You just sparked in my head something that I couldn’t quite summarize previously: GenAI is like someone who knows a lot of trivia or can do a cool party trick - it’s really impressive, but not really useful.

I’m genuinely amazed at many of the things generative AI can do. The fact that a computer can spit out text on a subject that sounds coherent is kind of amazing, and the fact that it can synthesize images based on a prompt is honestly mind-blowing to me. The quality of that generated content isn’t that impressive compared to human authored works, but the fact that a computer can do it at all is bonkers to me.

That said, it doesn’t really make my life better in any way. It’s barely helpful to me in the tasks that it actually does well on, and it wastes my time on prevarications that I spend more time double checking than if I’d just done it myself in the first place. Even worse, it takes an enormous amount of energy and other resources, it’s being used to diminish human labor, and we’ve blown through massive amounts of financial capital that could have been used to actually improve people’s lives in a substantial way.

The only use case that I can think of for an LLM that I would really want and wouldn’t cause more problems than it solves is making a smart home voice assistant more helpful. Translating my plain language commands into the specific syntax that my smart home would recognize is helpful to me because I wouldn’t have to remember the specific verbal command and taxonomy of devices to accomplish some task, and if it screwed up it’s easily noticeable and fixable. And I can run that locally and don’t require a half a trillion dollars spent on data centers and spiking energy prices to accomplish that.

Like another commenter, my ADHD interest in novelty helps offset the anxiety from the routine break. In my case I feel more anxiety about losing a routine that I’ve struggled to maintain (thanks again to the ADHD), which has happened to me multiple times this year thanks to random health issues that were outside of my control.

That said, I have experienced anxiety about using a hotel gym because I’ve struggled to substitute different exercises to accommodate different equipment. I hate having to share equipment with other people in the hotel gym (versus using my own equipment in my basement.

One strategy I’ve considered is developing (but haven’t executed on, so take with a grain of salt) is a go-to bodyweight routine. That way I don’t have to worry about what equipment is or is not available, or the social stress of finding other people in the gym; I can just do a predetermined set of bodyweight exercises alone in my hotel room. It’s still a break in my routine because it’s a different set of exercises in a different environment, but at least I can mentally prepare myself for something that I’ve pre-prepared as a substitute.

Alternatively, I’ve accepted that days when I’m stuck in a hotel it’s going to be different and since my struggle is maintaining a stable routine of working out on a schedule, I’ve defaulted to using a treadmill for some set period of time. It’s not the same workout or feeling, but I can usually depend on any exercise room at the very least having a treadmill that I can use.

Feels like this is the same logic that is used to ban sex education - they shouldn’t have sex until marriage so you shouldn’t teach them about it. I accept that kids will have access to fully loaded genitals, so I want them to understand and respect the consequences and to be able to act responsibly.

As much as I would like firearm access to be restricted and regulated, I accept that in the world we live in they’re not going anywhere, anytime soon. I also think alcohol is deadly, both for the consumer and the people around them, but I’d rather teach my kid to drink responsibly than send them off to college unprepared; I’ve seen too many sheltered kids go fucking crazy once they’re out from their parent’s thumb.

I’ve always felt that harm reduction was an admirable thing. Accept and work with human nature instead of against it. I don’t want people shooting up heroin, but I support giving away free, clean needles to prevent even worse outcomes. Doesn’t mean I endorse or encourage the activity.

Just a reminder that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe in charge of beating the Nazis and other fascists was later the Republican President of the United States, among whose goals was preventing the spread of communism. You don’t need to be leftist to hate fascists.

And yet it’s less infuriating than the people who are directly affected and still engage in cognitive dissonance in order to continue to believe that their vote was a good thing and that this is just the price they gotta pay to ensure “those people” don’t take advantage of them.

I totally get the frustration from watching people talk past each other, neither side taking anything positive away from the exchange, arguing for the sake of arguing or a misplaced desire to “own” the other one. It’s exhausting and there’s lots of times I want to do exactly what you did, so I truly do understand.

