A quick reminder, 2025 update should include AI in the diagram : programmer

[–] primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexus 82 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Okay, but, devils advocate:

What if I'm a billionaire trying to crush the working class and accelerate climate change and political division so the class war doesn't pop off before i can get to my climate bunker?

Or a billionaire fascist who wants to sloppify everyone's brains and increase alienation while annihilating interiority so people will become docile and the class war won't pop off and we get the 1984 timeline?

Or a billionaire asshole who wanted to murder a concept and settled on 'truth'?

Or a really big 'infinite jest' fan?

So "ai" has a lot of use cases. Maybe dont be such a reflexive reactionary fucking Luddite piece of shit about it.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (6 children)

That’s the thing, AI is an exceptional propaganda machine. Blockchain isn’t really exceptional at anything - it’s just a reinvention of the wheel.

[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Blockchain solves a specific problem: safe transactions without a trusted authority.

It has a lot of downsides to solve this problem without a trusted authority, so in any case where you can use a trusted authority (for example a central server) it's much better to use that instead of a blockchain.

So everyone who added blockchains to their projects gained all the downsides while never having the problem it was meant to solve in the first place.

AIs, and I assume you meant LLMs with that, are a different breed. LLMs are new: never before could a computer handle natural language to such a degree.

Problem is, that it's still new. So no one knows what the "killer applications" are or what monetization should look like, or what the laws about it will be.

People just throw every against the wall and see what sticks... And hope for AGI/ASI and to be on the side that rides that nearly infinite potential to the moon.

Or, you know, crash and burn in case AI reaches a wall/diminishing returns/systemic problems that can't be fixed.

We will see.

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[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Blockchain is an adequate solution to a problem that already has other, cheaper solutions.

AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information). Unfortunately, all the money is in that solution being applied to problems where it's not adequate (content generation, user interaction).

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information).

Sentiment analysis machines and such have been around before LLMs and eat much less electricity.

LLMs taken over the "AI" label so much that any success from a machine learning context is attributed to it, while it actually defunds and kills research out of ML all into LLMs.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's true that LLMs (and GANs) are taking over a term that contains a lot of other stuff, from fuzzy logic to a fair chunk of computer linguistics.

If you look at what AI does, however, it's mostly classification. Whether it's fitting imprecise measurements into categories or analyzing waveform to figure out which word it represents regardless of diction and dialect; a lot of AI is just the attempt at classifying hard to classify stuff.

And then someone figure out how to hook that up to a Markov chain generator (LLMs) or run it repeatedly to "recognize" an image in pure noise (GANs). And those are cool little tricks but not really ones that solve a problem that needed solving. Okay, I'll grant that GANs make a few things in image retouching more convenient but they're also subject to a distressingly large number of failure modes and consume a monstrous amount of resources.

Plus the whole thing where they're destroying the concept of photographic and videographic evidence. I dislike that as well.

I really like AI when used for what it's good at: Taking messy input data and classifying it. We're getting some really cool things done that way and some even justify the resources we're spending. But I do agree with you that the vast majority of funding and resources gets spent on the next glorified chatbot in the vague hope that this one will actually generate some kind of profit. (I don't think that any of the companies who are invested in AI still actually believe their products will generate a real benefit for the end user.)

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

If you look at what AI does, however, it’s mostly classification.

Not necessarily, a huge use case is regulation and control in the engineering, not the political sense. Like driverless cars, independently flying drones and such. And yeah, they need classification subsystems under the hood to work, but their ultimate outputs are complex control signals, not simple classes.

And don't get me wrong, I also like ML and AI as a field, I just don't like how OpenAI fucked the field with text generators that they got Silicon Valley to worship like gods. I even like LLMs, just not the grotesquely outsized cult around them.

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Blockchain is good if you want everyone to know who you send your money to.

Which sounds stupid, but if we used it more for things that aren't stupid money, perhaps we could find something where transparency and permanent immutable logs are a good thing. For currency those may even be bad things because privacy. Which Monero solves and that's actually another useful thing - ability to make untraceable payments remotely. Used to have to use cash for that.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

permanent immutable logs

My understanding of current blockchain technology is that it's only permanent so long as someone is online maintaining the block integrity. If enough machines go down, or if enough machines come up that refute it, then anyone can push an alternate history.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

A Bitcoin heist where you install a false ledger using a botnet.

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[–] probable_possum@leminal.space 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Every decade has at least one of these buzzwords (multimedia, internet/ online, social media, mobile app, blockchain, cryptocoins, micropayment, delivery, ai,...).. They can be used to attract dumb investor's money but they have their useful sides too.

Ok. They are just buzzwords which outline a set of tools. They are worthless without a realizable concept with a benefit for the end-user. And the use of the right tool for the job. So, I'm not sure about useful cryptocoins and blockchain use cases (I wouldn't count financial speculation as particularly useful).

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Every time somebody starts raving about some tech, it'll turn out to be a classic hype cycle.

[–] primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexus 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This isnt productive, and the hype is the largest I have ever seen. Ireland–a wealthy developed tech savvy nation–isnt building new homes to address their housing crisis because this shit is taking all the energy and water.

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[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That graph is peak bullshit.

Just because you believe the hype, it doesn't mean there's a milder use case for your application.

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 8 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately LLM do have one profitable application: generating spam and astroturfing

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

"According to this chart we made up without any explanation, blockchain and nfts and metaverse are going to be pretty useful tools in the future. Just because they were trendy once."

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[–] dumbass@aussie.zone 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Even I know that.

[–] Rothe@piefed.social 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

A surprisingly high number of techbros doesn't though.

[–] pewpew@feddit.it 12 points 1 week ago

Tech bros using every buzzword to sound smart after they just lost tousands

[–] dumbass@aussie.zone 9 points 1 week ago

That's because they're fucking idiots.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Wait, what if are made an AI that was also a blockchain based NFT? We could scam so many venture capitalists

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Talk about improving our synergies!

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[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

In the metaverse!

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[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is there any way we can get this slide on the block chain?

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You want an NFT, I can get you an NFT....

[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah but can you make a bunch of them so I can sell it multiple times?

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago

no-no, we'll sell them in different colors. You need perceived scarcity. Add in some nostalgia, maybe some Shirttales characters wearing it on their clothes....

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Is the picture from Tiktok? > yes
Is the platform you're reposting on vertical too? > no
> remove black bars

[–] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 10 points 1 week ago

No, the better solution is to add more black bars to the side so that it fits on to a wide screen.

[–] nednobbins@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Can someone explain this joke in programmer terms?

I just wrote an AI that is trained to classify image patterns and automatically creates bitmasks based on the pattern distributions. We tried k-means clustering and got garbage. How would I have done that without AI?

[–] chuckleslord@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, the joke is that every company is trying to ram LLMs and Agentic LLMs into everything without thinking about what they're trying to accomplish. Like the trend with blockchain a decade ago.

Yours is a valid use case for ai. That's why it doesn't fit the meme.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

But the meme is making the more extreme claim that no uses exist, so any counterexamples mean it's untrue. Not the best way of criticizing companies that don't know or care what a technology is good for imo.

[–] RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

the meme is making the more extreme claim that no uses exist

Only if you take it literally instead of as a joke that is exaggerating for comedic effect.

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[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

—> Yes. —> No, you don't.

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

I made money odd BTC and that's it.

Whatever vision they had, it's not fucking happening. Web3 being pushed by those altcoins is bullshit. It's so totally unnecessary.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Ok I will do a image recognition software using if else.

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[–] Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

I thought we were doing ai now

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