this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.

A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.

If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Some hammers use enough energy to power a small country in order to show you a cake recipe without an entire backstory and 50 ads.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

Without ads for now

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Then it WAS worth it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

A cake recipe that instructs you to put non-toxic glue in it, and some small pebbles on top of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

This hammer does the same without using the energy of a small country https://theskullery.net

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

It's more like Jefferson's dumbwaiter, in that it was created by someone who verbally supported an egalitarian utopian vision of society, but the device itself is a scale model of an exploitative social system. At one station of the device, unpaid/low-paid labor operates out of view of the user, and then at the other station, the user enjoys an almost-magical appearance of an answer to their request.

No tool is "just a tool", after all. In that way, AI is like a hammer.

(That section of the video leans heavily on Do Artifacts Have Politics?, which is a pretty short and accessible essay. If you're not convinced that artifacts do have politics, and you don't want to watch the video, just read a few paragraphs of the essay.)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

Nope. It's more like that weird thing you brought at 3 am off of the Home Shopping Network because you were in a really bad place and thought it would make you feel better.

Now it's taking up space and you don't want to throw it out because that would mean you're a failure...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

It's not good at replacing your job, but good at convincing your boss that it can

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Basically what I said to people who asked me about my opinion on AI.

Exactly it was: "AI is a tool like a hammer. If you hit your finger, don't complain about the tool, but because you simply used it wrong."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Except AI is a pipe wrench pretending to be a hammer.

[–] MajorHavoc 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

True.

And I get where you're going, but pipe wrenches are still way too useful in too many situations. AI is a like a disc brake compressor hand tool, being sold as the solution to everything else.

When I mention how much I like it for compressing a disc brake, I feel like people look at me like I'm crazy for falling off the hype train.

Edit: And by people, I mean AI hype shill bots, probably.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yes, but your disk brake compressor tool could also be a hammer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Sometimes it is more like "AI is like a hammer in a world full of screws."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it's very difficult to use jello as a hammer

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Probably just as difficult as justifying the “AI” component of this light: https://amzn.eu/d/08yAcZpp

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Or called our mobile phones "cell phones", despite not being organic. Tsk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Except cell phones or cellular phones refer to the structure a mobile network is built on: a mesh of cell towers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

pretty sure that they were and still are called Bots though, atleast in the context of first person shooter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

look at the NBT tags for bats for example. it means artificial intelligence.

https://www.digminecraft.com/data_tags/bat.php

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

next thing you gonna say that boids are AI too...

just because Mojang decided to name that flag noAI doesn't mean it uses AI to govern its behavior.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Descriptivism advocates when AI smhingmyheads

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Software developer, here.

It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.

I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

LLMs are part of AI, which is a fairly large research domain of math/info, including machine learning among other. God, even linear regression can be classified as AI : that term is reeeally large

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I mean, I guess the way people use the term "AI" these days, sure, but we're really beating all specificity out of the term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

This is a domain research domain that contain statistic methods and knowledge modeling among other. That's not new, but the fact that this is marketed like that everywhere is new

AI is really not a specific term. You may refer as global AI, and I suspect that's what you refer to when you say AI?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

it's always been this broad, and that's a good thing. if you want to talk about AGI then say AGI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I know that they're "autocorrect on steroids" and what that means, I don't see how that makes it any less ai. I'm not saying that LLMs have that magic sauce that is needed to be considered truly "intelligent", I'm saying that ai doesn't need any magic sauce to be ai. the code controlling bats in Minecraft is called ai, and no one complained about that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn’t “learn” the way a neural network can. When you’re feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you’re making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you’re not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can’t learn.

But that's true of all (most ?) neural networks ? Are you saying Neural Networks are not AI and that they can't learn ?

NNs don't retrain while they are being used, they are trained once then they cannot learn new behaviour or correct existing behaviour. If you want to make them better you need to run them a bunch of times, collect and annotate good/bad runs, then re-train them from scratch (or fine-tune them) with this new data. Just like LLMs because LLMs are neural networks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.

Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.

It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.

Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.

Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

They are neural networks which are some of the oldest AI tech we have.

You can hate them, but they are by definition AI.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.

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