https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Nope, 65th place, slightly behind the US and the country of old men: Albania.

It’s the same in China.

The best argument against Rand is just listening to her for 5min.

Very rarely do you see such a mixture of arrogance, self-righteousness and utter lack of logic in a single person.

What’s really baffling to me is how completely irrelevant most ads are to me.

And I’m not saying “ads don’t work for me”, I get ads for products that I will never buy. I’m a man and YouTube recommends me tampons, lipstick and perfume. I also won’t buy a car anytime soon, yet I get tons of ads for cars.

Even in the mindset of an ad person, that can’t make sense. Sure, there is the off chance that I’ll buy lipstick for my girlfriend, but how likely is that and how much revenue will materialize from bombarding thousands of men with ads? That cannot be economically viable.

The actually infuriating part is, that we’re still paying for it. And the vendors as well. Only Google profits. If a company spends more on ads than necessary, their products will get more expensive, and those who buy their products will have to pay for it. So essentially I’m paying money for being advertised to, so Google can rake in billions.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.

No. Not at all. It’s about gradient descent, an optimization technique.

You could use it to auto reply and delete said mails.

Are there any numbers on how “efficient” those are? That is, how many destroyed Russian tanks will 4000 of them cause in practice?

I’d argue that the structure of reddit is almost perfect for that kind of nonsense.

You have a huge pool of users from a wide variety of backgrounds, but split into different communities that are simultaneously tightly knit and very open. It’s the perfect storm for the ackshuallys to get in contact with normal people, and thus feel absolutely superior.

Lemmy has the same structure, but simply not that many users.

No love for Einhell?

Could you please start a job at Nestle, Microsoft, BP, Raytheon? Either would be fine, but you need to weaponize your god level incompetence for a good cause.

I work at a company that does ai research.

You are so emotionally charged.

Let me rephrase that: “My salary depends on believing that AI is great, so I will not stop believing”

But sure, I’m emotionally charged. Not the guy who’s (poorly) defending his excuse for work.

So all your points are “nu-uh”.

Show me a single product that is even close to being worth the investment.

How can openAI ever recoup all the money?

This tech has already irreversibly changed coding, graphic design, marketing, writing, education,…

Where? Writing boilerplate articles without content for dying news outlets? “Coding” hardly changed. You know why? Because typing code is by far the least time consuming part of the work.

And where are all those great graphic design products? You mean those cool images of Trump riding a laser velociraptor?

You think companies would be investing hundreds of billions if there is nothing there?

Yes. Also, Metaverse, blockchain, etc. Ever heard of the dotcom bubble? Same pattern.

You would be wrong, as I work in AI research.

Hard doubt. Because the number one virtue of a scientist is to know the limitations of their subject. So either you’re not actually a researcher, or a really bad one.

Then where is it?

There’s hardly any application that’s more than a gimmick. ChatGPT is an incompetent liar, Sora and all the image/video generators produce mediocre crap the can’t reasonably controlled, chat bots keep making up stuff, etc. etc.

This tech is done. Why do you think there’s no progress from openai? The tech hit a ceiling. LLMs scaled to their current state very quickly, but each increment used exponentially more compute. There’s not enough compute, not enough training data to get better.

I’m pretty sure, you don’t understand how models work. It’s just magic for you. Just like blockchains, NFTs and VR. None of them changed the world in any meaningful way - just scams.

AI companies very fundamentally don’t make money, and have no way to become profitable in the near future. None of their tech has any business model. OpenAI relies 100% on Microsoft essentially donating azure instances.

Sure, AI has its applications, but not hundreds of billions worth of applications.

We’ll try again in world war three 🎵