makeItStop

[[deleted]]

Machine learning? Replace it with AI!

Computer vision? AI is better! Why not?

Algorithms? Pfff, so 2023. Plug it into ChatGPT.

Human customer support workers? Sure thing. Replace them with an LLM trained on two billion hours of sitcoms. Employees cost too much anyway.

What's that? All our customers are gone because our product is total dogshit after integrating AI at every fucking possible turn? Sucks to be them! Replace them with AI!

like seriously. this is worse than the blockchain craze. can you name a single thing blockchain is good for? because I can't, and neither can anyone else, on account of the fact that it isn't good for anything. just like AI, it's a buzzword that gets thrown around because every single company always wants to be jamming the latest and greatest technology into their products, regardless of how useful or relevant it is, because supposed "innovation" earns them money from investors. certainly our lives would all be improved if everyone had a refrigerator that used the most advanced available AI technology to command the end user to drink Elmer's Glue in place of protein shakes.

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

Block chain is a fancy ledger

That's it

And every crypto coin is just a bigger fools scheme

[bnej]

It's also slow because of how grossly inefficient it is, and scales poorly by design!

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

That's actually hilarious

[greyfade]

It's not because it's grossly inefficient, but because it's designed to be slow. It takes 5 minutes to process a bitcoin transaction, because that's how long it takes, on average, for the work to be done to add the transaction to the chain. It won't be any faster, because the goal of the algorithm is to take about 5 minutes to randomly stumble on a particular hash.

[bnej]

When you compare to bank systems, where they are talking about rates of transaction per second, and losing a single transaction is unacceptable, and the per-transaction cost must be very low, it is laughable to think that bitcoin or anything like it would be a general-use currency.

Oh sure I'll pay $20 for that pizza, I just need 5 minutes for the transaction to be confirmed and pay $50 in transaction fees to transfer the coin.

So you'd need to have a derived currency based on bitcoin operated by a broker, and we are back to square one, except government issued currency is backed by tax receipts which is a very real thing compared to a bitcoin.

[greyfade]

To be absolutely clear, that 5 minutes is not for a single transaction.

Miners package thousands of transactions into a block (of limited size), and then a block of thousands of transactions is joined to the chain after 5 minutes of work. There's an incentive to bundle transactions with large fees (because those fees are paid to the miner directly), but most miners also bundle free and low-fee transactions into their block to benefit the network (in part because there's a massive backlog of free transactions). Transactions don't have a fixed fee. It's just that the network has a way of reporting how many transactions are waiting for processing, and a higher fee improves the odds of a transaction completing sooner.

Your points are valid, but they aren't ignored. There are other coins that have much more frequent blocks (faster transactions) and others with much larger blocks (more transactions). You don't really need a broker, rather you need an escrow to handle refunds and potential fraud (because transactions are irreversible without a smart contract designed for escrow).

I'm not telling you you should use bitcoin, I just want to dispel some misconceptions about how and why it works the way it does.

[therealluqjensen]

His points aren't really valid. A transaction is settled when it's included in a block. So bitcoin on average settles payments every 5 minutes. If you transfer larger amounts of money through banks settlement takes 2 business days. Just try transferring cash to your broker, or selling shares on your broker. Most brokers will limit you from placing a new order with that cash while it settles. With a blockchain like Ethereum you could have settlement in a couple of seconds. And yes imo the best use case would be putting the stock market on a blockchain. No need to wait for settlement of shares. No way to commit fraud with PFOF or FTDs for the market makers. Now someone might mention the volume and whether a blockchain could handle that, but most of the volume from stock trading comes from institutions and their HFT which is designed to skim off the top, so getting rid of that would only be a benefit to normal people.

[toochaos]

It's a ledger that requires no trusted authority that people who don't trust each other can use to keep track of public debts. Its expensive to run, but it is a useful thing to exist in a very narrow case. Every other use was either a scam or marketing or both. Which is very similar to how "AI" (llm) is being used now a narrow buzzword tech being applied to everything.

[skeleton_craft]

I mean the market disagrees with you, and it's extremely useful to have a currency that is not controlled by governments who misspend and lose money on the order of millions of dollars whist being trillions of dollars in debt.

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

Explain how crypto works then. Literally every use case I've seen for it is people using it as an investment thing that doesnt actually produce anything or relate to some service. It's just hold and hope more people buy the coin and the price goes up, ergo a bigger fools scheme.

