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3 yr. ago

  • If you think taking a picture of something and having AI identify it for you is something that 1) people should do on a daily basis and 2) the government should support AI as a utility for, then we have such different concepts of the world we want to live in that I don't think we'll come to an agreement here. I cannot imagine how that would be "highly useful in everyday life" for the average person.

    The whole "You could ask a million questions" while supporting the idea it should be a utility is so weird to me. Like, yes, we could ask a million questions, and I think we should before suggesting it is a service that every citizen should be somewhat entitled to access from the government in some way (with all the caveats that come with a utility etc etc). It seems like you have fallen into the trap you suggest is inherent to human nature and you haven't bothered to ask if we should do that.

  • I don't think anyone is "blindly bitching". I think people have understandable concerns regarding its development, use, and proliferation.

    The other idea that it needs to be a utility is straight from the wet dreams of every AI company. Realistically, the average person has little use for AI and it's much more likely to be a detriment to them than otherwise. I know someone who is an exec in a big company and they get AI through their work. They use it for inane things mostly, but recently they used it to generate a list of reasons that their kids *dont need to go to school. This is an educated person with a good job who can't figure out that AI has no idea what their kids need.

    I don't think AI needs to be used by nearly the number of people currently using it, but my bigger concern is letting anyone, be it a private company or a government, have access to something people treat like a magic answer anything machine.

  • No, there are plenty on the left doing exactly that. Plenty don't mention it because there's been so much AI pushback they don't want to be written off, others don't mention it because they know it doesn't really contribute to the conversation most times. It's unlikely that your use is reflective of most AI use in these large projects.

    Realistically, even your use doesn't address some people's issues. People dislike that the training data was used without consent, that's not really addressed by open weight models. You checking and understanding the output is great, but a lot of people take issue with having offloaded that to the AI in the first place. Maybe your use doesn't have the same negative environmental impact as some of the other models, but I'm not sure it really matters. If we're using AI then inevitably some outputs will have larger environmental impact than others.

    I am not saying your AI use is the problem with humanity or anything, but no, you're not alone. Most people just aren't talking about people like you and your specific situation doesn't actually fully address people's issues with AI regardless.

  • Thank you! It's so weird to see some pro AI people act like this somehow crossed a line. It's my understanding that part of the issue is that the AI used its chat logs to get some of this information, but I've seen no one explain how that is any different from what was done to people who believed their work was private or protected under a license but ended up having it in a training set anyway. I don't believe there's an expectation of privacy when using the plagiarism bot, and my understanding is it does reserve the right to train off your chats.

    The concern regarding attribution is also strange to me because it's possible that the attribution for any specific thing is completely lost during the training process. When people have it generate images or stories or even just a response, it's not going line by line explaining all the places it stole from. When people talked about AI bootstrapping itself there was no discussion of how we were going to keep track of all the people whose hard work it was building off of.

    I'm against AI in general for a bunch of reasons, but the fact they're upset they got scooped is so minimal in my opinion. Wasn't AI supposed to solve all these problems for us, faster than we could alone? It's doing exactly what they said it would, and since they never bothered to care about attribution before I'm having a hard time sympathizing with them now.

  • The fact is that a lot of people are not equipped to do full time childcare and would actually be a bigger help to society if they continued doing their job if that's what they prefer. Childcare is a skill and having the right tools can make it easier. It's very possible that encouraging people to stay home even if it's not their preference actually hinders the growth of the child and the economy. A place intended for childcare will likely have people educated specifically in how to best assist a child of that age and have a lot more dedicated toys and books and learning experiences than the average parent would have access to. I fully support people wanting to do their own childcare, but I feel like people never want to acknowledge that dedicated childcare spaces can be great for families for all kinds of reasons, not just because they cannot afford to stop working.

  • I am not really up to date on him since I viewed his existence as largely irrelevant. What exactly did he say about his dead brother's family? He never seemed like a nice person to me, but I'm surprised he made disparaging remarks about his family, especially since it seemed to have really affected his father.

  • The fact that more employers haven't jumped at WFH is so telling. It's basically equivalent to an increase in salary, an improvement in employee work life balance, and a wider recruitment pool all wrapped into one without them actually having to do anything, except maybe spend LESS money on overhead.

