Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem

Idk if I’d point at a supercomputer system and suggest it was constructed “without much problem”. Cray has significantly lagged the computer market as a whole.

the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

Again, I would not consider anything in the LLM marketplace particularly cheap. Seems like they’re losing money rapidly.

there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries

And loads more of its ineffectual nature and wastefulness.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link

You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.

One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine

Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn’t pay for the service.

Google Whiteboard could have been better. Hell, I can think of a dozen apps in the Google graveyard that could have been better.

But Discord still exists and they don’t, so…

The NSA agent assigned to monitor me has a character on my Foundry instance.

Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.

crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.

Crypto has a very real niche use for money laundering that it does exceptionally well.

AI does not appear to do anything significantly more effectively than a Google search circa 2018.

But neither can justify a multi billion dollar market cap on these terms.

The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.

Voice actors simply don’t cost that much money. Procedural world building has existed for decades, but it’s generally recognized as lackluster beside bespoke design and development.

These tools let you build bad digital experiences quickly.

For logistics and finance, a lot of what you’re exploring is solved with the technology that underpins AI (modern graph theory). But LLMs don’t get you that. They’re an extraneous layer that takes enormous resources to compile and offers very little new value.

would rather go to local retailers that are increasing Chinese goods for a 150% profit, than Amazon and pay 300%

A lot of the local retailors are going out of business in my area. And those that exist are impossible to get into and out of, due to the fixation on car culture. The Galleria is just a traffic jam that spans multiple city blocks.

The thing that keeps me at Amazon, rather than Target, is purely the time visit of shopping versus shipping.

The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.

The DotCom bubble was built around the idea of online retail outpacing traditional retail far faster than it did, in fact. But it was, at its essence, a system of digital book keeping. Book your orders, manage your inventory, and direct your shipping via a more advanced and interconnected set of digital tools.

The fundamentals of the business - production, shipping, warehousing, distribution, the mathematical process of accounting - didn’t change meaningfully from the days of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. Online was simply a new means of marketing. It worked well, but not nearly as well as was predicted. What Amazon did to achieve hegemony was to run losses for ten years, while making up the balance as a government sponsored series of data centers (re: AWS) and capitalize on discount bulk shipping through the USPS before accruing enough physical capital to supplant even the big box retailers. The digital front-end was always a loss-leader. Nobody is actually turning a profit on Amazon Prime. It’s just a hook to get you into the greater Amazon ecosystem.

Pivot to AI, and you’ve got to ask… what are we actually improving on? It’s not a front-end. It’s not a data-service that anyone benefits from. It is hemorrhaging billions of dollars just at OpenAI alone (one reason why it was incorporated as a Non-Profit to begin with - THERE WAS NO PROFIT). Maybe you can leverage this clunky behemoth into… low-cost mass media production? But its also extremely low-rent production, in an industry where - once again - marketing and advertisement are what command the revenue you can generate on a finished product. Maybe you can use it to optimize some industrial process? But it seems that every AI needs a bunch of human babysitters to clean up all the shit is leaves. Maybe you can get those robo-taxis at long last? I wouldn’t hold my breath, but hey, maybe?!

Maybe you can argue that AI provides some kind of hook to drive retail traffic into a more traditional economic model. But I’m still waiting to see what that is. After that, I’m looking at AI in the same way I’m looking at Crypto or VR. Just a gimmick that’s scaring more people off than it drags in.

I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services

The great thing about bots is that they can listen to every song on file, 24/7/365, and you can spin up as many of them as you like. 12 million is nothing.

Empty Internet Theory but its just the “Recommended For You” stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.

Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.

But ten years later, we’re right back to a website that’s indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The “put ads everywhere to maximize revenue” folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg’s genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

There are far better models out

I’ve heard this refrain a few times. Still waiting for it to pan out.

Android does the same shit, and I hate it.

My OnePlus has been solid for the last five years. Idk about the Pixel, though.

Because as a consumer, I’m now quite hesitant to buy a thing without knowing if it’s going to be properly supported.

The end-game is to have every consumer appliance operate with a shelf-life. Yeah, you’ll have older models that don’t do this, but they will become increasingly rare (and, consequentially, expensive) while the mass produced disposables will saturate the market.

Basically, that experience is why I’m no longer willing to buy things that wholly depend on outside servers

What do you do when this becomes “Everything”?

Apple Mindset. I gave up on the iPhone after v3 bricked within a month of the v4 release.

What? Like some kind of primitive savage?

Are we talking 10% worse and 95% cheaper? Or 50% worse and 10% cheaper? Or 90% worse and 95% cheaper?

Because that last one is good enough for fiscal conservatives. Hell, the second one is good enough for fiscal conservatives.

It’s also pretty easy to tell the difference IMO.

Sounds like something a bot would say.