it kind of seems like the only thing AI is actually useful for at all is programming and every other usage of it is on a spectrum from "harmlessly shit" to "actually evil"
@sun oh, did AI stop giving people botulism speedrun instructions finally?
@vriska @sun @lolitechengineer ok yes BUT hear me out — “how they did it in the old times” also includes dying of botulism at age 32 and calling it “bad air” lmaooo 😭💀
like yes ppl potted meat historically!!! absolutely!!! and also historical infant mortality was insane and life expectancy was 40 and ppl regularly died of things we now know were preventable food poisoning!!! “the old times” is not exactly a food safety gold standard!!!
the thing is tho, traditional potted meat methods that DID work usually had extra steps that matter SO much:
like grandma wasn’t making a month-long shelf stable pork spread she was making something to get thru the WEEK and even THEN ppl got sick sometimes!!!
the real historical long-term shelf stable stuff was dried, salted, or fermented — not “meat under a fat cap” which is a botulinum dreamhouse 🏠✨
old timey =/= safe!! old timey = old timey problems!!! ^_^ 🫡
@sun @vriska it’s not good for general programming either, it’s good for a very narrow field that mostly relies on pattern recognition and repetition like assisting with boilerplate for garbage web frameworks and for finding obvious security flaws that nobody noticed because nobody has been looking. i’ve tried state of the art models and they’re USELESS for solving problems that haven’t been solved a million times already
@sun @vriska what they’re actually good for is pattern recognition and reproduction tasks because that’s what transformer models do. hence their use in search engines and child porn
i’ve used them to learn about math topics which mostly amounted to rephrasing gibberish into language that i can understand, and even that task was error-prone
@RustyCrab @sun you can just do that with your human brain too yknow
@RustyCrab @sun im not talking about programming because i dont know anything about that but personally I can eat a dish at a restaurant and figure out how to cook it just from eating it and reading the ingredients list, maybe I'm just really fucking good at everything.
those are just my current projects and AI is useless for all of them
has a tool where for recipe pages it will specifically extract just the recipe text without the bullshit if you summarize it
@ageha @sun @vriska pretty much. with all the online resources we have, you can learn this stuff in less than a week if you’re motivated. people literally reverse engineer FPGA bitstream formats for fun https://clifford.at/icestorm
many things in the old days also took teams and millions of dollars because they were government projects and the 90s IT revolution hadn’t happened yet. nowadays you can get access to all the hardware, software and knowhow as a hobbyist and that changes things.
@sun @ageha @vriska it’s also not that easy to make that comparison. a lot of my hobby projects took years instead of days or weeks because i do this as a fun distraction, not to be especially productive.
there are a few exceptions like when i built my keyboards and was so hyperfocused on it that i learned basic electrical design, PCB design and keyboard ergonomics over a weekend, bought a bunch of hardware to populate and bake the PCBs at home (didn’t use off-the-shelf MCU dev boards), then 3D printed custom keycaps, enclosures and travel cases. i spent most of the time waiting for parts to ship, and the 3D CAD/printing work took longer than any of the PCB stuff
@sun @vriska @ageha honestly anything that empowers people to do things is great, and i think LLMs absolutely do have that potential. but where are the smaller domain-specific models you can download and run on less expensive hardware, maybe even CPU-only?
i’d like to treat them less as the AI-that-does-everything product that silicon valley is trying to sell and more as interactive knowledge databases that can act as coaches. “i’d like to learn about linear algebra but i struggle with the way math topics are usually taught; please give me exercises in C that relate to the problem i’m trying to solve” is a thing state-of-the-art LLMs can do and i see a lot of potential in making this tech usable offline