No hard feelings, and I really do appreciate the apology. We all get heated sometimes… it’s easy to do on the internet, especially when text makes it easy to misinterpret tone.

It’s nice to end things on a positive note and on the same page - as I said, I’m a consensus builder. For what it’s worth, you were absolutely right that taking your emotion out of your argument and just being sincere works, at least when someone is approaching things in good faith, which I believe we both were.

So all of this tone policing because I wanted to say RTFM, decided that the initialism didn’t work with RTFA and spelled it out instead, and failed to drop the superfluous “fucking”, thereby making it sound overly harsh. I thought since “fucking” was modifying “article” that the profanity wasn’t directed at the commenter, but still expressed some exasperation on my part.

You’re right, I should have dropped the “fucking”. I was upset because I had just read the article about a topic that concerns me greatly, scanned the comments to see if there was any sense of solidarity that “hey, this is a problem we need to address” and got frustrated when the first comment I read was something that shot from the hip and completely ignored the entirety of the actual article. If not for that, I probably would’ve edited the “fucking” out. That was a failure on my part.

You’re right, that did come across overly aggressive and I apologize to the original commenter. It’s hard to convey tone with text and obviously I failed to communicate this as I never intended my comment to sound so aggressive that it warranted everything that I got in response.

Go back and read everything I’ve written, but omit the word “fucking” and I think you’ll see that one concession to my frustration stands in contrast to the rest of my messages where I was blunt but otherwise respectful. I provided quotes and deflected credit to the original author when it seemed like the credit was being given to me. I never engaged in personal attacks and my only actual criticism was literally that opening line. I hope that demonstrates my true intentions, which were apparently buried by the overly aggressive opening.

I’ve since been told I have shitty behavior and that I’m a “douche”. I never called anyone names, and literally my only call out was “did you even read the fucking article?” You’ve been an order of magnitude more aggressive than I was in the first place and I’ve gotten downvoted and chastised and called names while you’ve gotten supportive comments. I’ve apologized for my behavior without any expectation of reciprocation.

I hate conflict. I hate arguing. It makes me want to just not participate at all online. I don’t need this and as an autistic man it gives me a great deal of stress. I don’t expect you or anyone else to understand or care which is why ordinarily I just lurk online because people seem so eager to jump down my throat. Feels weird and shitty to be accused of doing the same when I failed to police my tone appropriately.

Normally when I do speak up, I’m a consensus maker, trying to bring people together. In fact, this particular topic inspired me to speak up because I’m deathly scared of the direction that current events seem to be headed and I wanted to set my comfort aside in the hopes of seeing that there were other people who wanted to combat this.

It’s disheartening that as fascists worldwide are gaining traction, the most relevant article I’ve seen in a while about it and what to do about it has had discussion completely derailed by criticism about the clickbait headline and subsequent tone policing. If this is where all our energy is going, no wonder fascists are seeing so little pushback.

Also, when I said “it’s from the article”, I was literally trying to give credit to the original author, since it seemed like you were attributing that to me. Feels weird to be downvoted for that.

The funny thing about your comment was that was the same sentiment I was expressing towards the other person. So point taken I guess?

To be clear, I didn’t write that, it’s from article.

Is the headline clickbait? Sure. I’m not defending that. Guess the author could have incorporated this into the headline:

Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically.

Feels like these are a bunch of nitpicks that distract from the main point of the article - that we need to act urgently and drastically to hope to stop this before fascists consolidate power.

Did you even read the fucking article?

Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.

As far as doomerism goes, he outlines several possible avenues to stop things that require us getting off our “comfy couch”.

“Okay, this one is a freebie, since you’re going to figure it out relatively quickly, but making the runner up to the Presidency is just dumb. Having your political rival as the next in line is just… c’mon, you can do better than that.

