My experience with ethically run (if unethically created) local models has been similar. Lots odd hardware to get slow mediocre answers.

But the biggest reason AI competes with plain old web search is that they’ve enshittified the web search available to us.

Corporate assholes are breaking search to force people to use their centralized harmful AI answer guessers.

We can fight back with Searx. https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Searx

I’m so tired of “Ai big number” headlines. 100+ packages - but how many good ones? (Genuinely, I don’t know, as I don’t the recognize those listed.)

We need projects that diligently keep the slop out. We don’t need every protect to do so, but it is critical that some do.

We have Meta and Microsoft to provide quick-to-market low quality shit.

The version of Linux that matters is the slow thoughtful good software.

I’m not mad at slop slingers, aa long as they don’t secretly inject slop risk where not welcome.

Edit: Thanks for responses.

For anyone who has read this far, I encourage seeing responses below for informative and nuanced thoughts on this.

No, just an American, where a health challenge of any kind can potentially bankrupt me, because health care here is a criminally privatized corporate hellscape.

So only for people who serve the state, not for people who served the neighbors without official capacity.

Translates to “not for people we could not control” pretty readily.

I run Linux at a workplace that is mostly Windows and some Mac.

Nobody notices or cares.

Everything I need runs in a browser now.

But why does everyone bring up AutoCAD? Lemmy seems to be full of AutoCAD professionals.

I sling code and documents. Linux is better for code and uses Office 365 as well as any other OS.

Wild. I will keep that in mind if I ever have a drink with either of them at a politcal fund-raising party.

History suggests you would want a very competent head of security, because some rich nepo babies wouldn’t like what you were doing.

What an incendiary thing to say!

Can someone tell me what Jack Black said? I bet it was provocative!

Edit: Oh - Was Jack blacklisted for associating with Kyle?

Well, I guess those boys finally fell from the political good graces they so carefully maintained for so long.

Still, if Jack said anything rude about anyone powerful, I would like to hear it so that I can consider it in my future judgments.

I figure the engine swap business has got to be booming right now.

Was it pre-spyware? I’ll pay extra for pre-spyware vehicles. I work in IT, so I value my privacy.

I kid you not, I bought a DVD player over this nonsense. Now my kids watch the same few used Disney movie and show DVDs however much they like, and I’m not paying these clowns monthly to be abused by them.

As long as our health is perfect, of course.

Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

But sometimes we get…

Strictly speaking, we only have to govern the billionaires if we don’t just eat them…so it’s kind of a run-off between how easy to govern they decide to be, and how they taste…

(This is solely meant to humorous, officer, your honor.)

Somehow it’s difficult for me to remember what I like?

I used to have mini-panic attacks when asked what I prefer.

Now, I just have memorized good enough responses that I won’t be unhappy with later.

Is that strange?

I’m told it’s not usual. So I guess so?

Does that make me non-human?

Nah. Human experience is much more varied than most people ever realize.

It does make you interesting.

I think a lack of enthusiasm has been kinda the default for me for as long as I remember

I’ve had life phases like that.

It doesn’t bother me as much, today, as it did, in the past.

Now, I focus on the things worth avoiding while I wait for my enthusiasm to return.

For me, enthusiasm returns, in bursts, eventually.

Thanks. I think every data point helps people.

I can’t say that particularly shocks me. I imagine that Chat GPT has probably swallowed dozens of Physics textbooks.

The bigger part of the problem is knowing where we are on the human knowledge novelty / training data available curve, or rather, when we need to get off of the ride.

Edit: Any chance your chosen AI has access to Wolfram Alpha as an MCP Tool? Because that would be very different, too.

If it’s successful at math, there’s likely much more than a learning model in play.

Which brings us back to the opacity problem. :(

If the answer machine has been cleverly rigged (and weighted) to pass off math questions to more capable software, things can be great.

But a person who just hears that AI can do math now can have a very bad time if they go blindly use a brute force pleasant answer machine on a math problem. :(

For simple math that could work, and as long as the question is close enough to an exact match with plenty of published examples to copy.

A good rule of thumb is that the script it will come up with is about as likely to be correct as blindly taking the highest voted answer to the most similar question on Stack Overflow.

If the question is simple and common, the odds are quite good. If the question is nuanced or rare, the odds of a correct result drop off aggressively.

Edit: Your mileage may vary - providing an API to these LLMs that can do math correctly for them is pretty easy. Getting the LLM to consistently detect when to use that API is more challenging.

You’ve misspelled “Fuck JK Rowling” there, mate.