• 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Are we sure it’s cheaper though? I mean it legitimatly might not be. I have some friends who work in tech and they use an AI model for, amongst other things, summarizing information on their internal documentation. They’ve told me what their company is paying for the license to use this thing, and it’s eyewatering. also, uhh last time I checked, the company they got that license from does not turn a profit… so it appears to be too cheap at the moment.

    It might really be the case that it isn’t cheaper than just paying someone a normal salary to do that work, and it probably isn’t cheaper than just jamming the work being done by the AI now back onto preexisting employees (which is what they did before ~2 years ago anyway).

    The other thing that makes me feel this might not be unreasonable is that everyone on the team likes the tool, except their manager, who has thrown out the idea to cut it twice now (that I know of).















  • I think that he’s trying to rile up wealthy workers and small business owners who view their (better, but more expensive) private insurance as a luxury good and fear it might be made worse or more expensive if a national Healthcare scheme were implemented. I think it’s pretty clear he’s also flailing and making mistakes because of it, but we shouldn’t overlook that Trump does have a handle on what some slice of Americans interests are, and his stament there isn’t totally insane. Shit, it might just be a reflection of his own personal fears, but there’s absolutely a real constituency for it.


  • I often wonder who these are for. It makes no attempt to engage in an honest way with criticisms and hesitations that non-Democrat voters have so it doesn’t have any ability to persuade them. It also infantalizes the view points of both the republican opposition and anyone outside the two party system so it’s not helpful for self-critique for “centrists”. So as far as I can tell it’s just red meat aimed at Democrat supports to keep them all hopped up and believing that they are “the party of responsible governance” (in comparison to the Republicans) and therefore all criticism is invalid and everyone else is childish. Like, if this is supposed to be something else you really need a new way of engaging, because this “there is no alternative” shit is what turned me away from Democrats back in the Obama years.



  • Andres Malm suggests in his book “Fossil Capital” that part of the reason that fossil fuels (stocks of energy) are so profitable is that you can pick and choose when to extract and then again when to release the energy stored in them, which will always be more profitable than, for instance, wind and solar (flows of energy) because you can manipulate production to prevent over supply, and choose when to release energy instead of waiting for the energy to be available in the flow. The higher capability to profit means that they will remain more profitable than renewables long after any other sort of calculation other than “profitability” would favor the renewables (cost to produce, damage to the environment, ability to satisfy energy demand).


  • I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.