Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
As far as I'm concerned the generative AI that we see in chatbots has no goal associated with it: it just exists for no purpose at all. In contrast to google translate or other translation apps (which BTW still use machine learning algorithms) have a far more practical use to it as being a resource to translate other languages in real-time. I don't care what companies call it (if it's a tool or not) at the moment its a big fucking turd that AI companies are trying to force feed down our fucking mouth.
You also see this tech slop happening historically in the evolution of search engines. Way before we had recommendation algorithms in most modern search engines. A search engine was basically a database where the user had to thoughtfully word its queries to get good search results, then came the recommendation algorithm and I could only imagine no one, literally no one, cared about it since we could already do the things this algorithm offered to solve. Still, however, it was pushed, and sooner than later integrated into most popular search engines. Now you see the same thing happening with generative AI...
The purpose of generative AI, much like the recommendation algorithm is solving nothing hence the analogy "its just a big fucking turd" is what I'm trying to persuade here: We could already do the things it offered to solve. If you can see the pattern, its just this downward spiraling affect. It appeals to anti intellectuals (which is most of the US at this point) and google and other major companies are making record profit by selling user data to brokers: its a win for both parties.
it creates perceived shareholder value of an emerging market. that is it's purpose.
it's utility is not for the end-user. it's something for shareholders to invest in, and companies to push in an attempt to generate shareholder interest. It's to raise the stock-price.
And like all speculative assets... nobody will care about the returns on it, until they do. And once those returns don't materialize... poof goes the market.
Just like they did with all the speculative investment bubbles based on insane theories.
This is how I felt about it a year ago. But it has gotten so much better since then. It automates a lot of time consuming tasks for me now. I mean I've probably only saved 100 hours using it this year but the number is going up rapidly. It's 100 more than it saved me last year.
Switching to Linux a few years ago gave me (at last part of) that feeling back
I've been using Linux steadily for the last 30 years, and yes it's still great. But doesn't really fill the niche that AI does.
Same!! Except it's been about 6 months for me :)
Computers can and still do all that, you just need some mental discipline to avoid the cognitive equivalent of fast food being forced into your attention via AI slop and social media demagogues over corporate owned messaging systems.
But how many people are actually doing that? I reckon most people (myself included) don't realise the extents of influence social media and other media outlets have on them, let alone act on that knowledge.
The LLM is absolutely not doing anything thinking for you. It's can, at best surface someone else's thinking based on a prompt.
Anyone that confuses what these things do with thinking is on a path towards psychosis.
Every 4 hours spent talking to one of these things is indistinguishable from talking to oneselves for 40 hours. It amplifies one's inner thoughts in ways that prevoisly only a schizophrenic was able to enjoy.
It absolutely can replace hours of research or programming or drawing with a quick prompt. It does this for me often, and as of the latest Gemini pretty much is always right too.
None of that is it doing the thinking for you.
LLMs can be used as a research tool but require a human apply critical thinking to the output to be useful.
It definitely replaced a lot of thinking with vibe coding. And research also requires thinking. Maybe not super intense thought, but it's thought all the same. Artists would also be pretty annoyed to hear that they are doing a brainless activity.
Literally not thinking.
Artists would also be pretty annoyed to hear that they are doing a brainless activity.
I see you lack critical thinking skills so I understand the confusion. Unfortunately, I can't fix stupid.
I can see you're a right cunt who can't admit he's wrong. Can't fix that.
You failed to prove your assertions.
Ask an LLM it will tell you it's not capable of thinking, it's approximating thinking.
Librarian here, can confirm.
I started my Master's in Library and Information Science in 2010. We were told not to worry about the internet making us obsolete because we would be needed to teach information literacy.
Information literacy turned out to be something people didn't want. They wanted to be told what to think, not taught skills to think for themselves.
It's been the single greatest and most expensive disappointment of my life.
How does one go about learning information literacy?
classes in philosophy, literature, politics, and digital media. typically.
you know, those evil humanities that are destroying society... because they don't produce 'value'.
Rhetoric is a big one too, not just to use but to be able to identify when it's being used to manipulate you
They wanted to be told what to think, not taught skills to think for themselves.
