@gloriouscow I would prefer a fourth option:

I don't think I really agree with your AI opinions for reasons too long to list here*. But I'd rather you discuss them rather than appease the "no politics, stick to retrocomputing" crowd.

* I guess a TL;DR without going into the weeds is "I do not find 'throw more resources at it' intellectually fulfilling."

@cr1901 This really isn't appeasing anyone, nobody has told me to stfu, i'm just curious if people want me to stay "on topic" or not. On any social platform any replies you get probably represents 1% of people's reactions to what you're actually saying, specially since there aren't any downvotes here.

I don't really understand your TL;DR - I don't feel like I exactly expressed approval of the staggering amount of resources being poured into the development of AI - in fact I find it more than slightly horrifying.

I just see it happening and draw conclusions, not necessarily correct ones, mind you, but ...

I realize there are a lot of people who predict this is all an enormous bubble, which will inevitably pop and that will be the end of it, like we'll all look back in a decade and say "hey, remember that ChatGPT thing?" as if we were reminiscing about the Zune.

I am reminded about the dotcom crash - in the same way that every dumb, overhyped idea startups had in 2000 is now pretty much an established and profitable business model, I do not think that we are going to escape the inevitable even if all the current big players go out of business.

This is, after all, a global arms race, and the failure of any one company just becomes discount IP for the next. The economic reward for whoever crosses the AGI finish line first is so staggeringly huge that every venture capitalist alive hasn't had to fill a viagra prescription since 2022.

@cr1901 I could have phrased that better - we all know that the internet is currently experiencing a tsunami of automated, inaccurate, AI-generated content that is fairly described as slop, and we know it when we see it.

I have a near daily experience of clicking on some article and getting a paragraph in and realizing it's all ChatGPT-speak.

I guess my awkwardly attempted point is that I find rallying behind slang like slop risks diluting a word that accurately describes specific phenomenon - if we're just going to call any use of AI slop, in any context, even if it was employed to successfully solve a quantifiable, testable problem, then we're just parroting a word rather than engaging in any nuanced discussion about why otherwise talented and intelligent software developers might find it useful.

@cr1901 There's also this enormous bias in the entire AI conversation to specifically generative applications, when there are a lot of applications where you are not asking them to generate content at all.

I recalled this story before - I was scrolling through the 900-something page technical reference on the STM32 in Acrobat reader (don't @ me Sumatra is jank and Foxit enshittified just as bad) trying to find a specific section on one of the hardware timers, and up there in the corner of Acrobat, just taunting me, is that fucking "Ask AI assistant" button, and I was just like, okay, screw it, lets go.

I asked it to give me the detailed register info I was looking for, and not only did it give me the correct page number it made me a little table summarizing the info.

I'm sure there's a word in German for feeling bad about someone succeeding at something when you wanted them to fail.