Soatok Dreamseeker
ZackGod, this bubble burst is going to be so brutal
imdat celeste 
[witchzard]
Funes@zenhob of course the program built off aggregating online content is gonna be like "oh do you want me to Google that for you?"
GabeMoralesVR
Neville Park@zenhob a vape store in my neighbourhood is named "Vape Store Near Me"
Large Format Projectionist
0xDECAFBAD
Jay Stephens
yaceq
يعقوب
jonny (good kind)
A Flock of Beagleslong before all of that started, there were two restaurants on Rideau St. in Ottawa called "The Restaurant Next Door", and "The Restaurant Across The Street" which was across the street. i think the Restaurant Next Door might have been next to Nate's Deli or the Rideau Bakery. that end of Rideau St. used to have some local culture. it's all just chains and high-rise condos now.
Daniel Lakeland
deutrino
Bri | 🚴📦💨✨ | 🏳️🌈
Melancholic Mediocrity 
@zenhob "use an online search engine" what a great idea!
Beige CatsWhoCode
Michel PatriceUsing a search engine is so 2024.
Bruce Mirken@LibertyForward1 @zenhob I hear Google used to have one of those!
EaterOfSnacks@zenhob Engine, search thyself.
Zuri (he/him) 🕐 CET@eaterofsnacks @zenhob At least, this sounds more honest than "don't be evil"
caneToad@zenhob Nice try!
LLM slop of the finest - this just qualifies for the beautiful German dialect term "strunzdumm", which means, mostly, dumb beyond belief.
#strunzdumm
LLM slop of the finest - this just qualifies for the beautiful German dialect term "strunzdumm", which means, mostly, dumb beyond belief.
#strunzdumm
@CatsWhoCode @zenhob Just in case we dared to use the term 'Artificial Intelligence' for such, that would probably reflect an IQ just below room temperature.
Algorithms assessing x-rays for tumors undoubtedly have their merits and are definitely a different animal than this bullshit. Are you supposed to PAY for that?
If this is a giveaway, it's rather a throwaway. No bull.
Justin Derrick@zenhob I cashed out all my tech stocks back in January. I suspect this will be the dot-bomb v2.0, where everyone finally figures out that LLMs and the hundreds of billions of dollars invested would have been better off getting tossed into a dumpster and just lit on fire.
They're impressive chatbots, but not useful for anything of consequence. They can't do math, they can't play games, they get basic facts wrong, they can be manipulated into being complicit in crimes, etc.
1337@JustinDerrick @zenhob "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Crypto is still going strong; been around for ~16 years. Tesla's stock is still higher than this same time last year.
@1337 @zenhob Yup, but I've made money on my tech stocks over the past 8 to 10 years. I watched with pleasure when the tech ETFs dropped nearly 30% earlier this year, but I thought it still had more to go. Having said that, it's still not back to mid-January/mid-February highs. It was still a good move.
I'm happy to have cashed out and moved it elsewhere while I wait for the AI / LLM bubble to burst.
Stel Clementine@1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob Crypto is a bit of a special case IMO because it's a *purely* abstract asset that's not even pretending to be tied to any physical function. I think about it as a decentralized ponzi scheme that only requires a bit of "get rich quick!" marketing, electricity, and hardware. Until one of those things goes away, the crypto scam will continue.
@stelclementine @1337 @zenhob As an IT guy, blockchain and crypto seems interesting, possibly revolutionary -- taking money out of the hands of politicians and bankers, and making it a hard asset like gold, but instantly portable and nearly infinitely divisible -- all made possible and enforced by code.
As someone who breathes, and is consequently concerned about the environment, it's a trainwreck.
Only time will tell what happens to it.
@JustinDerrick if it worked like the early adopter libertarians envisioned (I.e., not grifters), Bitcoin would be a deflationary currency; the rich could just horde it, not "putting it to use," with investment or loans, and they would gain value just sitting on it. Though, a long time ago I remember seeing "Freicoin" or something like that based on ideas by some obscure economist that was designed to be inflationary. The idea went something like, currency represents resources, like corn, and resources degrade, so currency should too.
@JustinDerrick @stelclementine @1337 @zenhob I thought Bitcoin was interesting when it was new, but it very quickly demonstrated that it was not a viable currency. Maybe the worst problem is the transaction rate limit. The energy use is way too high, unless every node is also doubling as a space heater. Anyone who owns enough computing power can manipulate the entire network. And now that it’s securitized it’s not even independent.
Tom Morris@JustinDerrick @stelclementine @1337 @zenhob they’ve taken money out of the hands of imperfectly regulated bankers and given it to wholly unregulated dipshits who keep doing endless scams.
Shine@JustinDerrick @stelclementine @1337 @zenhob It's a good idea only if you think that the problem is with who controls the money, and not with the whole concept of money.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen@stelclementine @1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob Yes but there was a time - not many months mind you - where too many tech enthusiasts insisted that you should put your stuff on the blockchain, until they realized it is a slow, expensive, pseudononymous, world readable database with very little payload size full of bugs and exploits. So they stopped insisting on it.