This must be one of the wisest statements I ever read on the internet.
Needing a masters for $18/hr sucks too.
Any good thing will inevitably be corrupted by capitalism, because that is what capitalism does. It is a cancer, and it will consume everything and us all in the process.
I don't know if it was in Strauss' "Accelerando" that humanity told an AI to solve some complex problem at any cost, and the AI promptly turned all the matter in the solar system into a supercomputer capable of solving it.
That's capitalism in a nutshell: "do profit" is the only imperative, and it will destroy everything, just like a cancer is predicated upon "do growth", forever, at any cost, regardless of whether the host organism dies.
Thank you...
Apparently, I've never ever considered any LLM serious, convenient, appropriate, similar to Markov's chain, though those differ, and I disable and uninstall absolutely everything that is LLM related, or alters human effortful works, including programming suggestions, searching, and in any kind of adequate research, in the personal life or everywhere possible since 2021 (and some in 2023), where I had a few months of experimenting with those - enough to consider the time I still have to continue actually learning, discovering, and staying social as much as I can...
Please... Please, in context of such education... instead of investing your priceless, precious, finite life time... into such empty void as unknown output of unknown LLM from unknown dataset of unknown artists... developers... people... Please, instead, please consider to take your time... and try to see the love in someone's else works, courses, videos, books, articles, schemes, tables, drawings... who would be only heartfelt delighted to know... to know that someone else like you, like themselves... were reaching out for their experience they were gaining for decades and worked hard to prepare it for someone out there... in search... for someone who wishes and tries to create something, to improve the world... to reach for an achievement... to treasure a goal... to invent a miracle...
Since isn't the following the miraculous purpose to live and contribute to the infinite world? To gain experience by confident, adequate effort, to work towards achievements, to stay responsible as a human, to stay alive... Which is at least: personal contributions published, social interactions, actually felt and considered facts organized by accountable people, self-confidence and miraculous time you invest into learning the human experience published in marvelous works of books, articles, videos, forums, chats - the ineffable magnificence...
There's use for LLM, including pentesting, medicine and analyzing of unknown and random for the sake of random in scopes of "black-box", for example, sure, but overly rarely and the fear of malformed facts, unknown sources, disturbed art... will always shadow any presence of such generative technologies, I believe... Yet, shouldn't technology support you, your mind (i.e. not atrophy it but train and discipline it), your creativity, your ideas, your... existence?
Since isn't learning from someone else experience is actually important...
Isn't it ineffably magnificent to discover someone's hard work...
Isn't the process of learning and discovering actually fun!
Isn't the knowledge that you unique carry valuable...
What is the fun, the purpose, otherwise...?
Please consider your confidence, skills, mind, and... your precious time...
"If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product." ~ Tristan Harris
"Machines should work; people should think." ~ IBM Pollyanna Principle
AI isn't the only thing you can use a computer for now. If you ignore AI and corporate software, there's loads of mind expanding activities in computing.
Take a look at what you can self host with commodity hardware (barring the insane RAM prices right now).
With AI, now it does the thinking for you [...]
No, it doesn't. It's just mimikry. Autocomplete on steroids.
Have you met many people?
Most people's entire lives are a form of autocomplete.
Obvious non-argument is obvios.
My father is convinced that humans and dinosaurs coexisted and told me that ai proved that to him. So.. people do let it think for them.
So he let's the "AI" do the hallucinating for him.
Yep lol.
I don't think AI is taking jobs, I think dumbass execs use it as an excuse to fire people though.
No its apart of the companies business strategy. These tech companies fire an unprecedented amount of employees (primarily from the mass hiring during 2020) make a post they fired these employees because of ai improvements, see their stock price rise ultimately inflating it and creating an economic bubble, and rinse and repeat with the next wave of potential hires who are sucking their employers dick a little to hard.
It's unethical, and it violates any and all job security and I don't want to be apart of that toxic workspace. Its ironic im saying this because a few years ago if I got a job at Google I would say "fuck yea mother fucker count me in" and now I just don't want to work for them. There are far better companies doing interesting and valuable work to benefit society than these hipster douche bags.
Yep, its definitely gotten worse. Thats why I just live as if its 2005 in my house xD