Clearly, climate change is on the rise. It is absolutely a fair price to pay for all the advancement. For almost all of history, we were dying under 30 years, we are close to triple that thanks to technology and all signs point to lifespan increasing. For pandemics, even if we outrageously compare just the number of deaths, not even percentages as we should, many pandemics of the distant past were way way worse than the only one almost all of us have seen in our lifetimes.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

I know you have it in your head that technology is evil or whatever, but that falls flat when you look up the numbers you are so afraid of. You are like a teenager complaining about how awful their parents are when literally everything you love and enjoy has come directly from them. I would not be surprised in the least if you are a literal teenager with how little you have heard about history.

It is honestly amazing how little you know of history. We literally had over 100 weeks with more casualties than the entire Russian and isreali wars combined back in ww2. And somehow you think wars are now worse. It’s honestly mind boggling.

Also, it is absolutely undeniable that murder is way down. You haven’t looked, and you can’t imagine how far off you are. The same for pandemics, it’s not even comparable. You are arguing that dinosaurs are smaller than most mice and it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad that you are so sure of yourself and so completely wrong about something you refuse to research. It is literally so easy to quickly look up and find you are wrong.

I recommend reading “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker. People love to complain about how much worse quality of life has gotten for people, but when actually pressed for specific ways it has gotten worse, they are almost always arguing from a complete ignorance of history. Lifespan is much longer, healthspan is much longer, rapes are way down, murders are way down, torture is way down, dying in childbirth is way down, incest is way fown, pedophilia is way down, starvation is way down, dying from wild animals is way down, wars are way down. Problems now for lots of the world are things like people bickering over who gets to be next to who when they pee and who called a “he” a “she”.

This idea that the world is way worse than it used to be is absurd and just shines a massive light on how popular it has gotten to selfish brats completely oblivious of where we came from.

Yeah, technological progress has historically made life worse for humans.

There is a reason why you point to examples from years ago, that’s because that is where you are still stuck.

Yesterday’s AI is today’s normal technology, this is just what keeps happening. Some people just keep forgetting how rapidly things are changing.

You’ll join this “cult” once the masses do, just like you have been doing all along. Some of us are just out here a little bit in the future. You will be one of us when you think it becomes cool, and then you will self-righteously act like you were one of us all along. That’s just what weak-minded followers do. They try to seem like they knew all along where the world was headed without ever trying to look ahead and ridiculing anyone who does.

Every word in every language changes over time. The term AI changing is the absolute normal. It’s not some mark against it.

Current llms are phenomenally beneficial for some things. Millions of developers have had their entire careers completely changed. Teachers are able to grade work in 10% of the time. Children through to college students and anyone interested in learning have infinitely patient tutors on demand 24 hours a day. The fact that you are completely clueless about what is going on doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean it isn’t happening. It just means that you not only feel like you are “beyond learning”, it also means that you don’t even have people in your life that are still interested in personal growth, or you are too shallow to have conversations with anyone who is.

This is just beginning. The more you cling to being in denial of progress, the further you will get behind. You are denying any mode of transportation other than horses even exists, while people are routinely flying around the world. It most likely won’t be too long until your mindset is widely accepted as a mental disorder.

You are just ignorant of the history and evolution of the term “AI”. It’s easy for anyone to learn about it’s history, your point of view is just one of ignorance of the past.

I use ai when I use search engines. This makes the search engines better. I also use ai when I get spotify suggestions. I use ai when I use autocorrect. I use ai without even realizing I’m using ai and the ai improves from it, and I and many other people get an improved quality of life from it, that’s why nearly everyone uses it just like I do.

So, @givesomefucks , do you also regularly use ai that improves from from your usage? Or are you not a hypocrite who thinks there is something morally bad about specific ais that you don’t like while doing exactly what you claim to be against with other ais? How are your moral lines drawn?

İ live in the 2nd world and am often in the third. You must have either been in a pretty unique place, or you are projecting your experience from long ago onto the current state of things. You just need to revisit and update your world view to modern times.

Been using it for decades, never an issue for me. What in the world are you trying to download over there??

Climate change is a separate issue.

It would be fantastic if people being abused by corrupt politicians and currencies was niche! It’s not though, there are hundreds of millions of people struggling with it. Billions depending on how you count it. It is a disease of the 1st world to be unable to accept that not everyone has the same privileges they enjoy. Human beings are literally starving to death and dying decades early due to poverty, Bitcoin is literally keeping them alive. Spoiled brats want them to die because they saw a headline that tells them to parrot that Bitcoin is bad. Where is your outrage over Christmas lights? How about video games? These things don’t save lives and transform existences like safe money does.

