A modest proposal if I ever heard one!

Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?

I think you’re right. It’s a bit of a dance with the devil as far as your own abilities are concerned. If we could have exoskeletons that would make us 40x stronger, would our bodies atrophy in the same way, and would we accept it?

And yet, I wouldn’t argue against the objective utility of an exoskeleton.

Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.

I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.

We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?

And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.

I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.

The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.

This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.

Where I live, most people have cars. But a) they’re cars, not trucks; b) parking is highly restricted, mostly to multi-story garages. Since parking takes up less space it means that walking distances get much smaller, which means you don’t need the car as much.

Yeah, I think it’s fascinating to read Claude’s transcripts while it’s working. It’s crazy how you can give it a two-sentence prompt that really is quite complex task, and it splits the problems into chunks that it works through and second-guesses until it’s confident (and usually correct).

Your verbal faculties are bad at math. Other parts of your brain do calculations.

LLMs are a computer’s verbal faculties. But guess what, they’re just a really big calculator. So when LLMs realize that they’re doing a math problem and launch a calculator/equation solver, they’re not so bad after all.

Hah, you swapped insomnia for reading-induced narcolepsy. Neat!

Yep. Doctors and randos alike will keep telling you to just try harder. Fuck that.

Read a book. Work some more on your project. Go for a run. Don’t try to sleep.

This is spot on, and pretty much how it went down everywhere, not just the UK. Just to clarify: it’s workers, not capital, who create wealth. The staggering rise in inequality, pricing people out of cities and the housing market is having a significant negative effect on productivity which is why Europe is falling behind.

This means lost time where we have not been producing anywhere near our potential, and by consequence also not honing our skills to produce anything in the future. We can’t just win this time back by political change now, it’s lost forever, and young people who should have been at the forefront of developing the economy and making families will never win this back.

We need to be way more angry than we are, and every day that we don’t fix this we’re letting it get worse.

Yeah, I think you’re hitting on something important. This is probably also why people living under dictatorships sometimes approve of their dictator. The devil you know.

In my experience, it doesn’t need to be a nice breakfast. It just needs to be something.

Going vegan is tough, because you have to relearn everything you know about food. A “normal” meal has a (high-carb/low-protein)+(low-carb+high-protein) pattern, let’s say meat and potatoes. With that template, you absolutely can not just swap out meat and replace it with something vegetarian. No vegetable- or fungus-based food, no matter how processed, comes close in terms of protein content to meat.

You essentially need to change the entire template. That means you’re also replacing your high-carb/low-protein foods with more “medium” foods like lentils.

That’s the best advice I can give, and you absolutely do not have to go all in. Replace a small portion of your rice with some green lentils. Replace a small portion of your meat with kidney beans. Goes a long way.

Dude chickens are the best. Some of them can be wicked smart too. I miss mine.

And I highly recommend sharpening your knives with a sharpening stone or whetstone. It makes such a huge difference to how fun it is to be in the kitchen.

Everyone should try going vegan. You don’t have to stay a vegan forever. You don’t have to preach to others. You don’t have to do it for animal welfare or the environment or anything other than you.

But you should try it. For you.

I should have clarified. Israel used drones smuggled in by agents, and remote-controlled using the internet, to disable air defenses and infrastructure in the first stage of their attack.