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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

    Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

    The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

    And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.


  • Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

    I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

    People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you


  • Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

    The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

    It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

    Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it










  • Why do people praising a thing you’re saying is useless sound like someone listing it’s good points in an advert? Gee tough question, could it be that they’re essentially the same thing and the latter is explicitly designed to look like the former?

    Of course if you’re going to dismiss something entirely then people who benefit from using it are going to give their opinion, that’s what this is - a place to give opinions and talk about stuff.

    How else would anyone answer your question? You suggest that it has no use, people who use it regularly are of course going to point out the uses it has. And yes many aren’t going to bother they’re going to use the button that essentially says ‘this is balderdash I don’t agree’

    I have found many things ai is brilliant at, as a coding assistant it really is a game changer and within five years you’ll be used to talking to your PC like they do in Star Trek and having it do all sorts of reality useful things that there are no options for in software made like we do now.





  • They have a few problems like demoneytising for arbitrary reasons, over zealous moderation on some topics and almost zero on others - I think things are starting to relax a bit but there was a time where history channels would avoid saying the word Hitler or Nazi in their documentary about ww2. Likewise if a film or news story has someone ‘commit the unthinkable’ and ‘unalive themselves’ it can make hard topics much more difficult.

    There’s a lot of engagement spam too, so many channels doing fake restorations, fake pool building, fake animal rescues… Then the ones which just have an ai voice reading fake stories from Reddit, chat gpt gibberish, or awful old jokes copy pasted from old books.

    There is amazing content too though of course and I think it’s by far the best place to get entertainment and education resources





  • I think you’re selling freedom short, yeah convenience and momentum are hard to beat but Lemmy is where the open source Devs are and the first adopters, I think we’re gonna go see a lot of interesting things emerge here which will draw a lot of users into trying it out - especially if all the other social media sites are closing their doors to people without accounts from viewing information.

    What Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place, not the same thing but things that are fun and novel and community building. The basic stuff is still getting finalized but as things get established we’ll see plenty of tools made to help moderation, to enable new features and useful ways of interacting with information. Hopefully some fun games and toys too.

    I’ve got a lot of work to do on my main project at the moment but I’ve also got a lot of ideas for Lemmy stuff I want to play with when I’ve got the time, I’m sure theres a lot of other people cooking up ideas and watching things develop and stabilize waiting for the right time.