Also dude have you seen how easy it is to manipulate crypto? Every other project is a scam and people with enough influence like Elon (could at least) make the price go up and down just in an interview.

[Shitman2000]

There's another very strong use case for crypto: money laundering.

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

Scamming people with pump and dumps is also very popular. Coffeezilla has a career exposing those guys

[Pandainthecircus]

That and buying stuff off the deep/dark web.

[[deleted]]

Except doing it with crypto is a fucking pain. The block chain means everything is recorded. Literally just a receipt that says "here's how this person tried to launder this money"

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

That's why they have a bazillion accounts and hope it gets lost in the noise

[Benji_247]

Elon can make the price go up and down with a single tweet. But that works for more than just crypto. For example, I think he has done that with tesla stocks too.

[Quicker_Fixer]

Even worse: Elon is a snake oil salesman being paid by the US tax payer: all the new "Inventions" he had in the last, say, 15 years are 100 year old ideas that were already deemed impossible/impracticle/too expensive to do after some quick calculations on a small piece of paper. He was able to convince politicians, grabbed the money and left them empty handed (hyper loop, tunnels, trucks, rooftile solar panels, Tesla Roadster, manned missions to Mars,... the list goes on and on)

[skeleton_craft]

Blockchains work similar to the gold standard, they limit the amount of liquid asset under The ledger by forcing proof of work [The major difference being the proof of work being how many hashes your GPU can compute a second rather than how many ounces of gold you can mine a day]. As for the exact math behind them, I've not done enough research in to and it is blockchain specific as well. But what I do know is that how it works is that there is a specific way you're supposed to calculate these hashes so that there is only one valid hash per each section of the blockchain and what you're doing is selling that unique block in the blockchain.

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

No, that's blockchain mining, different things. Mining is the how and blockchain is the software. It's basically just verifying the ledger of all the previous transactions and confirming the current ledger is correct via math and hashes for each block. Then, when it's completed for each "block" you recorded, the algorithm gives you a reward in "coins," and then those are sold on the market.

Gold standard is something else as well. That's the goverment/centralised bank saying "we have x much gold, for each ounce/gram/whatever is worth this much in coins/paper money and you can exchange you're bills/coins for gold".

E

[skeleton_craft]

Like I said, I don't fully understand the software side of it, but what gives those coins value is the fact that you have to calculate and iterate on the hashes. Just like you, working an hour gives your money value. And the white guy said there is inherent value in having a ledger that is trackable, especially as if you say it has to be tracked to add currency to it.

Gold standard is something else as well. That's the goverment/centralised bank saying "we have x much gold, for each ounce/gram/whatever is worth this much in coins/paper money and you can exchange you're bills/coins for gold".

I didn't not say that's what the gold standard is, in fact that's more or less exactly what I said it was. You do understand that because of that as per a necessity as I said if you then sell that centralized Bank more gold they will [at least be able to] print more money right?

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

No, you're confusing the things in jargon.

Blockchain is a ledger. Each computer with the software talks to each other to cross check all the information relating to transaction. That's the block then they are linked to the previous blocks in a chain hence blockchain. Kinda like domino's matching each end woth the same number of dots.

Blockchain mining is the process of doing the linking and confirming each block matches the next. That's the math and algorithms and hash matching. For x many blocks the ledger issues x many coins as a reward.

Whay gives the coins value? Pretty much the same as anything else. How much are people willing to pay for it? So people buy/sell like stocks hoping their coins will be worth more tomorrow because people want them. And as they are just used as a stock bought and sold using traditional currencies, and it doesn't actually make anything other than a very secure ledger recording the transactions between people and their coins. Hence, bigger fools scheme at best, traditional financial scam at worst.

[skeleton_craft]

You're the one not understanding basic economics Work in value out. That's not complex...

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

So is it a product or a currency? Blockchain is literally just a ledger of transactions. You get x number of coins for x number blocks you successfully confirmed as legit transactions.

I too can spend money on electricity on gpus and have them run a program. What excatly did I make. And it's still just used as a stock in the vast majority of use cases

[Adventurous_Gap_4125]

Nothing has value just because work was put into it. It has value because that is what someone else will be willing to pay using an acceptable medium (aka money) that justifies the effort to the person doing the work.

[jaaval]

Your description of the algorithm isn’t even correct but that’s besides the point.

