I feel it’s a vaguely Australian term?

Lol confirmed both idiot and troll, thanks :)

All right, we are done here. I’ve tried to engage with you in a fair and honest way. Giving you the benefit of the doubt and trying to respond to the points you are trying to make.

But it appears you are just a troll or an idiot, either way I’m done.

Well maybe one person is a little bit more impressed by some pretty pictures than another person. I really don’t see what that has to do with a company like Microsoft putting their money into this? They don’t make songs or movie trailers.

To me I’m stunned but that’s just me, on top of this we’re only in year like 5 of AI going mainstream, where will it be in 10 years? 20 years?

This is a common trap a lot of people fall into. See what improvements have been made the last couple of years, who knows where it will end up right? Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that. Improvements made in the past don’t guarantee improvements will continue in the future. There are ceilings that can be run into and are hard to break. There can even be hard limits that are impossible to break. There might be good reasons to not further develop promising technologies from the past into the future. There is no such thing as infinite growth.

Edit:

Just checked out that song, man that song is shit…

“My job vanished without lift.” What does that even mean? That’s not even English.

And that’s just one of the dozens of issues I’ve seen in 30 secs. You are kidding yourself if you think this is the future, that’s one shit future bro.

What’s your point?

Sure that’s the point of venture capital, throwing some money at the wall and see what sticks. You’d expect to have most of them fail, but the one good one makes up for it.

However in this case it isn’t people throwing some money at startups. It’s large companies like Microsoft throwing trillions into this new tech. And not just the one company looking for a little niche to fill, all of them are all in, flooding the market with random shit.

Uber and Spotify are maybe not the best examples to use, although they are examples of people throwing away money in hopes of some sort of payoff (even though they both made a small profit recently, but nowhere near digging themselves out of the hole). They are however problematic in the way they operate. Uber’s whole deal is exploiting workers, turning employees into contractors just to exploit them. And also skirting regulations around taxis for the most part. They have been found to be illegal in a lot of civilised countries and had to change the way they do business there, limit their services or not operate in those countries at all. Spotify is music and the music industry is a whole thing I won’t get into.

The current AI bubble isn’t comparable to venture capital investing in some startups. It’s more comparable to the dotcom bubble, where the industry is perceived to move in a certain direction. Either companies invest heavily and get with the times, or they die. And smart investors put their money in anything with the new tech, since that’s where the money is going to be made. Back then the new tech was the internet, now the new tech is AI. We found out the hard way, it was total BS. The internet wasn’t the infinite money glitch people thought it was and we all paid the price.

However the scale of that bubble was small as compared to this new AI bubble. And the internet was absolutely a trans-formative technology, changing the way we work and live forever. It’s too early to say if this LLM based “AI” technology will do the same, but I doubt it. The amount of BS thrown around these days is too high. As someone with a somewhat good grasp of how LLMs actually work on a fundamental level, the promised made aren’t backed up by facts. And the amount of money being put into this aren’t near any even optimistic payoff in the future.

If you want to throw in a simple, over simplified example: This AI boom is more like people throwing money at Theranos than anything else.

Not simply operating at a loss, absolutely dumping their prices giving away their products for almost nothing to gain market share. They are burning money at an impressive rate, just for some imaginary payoff in the future.

There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.

This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.

With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.

This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.

Because they operate on a very outdated understanding of how the world works. In their mind they own the games, they made them after all. The people “buying” the games don’t really buy them, they just get a copy of the software and the license to use that copy. That license is limited in what you can and can’t do. You can play them by yourself in your own home. You can even play with other people if they are physically in your own home. However if you want to do anything beyond that, it’s outside of the license and thus not allowed. If you want to put on an event featuring their games, you need to apply for a license to do so and probably pay Nintendo for that license. Nintendo wants to limit the license even further lately, limiting playing inside your own home to their rules and limiting resale of the game (license).

This may sound crazy, and it is, however this is very much how music still works. And how movies and TV series used to work, and partly still do. It’s a limited license for enjoying the media in your own home only. Technically when you throw a party, you would have to apply for a license to play the music you already own. When money is involved, like a bigger event and you don’t play by their rules, expect to get sued. This is why the entertainment industry is so huge and the people in the top make so much money.

In the West we’ve accepted this doesn’t apply to video games for the most part. Copying the game is a no-go, but using a game for entertainment purposes is allowed. When a streamer plays a game, they add enough of their own value for it not to be considered a violation. Even at large events, it’s usually allowed. Although depending on the context, often license deals are made for the really big events.

There’s gray areas as well, such as game modding or using the assets of a game to create a new game. This is also usually accepted, with services like Steam activily supporting mods and such. Most game devs like it when a community forms around their games and support mods. But not Nintendo, they hate this. They go after anyone doing this. Famously almost destroying the careers of people playing modded Nintendo games for entertainment. (Especially SMW romhacks). And people have to go through all sorts of hoops not to attract the eye of Nintendo (like how Ship of Harkinian does things). Another gray area is music in video games, usually that music has a rather open license. But not always and services like Twitch have made deals with the music industry in order to keep existing. That means upholding things like DMCA and muting or even disabling videos which contain copyrighted music. One recent example of this is Death Stranding, which contains so much copyrighted music it’s problematic for everyone involved.