    It's something we could easily change to improve the lives of everyone and help the environment. I'm really disappointed we're not seeing more support for it.

  • Well, you have to understand, the military has nothing else to do at the moment. It's not like we're at war or anything.

    I'm extremely surprised all they're doing is firing them. I was worried they were going to be tried for something stupid like defrauding the government or something. I have no idea why they would still be there, other than I can only assume benefits related reasons.

  • Really appreciate your detailed write up. I mentioned elsewhere that some of these comments were swaying me towards trying one out, certainly more convincing than the article in my opinion. I appreciate the fact you outlined some pros and cons. I always have my phone, and anywhere I go for more than a quick chore I generally throw my ereader in a bag, so I understand I'm likely not the target audience, but I guess having more ways to read can't be a bad thing. The lack of backlight and proprietary charger are giving me pause for sure. I might still give it a week to mull it over, but your comment was super helpful and saved me a cursory search before really diving into comparison shopping. Glad to hear they are helping some people read more. Fingers crossed they keep improving them, even if they're not quite right for me.

  • Honestly, people seem to really like them based on the comments here. 70 seems silly to essentially combine two products I already have, but I may give it a week or so and if it's still top of mind go ahead with it. I really appreciate people bothering to share their experiences with it, since I really was not convinced by the article.

  • I just saw someone in a different comment section say that if we ever actually get AGI it'll start by scamming us all. Apparently there's no need to wait for AGI, AI is just as happy to basically do fraud.

  • Yea, I read ebooks on my phone for years, even back when I used reddit way more than I use Lemmy and I don't think it being on my phone was a huge issue for me, but I do understand how it could be distracting. My main reason for switching to an ereader was the eink and ergonomics because carpal tunnel was getting to me. I don't bring my ereader everywhere though and sometimes I do miss having it all on my phone for convenience. Really glad you've gotten to read so many books since deprioritizing scrolling.

    Let me know once you find a device like that because I'll be second in line.

  • Really cool to get an opinion from an actual user. Thank you for sharing! If it gets people reading, I'm all for it. I have an eink ereader, so I do understand both points you're making.

  • I have an eink ereader, and it really is wonderful, but I absolutely would not use it as much if it was the size and shape of my phone. For short stretches I guess it's fine, but one of the reasons I got an ereader is because my phone was so ergonomically bad for reading.

  • That's fair. I did get an ereader in part to have a dedicated device for reading that had an eink display, so I get that desire. Part of me still feels it's a bit ewaste-y, but whatever gets people to read more is generally good in my opinion.

  • The article worked in reader mode for me, sorry you hit a paywall.

    I appreciate you mentioning the eink bit. I have an eink kobo which I really like and it's definitely nicer to use than my phone for reading. I did pick it specifically because I didn't want one that had other distracting apps or anything, but I used my phone for years without issue.

    Not to shill for a product I was just hating on, but it seems like there's quite an open source community that has popped up around this thing, so it's possible there's an app for it that will auto sync with your preexisting ereader, depending on the device. The article mentions Libby by name, but they possibly have others. I'd just be remiss if I didn't mention that and possibly help a fellow reader out.

  • I'm glad it got the author of this article to read more, but there's no real mention of why someone would use this instead of the myriad phone apps for reading already in existence, including the one that you have to download special software to get to run on this thing.

    The TikTokification cannot be much different between this and a phone screen. You can only fit a few sentences on a phone screen in the first place, so I can't imagine there's a real change even when you halve the size.

    Traditional ereaders have a place for a variety of reasons and this seems to go against everything someone would want in an ereader. I really just don't understand this product and there was nothing that helped explain it's purpose in contrast to the phone it's presumably going to be attached to. Really wish they bothered to address that point at all.

  • *Think of the political parties.

    The candidates are now going to have to compete with the parties at the same rate. This is great because as we all know political parties didn't have enough sway.

  • For clarity sake, the article seems to be using the term lift to refer to an elevator. The article mentions it was to be used to change floors. They often use UK English in India since it was colonized at one point.

    This obviously doesn't affect your experience, just mentioning for your knowledge. The guy was apparently in a stretcher and they got on the elevator to go to a different floor.