I initially started with natural language processing (small language models?) in school, which is a much simpler form of text generation that operates on words instead of whatever they call the symbols in modern LLMs. So when modern LLMs came out, I basically registered that as, “oh, better version of NLP,” with all its associated limitations and issues, and that seems to be what it is.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty neat, and I can certainly see some interesting use-cases, but it’s really not how I want to interface with computers. I like searching with keywords and I prefer the process of creation more than the product of creation, so image and text generation aren’t particularly interesting to me. I’ll certainly use them if I need to, but as a software engineer, I just find LLMs in all forms (so far) annoying to use. I don’t even like full text search in many cases and prefer regex searches, so I guess I’m old-school like that.

I’ll eventually give in and adopt it into my workflow and I’ll probably do so before the average person does, but what I see and what the media hypes it up to be really don’t match up. I’m planning to set up a llama model if only because I have the spare hardware for it and it’s an interesting novelty.

Lol. I guess you’d need to go to a mining crypto den then, I hear they pull that sort of nonsense. ;)

But seriously though, I’m not interested in listing, shipping, and dealing w/ customer feedback just to save a few bucks on a GPU, because that sounds like a job.

Yup, voted each time. Didn’t matter though, my state’s elections are almost never competitive. But it only took a few minutes and I voted at home, so at least I didn’t spend all afternoon in line.

shouldn’t it know what words are?

Not necessarily, but it should be smart enough to associate symbols with some form of meaning. It doesn’t do that, it juts associates symbols with related symbols, so if there’s nothing similar that already exists, it’s not going to be able to come back with anything sensible.

I think being able to create new content with partial sample data is necessary to really be considered general AI. That’s what humans do, and we don’t necessarily need the words to describe it.

the bubble bursting might very well be a good thing for the technology into the future

I absolutely agree. It worked wonders for the Internet (dotcom boom in the 90s), and I imagine we’ll see the same w/ AI sometime in the next 10 years or so. I do believe we’re seeing a bubble here, and we’re also seeing a significant shift in how we interact w/ technology, but it’s neither as massive or as useless as proponents and opponents claim.

I’m excited for the future, but not as excited for the transition period.

Eh, if the investment dollars start drying up, they’ll likely start optimizing what they have to get more value for fewer resources. There is value in AI, I just don’t think it’s as high as they claim.

And are you really interested in selling the extras?

But eventually, bubbles either deflate or pop, because eventually governments and investors will get tired of propping it up. It might take decades, but I think it’s inevitable.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

A. Gary Shilling

Wow, that’s ridiculous…

That’s really too bad. I have never had to file a dispute since everything I’ve ordered has so far been as expected. Then again, I haven’t had any problems in my area with shipping companies mishandling packages either, so YMMV in your area if that’s a common issue.

Eh, there are some search engines in the EU, the notable one I know about is MetaGer, but apparently they had to stop supporting their free, ad-supported service due to Yahoo ending its contract with them. But it’s based in Germany and still exists today.

That said, it’s a meta search engine and I don’t think it has its own index, but who knows, maybe if enough people sign up, they’ll work on their own engine some day.

I’m guessing he selects scammers for maximum enjoyment and doesn’t randomly sample. I imagine there are plenty of smart scammers out there.

Eh, depends on if the spammer’s AI can detect the chatbot AI consistently.

eBay is completely different though, since they have a lot of consumer protections, as well as a variety of services and used products. I got my phone on eBay used, which was about half the cost of buying new, and the phones was <6 months old. I also got a smart watch on eBay refurbished, again about half the price and there’s zero indication on the watch that it’s used or refurbished. I buy used Switch games (w/ case) on eBay as well, which aren’t as good of a deal, but I still routinely get them $30-40 when they’d normally retail for $50-60.

You can buy utter crap on eBay, but you can also buy high quality used products. On Amazon, those same used products tend to be about 10% more expensive (my experience), and Temu just doesn’t have anything similar.

If you’re after cheap everyday items, shop at your local dollar store or buy on AliExpress. If you’re after new electronics, wait until one of the regular sales (usually holiday season and tax season), or shortly after the next version launches, and then shop online (lots of retailers). If you’re after used electronics, check your local classifieds, and fall back to eBay.

At no point is Temu on my list of options.

Yup, it’s the same as in Teams, but I think it formats better: use triple backticks.

Why is it not an option?

Yeah, it has gotten better since a year or so ago, but it still falls quite a bit short of Slack. Slack can do snippets or not, it’s up to you.

And yeah, it’s nice that it’s getting better, especially since I’m forced to use it for work (and interviews, where bad code handling sucks).

Make it $0.01. No need to waste too much money.

Agreed.

I hate Twitter’s format though, so Mastodon isn’t interesting at all to me. I really like the Reddit setup where discussion is around a presented topic (whether a link or a text post), instead of the Twitter/Mastodon format where you follow general topics and people. I don’t care about individuals, I care about ideas, and Reddit/Lemmy seem to distill ideas around topics I care about better than Twitter/Mastodon. However, both Lemmy and Reddit tend to encourage echo chambers, which I strongly dislike, hence why I’m working on something else.

BlueSky seems like Twitter 2.0, so I’m just as uninterested as I ever was in Twitter and Mastodon.