It has taken a very long time for the music industry to get around to the concept of streaming music. And even then the license is super limited and people don’t own the music they pay for. Same for movies, TV series and other media. It has made them rich for decades, why give that up? Nintendo has always had the same mindset when it comes to video games and aren’t going to change.

Personally I don’t know why we put up with the BS system for music and other media. Especially the length of time for copyright these days. But large companies like Disney have so much power, it isn’t going to change quickly. I feel the only reason we have music streaming at all is because the piracy got so bad they had to. And even then they fought it hard, demanding tens of thousands of dollars from little Timmy who downloaded a Metallica song.

I don’t know, most experimental technologies aren’t allowed to be tested in public till they are good and well ready. This whole move fast break often thing seems like a REALLY bad idea for something like cars on public roads.

And the war on drugs was extremely effective and didn’t cause any bad things at all!

I think they meant people don’t know how these models work in practice. On a theoretical level they are well understood. But in practice they behave in a chaotic way (chaotic in the math sense of the word). A small change in the input can lead to wild swings in the output. So when people want to change the way the models acts by changing the system prompt, it’s basically impossible to say what change should be made to achieve the desired outcome. And often such a change doesn’t even exist, only something that’s close enough is possible. So they have to resort to trial and error, trying to tweak things like the system prompt and seeing what happens.

Yeah these are the dicks that cried terrorism when Tesla was “attacked”

Oi Ue, it’s fooking diabolical mate. Omelander topped me wife and now more ads on the tele, diabolical.

You are right in how wasteful it is, especially since it turned out a lot of those satellites don’t even make it to 4 years.

However there is zero risk of space trash with Starlink. They orbit so low, it’s basically within the atmosphere still. They need to constantly boost themselves, otherwise they fall down and burn up. So these satellites are coming down within years all on their own, even without any controlled disposal.

It’s insanely wasteful, but it keeps SpaceX in business launching every week, which is kind of the point. But at least there isn’t a Kessler syndrome waiting to happen.

Thanks for the suggestion. It’s my laptop from work, I have zero say in what software it runs, I don’t even have admin rights on it. None of my personal stuff runs Windows. But it might help other people on their own machines.

Please let them also remove all the XBox nonsense. The other day my laptop from work that runs Windows 11 Pro gave a big ass prompt if I didn’t want to try XBox Game Pass with the new Doom game. It’s basically an ad for games on a Pro machine, ridiculous.

Ah you are from the US? No then it probably won’t be available. The US is very slow to make changes in retail. You only recently got those digital price tags that update constantly, we’ve had those for 10 years or so. In Europe the hand scanner or app self scan thing is very common.

Yup, that’s the one.

I think where I live it’s a company that offers the whole thing white label to supermarket and other shops. The systems are very similar across a bunch of different stores, but the branding is specific to the store. So their logo, their colors. Not just on all the UIs (both the scanner and the checkout), but also the physical hardware colors.

The hand scanners all run Android, the other day I got one that said Google Play Services had crashed. The scanner itself is probably made by Zebra and then customized by the company providing the scan and checkout solution.

It has become super common around here, to the point where I’m annoyed when it isn’t an option and I have to use the self-checkout where you need to scan at the checkout.

No, the hand scanners aren’t connected to the kiosks. They are at the entrance, you pick them up, scan all you want to buy. Then at checkout you place the scanner into a kiosk, it knows what you bought and you can checkout as usual. Every once in a while a store employee takes the scanners and puts them into the holders in the entrance. Depending on the size of the store there can be up to a hundred of these scanners available.

Other stores do the same, except your phone is the scanner with an app you can download. It works basically the same way. Most stores that offer the app also offer the hand scanners, which I prefer.

For me personally, the self checkout is just a way better solution to the problem. It’s for me much faster and more efficient. It’s also easier for the store itself. The best kind of self checkout for me is where you can scan everything with a hand scanner or app whilst shopping. Then just pay at the self checkout and walk out. That way I just put the stuff in my bag directly, instead of from the shelf into the basket or cart. Then from the cart to the checkout and then from the checkout into my bag. It also spreads out the action of scanning the products, which means avoiding a slow and repetitive task scanning it all in 1 go. I’m also not blocking a checkout whilst scanning. I hate it when stores that offer the hand scanner have people scanning a whole cart full of stuff at the checkout. And then bagging it of course, which blocks a checkout for ages. Just go to the regular checkout if you want to do that, the cashier is faster than you are and you can focus on bagging exclusively.

However the lack of human contact is an issue. I’ve seen a lot of stores that offer self checkout recently make one or two lines available for chatting. It’s just the regular oldskool cashier, but they are relaxed about it and chat with the customer. This means people in a hurry or that don’t need contact right then can go fast through the self checkout. And people who like to chat can use the chatty checkout with a good old human being.

This for me is the best way to apply new tech, all of the benefits for all parties involved and hopefully none of the downsides.