Nearly everyone who has bought Bitcoin and held are up, it has outperformed every stock, every currency, every investment on large enough time scales. Give me a volatile currency that goes up in value over volatile currencies that utterly collapse. Where is the outrage over the lira? Or any other currency that is down to 5% of itself that people are “supposed” to hold according to you?

There is a very good reason that you don’t have answers to these. It is because all you know on the issue is that you are not supposed to look to deeply and you’re supposed to mindlessly repeat that Bitcoin is bad without having any idea why. You are allowed to research, you are allowed to make your own decisions, you are allowed to talk to people in the 2nd and 3ed worlds. You are allowed to travel to these places and talk to people. Nobody forces you to repeat their BS, you just have to decide that you want to learn and then put in some effort.

I just looked it up, it looks like it is the a difference of 35% to 80% in the developed world.

Imagine this, you are forced to hold your wealth in corrupt government run banks. They often print tons of it for themselves, criminals are printing it, the government can seize it from anyone they want. You can try to store it at home, yourself, or you can give it to the banks. Now there is a third option, store it as Bitcoin. No need for risking it under your bed or with the corrupt banker politicians, and on top of those be victims to their inflation. Sure, your bank probably doesn’t often seize your money, and your currency probably isn’t rapidly devaluing even compared to the dollar, but if it was then you would probably think the energy is worth it.

That’s why you stick with Bitcoin instead of running after whatever flashy new super duper coin that assholes trick fools into buying.

It takes living with a broken system to understand the fix for it. There are millions of people who have been saved by Bitcoin and the freedom that it brings, they are just mainly in the 2nd and 3rd worlds, so to many people they basically don’t exist.

I don’t see why people would use a credit card to pay for a vpn, it seems like it would totally defeat the purpose. I guess if you get ahold of an anonymous card then it would be fine, but using a card in your name to pay for an anonymous service just seems wacky to me.

I’m curious, does anyone here pay for their vpn with something thatvis in their name? If so, why?

What could they even give? They don’t even ask for an email, and they claim to run everything you browse as RAM that never gets held or recorded.

Most positive use cases are agent-based and the average user doesn’t have access to good agent-based systems yet because it requires a bit of willingness to do some “coding”. This will soon not be the case though. I can give my crew of AI agents a mission, for example, “find all the papers on baby owl vocalizations and make 10 different charts of the frequency range relative to their average size after each of their first 10 weeks of life”, and come back an hour later and have something that would have been 100 hours for a grad student just last year. Right now I have to wait an hour or so, soon it will be instant.

The real usefulness of these agents today is enormous, it is just outside of the view of many average people because their normal lives don’t require this kind of power.

Yeah, it’s trajectory thing. Most people see the one-shot responses of something like the chatgpt’s current web interface on openai’s website and they think that’s where we are at. It isn’t though, the cutting edge of just what is currently openly available to people is things like CrewAI or Autogen using agents powered by things like Claude Opus or Llama 3, and maybe the latest gpt4 update.

When you use agents you don’t have to baby every response, the agents can run code, test code, check latest information on the internet, and more. This way you can give a complex instruction, let it run and come back to a finished product.

I say it is a trajectory thing because when you compare what was cutting-edge just 1 year ago, basically one-shot gpt3.5 to an agent network with today’s latest models, the difference is stark, and when you go a couple years before that to gpt2, it is way beyond stark. When you go a step further and realise that there is lots of custom hardware being built(basically llm ASICs-traditionally a ~10,000x speedup over general use gpus), you can see that soon having instant agent based responses will be the norm.

All this compounds when you consider that we have not hit a plateau and that we are still seeing that better datasets, and more compute, are still producing better models. Not to mention that other architectures, like state-based Mamba, are making remarkable achievements with very little compute so far. We have no idea how powerful thinks like Mamba would be if they were given the datasets and training that the current popular models are being given.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. About a month ago, I would have said that Suno was clearly leading in AI music generation, but since then, Udio has definitely taken the lead. I can’t imagine where things will be by the end of the year, let alone the end of the decade. This is why it’s so crazy to me when people look at generative AI and act like it’s no big deal and just a passing fad or whatever. They have no idea that there is a tsunami crashing down on us all and they always seem to be the ones that bill themselves as the weather experts who have it all figured out. Nobody knows the implications of this, but it definelty isn’t an inconsequential tech.