Solow Paradox

The main difference is that PCs actually worked as advertised, back in the day and the reason for this productivity dent wasn’t a false promise from the start. Before AI the main use of computers was of a deterministic nature, meaning you get a directly reproducible outcome depending on the input. AIs (especially: LLMs) are probabilistic in nature, the output cannot be guaranteed to be correct, and it turns out just bolting on guardrails on top of the system is a band-aid. In practice, instead of getting a general-purpose intelligent machine which is capable of making autonomous decisions, you get a word predictor with an unlimited amount of possible failure modes.

I’ve seen this so many times, long before AI was even a thing. It always goes like this:

• Let’s outsource department x to India because they are much cheaper
• Oh no, the results are terrible and we are actually paying more money to fix the damage done.
• Outsourcing was a mistake, let’s hire locally instead

What amazes me is that this is still happening to this day. I’ve seen a real world example of this just last week.

On top of that, AI has arrived and it gives the CEOs of the world an opportunity to make the same mistakes again. It’s mindblowingly stupid.

Note: I don’t blame Indian companies for offering their services. The blame entirely goes to greedy companies from the west who try squeeze out profit from income disparity and lower standards.

I knew I forgot something… Yeah dolphin is good, but it has some questionable UI design decisions too. For example I always have trouble finding the quick filter instead of the find menu. It’s hidden somewhere and it does not persist. And the find menu itself is such a mess that it’s easier to use find . -iname *whatever* on the command line. But maybe that’s just me and my way of thinking.

Hm never thought about it, but now that you mention it, I feel the same. Mostly using non-KDE apps with a few exceptions like Spectacle and Konsole

Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.

Yeah unfortunately there are some actors on Lemmy who post propaganda pieces or at least heavily opinionated stuff as “news”. I’d count everything from rawstory or dropsite news as such, for example

I don’t have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several “rollouts” in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.

First of all, gather information about why data centers are bad for communities yourself. You need a clear understanding of what this topic is about if you want to be able to communicate these facts clearly. Otherwise anyone can discredit your concerns with a few questions you have no answer to. Secondly, find allies instead of trying to accomplish this on your own. Find local politicians who are likely to be on your side and contact them. Is there something like a regular town hall meeting? Environmental groups? Unions? You could present something there to find people willing to help. You need to amplify your voice to be heard.

Why is this even considered newsworthy? A known propaganda outlet posts lies on a disinformation platform owned by a fascist billionaire. shocked pikachu and stuff.

True. It’s also a good idea to check for Linux compatibility before buying hardware. That’s an annoying extra step to do, and makes it harder for new users. But on the other hand, there are now more vendors including this info on their own, and a lot of hardware is pretty much standardized (like USB HID devices etc).

The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.

I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.

Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.

Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.

Oh, I meant the ping pong loop of the GitHub bot and it was pure technical nitpicking. But since you’re asking, the definition of recursion is a function calling itself. I find it difficult thinking about capitalism as a single function. For me it looks more like running an infinite loop on finite resources. But applying a technical term as a metaphor leaves a lot of room for interpretation, so there is no right or wrong

Funny but I have an itch to note that this is a simple infinite loop, not a recursion.

As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.

You might have been unlucky. I never had serious installation issues when installing Ubuntu on a lot of different computers in the past five years. Just started the installer, click next a few times and reboot into the new installation. It used to be some tinkering required to get everything to work, but apart from having to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver in a GUI (and having to search for it) everything else just worked. My last Windows install however was a shitshow. Took ages and I had to disable a ton of surveillance stuff. On top of that I had to go through some weird hoops to keep the thing from requiring me to create a Microsoft account. What distro did you use? I guess some are more difficult than others

Is the image not AI generated? With all the odd swastikas and stuff?

Edit: Look at the hands of the Nazi dude on the right. Case closed

Using AI for good. I like it.

You can check the user’s post history. It’s quite evident

Is this “Germany” you are talking about in the room with us right now? Anti-EU sentiments are being amplified by right-wing populists. That’s all there is to know. There is no anti-EU sentiment among the democratic parties. Even right-leaning CDU party members know this would weaken Germany’s position in the world. Germany is an export-heavy economy and their military force is a joke (by design). Losing EU trade benefits and weakening ties to the EU allies would be extremely unwise.

“in the pockets of the EU” is a funny thing to say when Hungary is a member of the EU.