Technology

The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is some college software (Won't need it when I'm done) and 1 game (which no longer gets updates and thus is on the path to a slow sad demise)

So I'm on the verge of going Penguin.

Exactly - I find AI tools very useful and they save me quite a bit of time, but they're still tools. Better at some things than others, but the bottom line is that they're dependent on the person using them. Plus the more limited the problem scope, the better they can be.

LLMs could be useful for translation between programming languages. I asked it to recently for server code given a client code in a different language and the LLM generated code was spot on!

For coding it's also useful for doing the menial grunt work that's easy but just takes time.

You're not going to replace a senior dev with it, of course, but it's a great tool.

My previous employer was using AI for intelligent document processing, and the results were absolutely amazing. They did sink a few million dollars into getting the LLM fine tuned properly, though.

I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.

For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.

On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.

So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.

I think the best way I've heard it put is "if we absolutely have to burn down a forest, I want warp drive out of it. Not a crappy python app"

It isn't R&D anymore if you're actively marketing it.

Especially when the product is garbage lmao

I think you're confused, when you say "value", you seem to mean progressing humanity forward. This is fundamentally flawed, you see, "value" actually refers to yacht money for billionaires. I can see why you would be confused.

Well sure, but you're forgetting that the federal government has pulled the rug out from under health research and therefore had made it so there is no economic value in biochemistry.