The new machine lying fad even has governments singing its praises.
⁂iwein⁂@toriver
Is there a better distributed database?
Single-purpose? Probably not. Nor is there one that is slower or more energy-consuming. And with no transactional rollback where you «fix» errors by forking. And it’s not really one, there are multiple, with some bridging going on.
@iwein DHT, OrbitDB, or any Byzantine fault tolerant scheme. Even Postgres can be made to work in a quorum-type distributed system. Crypto like Bitcoin just tries to "solve" the Sybil problem by indirection (PoW) and clever (social/financial) incentives. I'm guessing one of the FAANGs could take complete control over the network with their AI datacenters if they wanted to. The question is if a *permissionless* system like Bitcoin's is needed for a use-case, and not just a centralized or federated system. Trust is eventually needed somewhere in an exchange.
Leeloo@1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob
Cryptocurrency found a usecase where it's really useful: Drug deals, scams, ransom money and similar things that need to move money on the black market.
That's real value keeping it afloat. Criminal but still real.
@JustinDerrick @1337 @zenhob
That's not what I was arguing.
AI, NFT, etc are/were bubbles, full of hot air, no actual value.
Drugs and other crimes - worth billions. Not a bubble, people just need to be aware of what they are really investing in.
Viking Chieftain@leeloo @1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob
B̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶... Gifts to shady politicians.
Davey@1337 @JustinDerrick @zenhob that's the argument against shorting something overvalued though isn't it?
Cashing out before the pop is a different thing.
Dataless
AccordionBruce@JustinDerrick @Dataless @zenhob @artemis
I agree. Though I suppose then they’d all try harder to hide their money in anonymous accounts and invest in “crypto for billionaires”
They’ve got everything propping up unaffordable international housing prices now
Honest question: If the wealthy’s billions disappear what happens to the economy?
They could still personally buy as much lifestyle as they want
If their cash hoard was not sloshing around in the real world would that be bad or good?
MidgePhoto@Dataless @JustinDerrick @zenhob @artemis
Money is a convenient fiction, but a lot of time was used on this.
And some of the people are capable of useful work.
Nazo@zenhob It really is. Venture capitalists and companies have spent billions and billions on a tech that has no future in any of the things they've been spending on it doing. LLMs can have uses, but not one single one of them is anything these corporations are trying so hard to force them into. They will never -- no matter what -- ever be able to become true AI and will never successfully perform as well as alternatives in any of the things they're using them for.
What scares me is it may be another housing market crash type of thing if everyone lets this get much further. Governments are already starting to become receptive towards it. I'd love to see corporations knocked down a peg, but chances are they'll just get subsidies to support them when this fails.
Oh 2 ten@nazokiyoubinbou @zenhob remember blockchain? LOL
Julian Schwarzenbach@zenhob @nazokiyoubinbou I strongly suspect that we are heading for a.com type crash. There will be businesses what fail catastrophically due to poor user of AI. The risk is that some of these failures may have big impacts in the real world. In Gartner Hype Cycle terms we are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations raping approaching The Trough of Disillusionment
Jennifer Moore 😷I realise the overall situation is bad, but the absurdity of that one is delightful to me! Haha!
Andrew Zonenberg@zenhob adblock the ai overviews. No mercy.
Every couple months they change the css class and i need a new ublock rule but that's at least somewhat tolerable compared to the alternative.
@zenhob Open question: if you adblock the overview, does it prevent the request from being made to the server?
Or is it still burning energy and just not being rendered? I'm not sure of the specific point in the search process that it happens and when ublock steps in.
ravelin@azonenberg @zenhob just stop using engines that force AI
@ravelin @zenhob Do any exist?
I'm pretty sure everyone either does it themselves, or is a thin wrapper around the index of someone who does on the back end.
There's no user-respecting search engines that focus on delivering quality results rather than selling ads anymore.
And you can't create one, because everyone is so busy blocking AI crawlers with cloudflare and anubis and what have you that it's virtually impossible to build a "good" web crawler in 2025.
Without the index, your search engine is toast.
@azonenberg @zenhob there are better sources than me for this, I lose track of who uses their own indexes, but Ecosia and StartPage at least both have the option to exclude AI summaries.
I believe Ecosia is developing its own index, but also has the option to include results from Google's.
I'm not sure if using Google's index means it also generates the summary on the back end?
@azonenberg @zenhob well, it is not environmentally immaterial. But yeah, still flawed.
Jack Yan (甄爵恩)@ravelin @azonenberg @zenhob I donʼt believe either has its own index, but it will be interesting to see how Ecosia fares if it does its own. Startpage was Google and is now Bing, and Ecosia lets you choose from either in its settings. The main indices I can think of (not complete) are Google, Bing, Mojeek, Yandex, Baidu and Sogou; I believe Brave and Yep do their own, too. @Seirdy is the authority on this—let me see if I can find his page about it.