Next, I know some of you are concerned about factions. It’s human nature to band together so you can’t really stop this, sorry. That said, this first-past-the-post system is awful and will result in a duopoly and a race to the bottom. If you just adopt ranked choice voting to start with, these factions won’t be neutralized but at least you can ensure more diverse political factions and limit their power to dominate other factions.

Now then, the second amendment. I know it seems straightforward to you, but eventually this language will be too vague. Additionally, those muskets are eventually going to evolve into easily concealable firearms that can fire a dozen or more deadly accurate shots and be reloaded in under a second. Ironically, they’ll still be wildly outclassed by what a tyrant can field against patriots exercising their rights. I’m not going to tell you what you should do, but at the very least you should clarify what a “well regulated militia” means. Yeah, I know the Constitution can be amended so that it can evolve around those firearms, but it remember my previous point? That duopoly will ensure that nothing is done about this and people will argue past each other.

What’s next? Oh yeah… you know that clever set of checks & balances y’all designed? Sure it makes sense that each branch would jealously guard their political power, but those factions are going to prefer to centralize all their power behind a single executive. I know you all who supported the Articles of Confederation are horrified about that idea, but eventually things will evolve back to an elected monarchy, and once they consolidate enough power that elected part will probably disappear too. So uh, might want to strengthen those checks & balances. Good luck on that one.

Finally, I know y’all can’t envision a world without slavery. I get that the southern states are dependent on it and therefore abolishing it overnight seems impossible, but kicking the can down the road (do you guys know that idiom?) is just going to make the problem worse. It will literally divide the country in two and will have major ramifications many centuries later. If you can’t abolish it now, at least put a framework in place to transition away. Maybe in a way that respects those wonderful values you profess in the Declaration of Independence that only apply to a handful of landowning men for now.”

True. I’ve been on an extended sabbatical from work in an industry heavily impacted by LLM use, and I’m not looking forward to returning and being forced to use it, especially when it doesn’t benefit my productivity.

Still, even with this forced demand, spending is vastly outweighing the revenue generated. Venture capitalists seem to have an absurd amount of money to spend, but even their resources are finite, especially without ultra low interest rates.

Then again, I expected cryptocurrencies to implode years ago, but even after FTX it stabilized enough that the bubble has kept growing. It hasn’t had to weather a real recession yet and I expect that will apply a lot more pressure when that finally happens.

Between those two bubbles and the tariffs finally starting to take effect, it feels like we’re in for a really bad time. I really hope I’m wrong.

Edit: Forgot to mention that Intel seems to be thrashing. Their current CEO seems to be slashing the people he needs to recover from their current conditions and shutting down construction on fabs that represent their future. Never thought I’d see a day when Intel was facing an existential threat, but here we are.

If the market gets spooked, it doesn’t matter what CEOs do. The companies burning is the bubble popping. See the dot-com or the prime-mortgage bubbles.

It always starts with a little wobble that causes investors to pause and wonder if all the hyper optimism is maybe unfounded and start to look at the fundamentals. Then they realize the emperor has no clothes and the bull turns into a bear.

Not saying that Coreweave is that wobble; many analysts and pundits will try to sweep it under the rug to maintain the irrational exuberance, but once sentiment starts to turn, it can happen fast… pop!

Yeah, but it’s nice to see them branching out from the one pronoun joke that they keep recycling over and over.

Copycat

Unless Al Jazeera edited the title, it does not use the acronym IOF. I assume that was the responsibility of whoever posted it to Hacker News.

Werner von Braun, the primary architect of the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon, had plans to get us to Mars by 1984. Not sure that was completely realistic, but it’s hard to believe that 40 years after that we don’t even have any serious plans.

I’m sorry to hear about your self abuse. This internet stranger is hoping that you’re in a better place.

Less mind blowing but still shocking to me - it’s been 53 years since we last set foot on the moon, much less gone beyond that. Humanity has lost our ambition.