other cooking mess? Just touch the faucet with your elbow. Rinsing a bunch of veggies one at a time? Tap on, tap off. It works flawlessly, unlike those touchless ones at the airport: no delay and works every time. We will never have a kitchen sink without it - my wife wants them for the bathroom.
Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.
It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.