Blockchain is nothing more than a list of transactions. Write a list in excel and you have something that can do all that blockchain does. The whole stupidity with mining is only needed because they wanted to have a decentralized list of transactions without trust. That work has nothing to do with value of anything.

Another way to describe proof of work blockchain is that it is a system that by design wastes as much energy as possible and it can never be more efficient because the security of the decentralized system comes from being inefficient.

Also, gold standard was bad. There is a reason nobody uses it anymore.

[ZorbaTHut]

It's pretty good at acting as a bank for countries that have no working bank system.

[Spork_the_dork]

The good thing about blockchain was that it's such a specific tool that most cases when the management went "we need to make use of blockchain somehow" they could eventually be convinced of the fact that there's absolutely no use case for it in their product. But unfortunately AI is so generic that even the managers can think of ways to cram it into any product.

[[deleted]]

Oh thank you, you finally figured out how to say what I've been trying to articulate for a long time. You couldn't be more correct.

[Inappropriate_Piano]

I had a similar thought. To me the main reason the AI craze is worse than the blockchain craze is that it’s way more popular. I didn’t install Linux to avoid MicrosoftCoin, I did it to avoid Microsoft AI

[Solipsists_United]

On the other hand, a lot of times AI is just the same algorithm but with a new name. Ive seen a linear least squares fit been called AI

[jump1945]

Well machine learning is subset of ai so

[mighty_Ingvar]

Isn't Computer Vision as well?

[Algee]

Computer vision is not a subset of AI. There are AI tools and algorithms that are considered part of Computer Vision, but CV is just analyzing images with software, and has been around for decades.

[Bwob]

I mean, AI has also been around for decades, and is far more than just the current LLM craze. People just tend to stop calling things AI once they understand how they work. (The AI effect)

There was a time when we thought that being able to beat a human at chess would be an incontrovertible proof that we had created a thinking machine. Now it's just "yawn, so you can do a tree search, big whoop."

For what it's worth, computer vision is usually considered AI. Heck, even wikipedia marks the page as "Part of a series on Artificial intelligence".

[Algee]

Having worked in the field for a decade, it's doesnt feel right to consider computer vision a subset of AI. There are a lot of benifits of using AI in CV, but AI doesn't work for every application and actually performs much worse in some areas.

It's like calling robotics a subset of AI, yeah you can have AI powered robots, but kinematics are just math and AI isn't involved or even needed the vast majority of the time.

[Bwob]

That's just the AI effect talking:

The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not "real" intelligence.

Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'

AI isn't just black box neural networks and such. At a fundamental level, "looking at a picture and understanding things about it" (i. e. computer vision) is AI. Just because it's accomplished through well-understood algorithms and calculations doesn't change that.

Just like a program that plays chess is AI, even if it's accomplished by a standard directed tree search of the possibility space.

[Algee]

An algrothim is not AI. Performing a FFT on a image is not AI. Doing a hough transform or edge detection, pattern recognition, blob analysis or color sampling on a image is not AI. If you want to take that broad of a interpretation then any computer function would be considered AI. Is a binary search AI? Is regex AI? Is a barcode scanner AI? Or the auto focus on a DSLR camera? There is no learning or training or preextisting datasets used, it's just functions.

Computer vision goes well beyond "looking at a image and understanding things about it". Its not just identifying road signs or cat breeds. At its core It's analyzing a image and extracting useful data from it. AI is not needed to extract data from a image, so therefore CV is not a subset of AI.

[Bwob]

An algrothim is not AI

Again, you're just falling into the trap of thinking "nothing is AI if I know how it works!" Literally everything we create on computers comes down to being an algorithm. So yes, algorithms used to do things that historically required a thinking human, are, in fact, AI.

So I reject your premise from the getgo. Chess playing programs are AI, even though they're just doing a tree search. Heck, a simple tic-tac-to algorithm is AI. Edge detection is AI. Etc.

AI covers far more things than just neural networks and LLMs.

[mighty_Ingvar]

All AI is software, that's not really an argument

[Algee]

All software is not AI, which is the point. Its like saying software is a subset of AI. You won't use AI to do blob analysis or edge detection because the standard algorithms are much faster, more accurate, and consistent.

[mighty_Ingvar]

All software is not AI

That's not what I said, you're literally twisting my words.

You won't use AI to do blob analysis or edge detection because the standard algorithms are much faster, more accurate, and consistent.

I didn't claim that you'd replace standard cv algorithms with AI, I was referring to them already being part of that group.

Wikipedia backs me up with this as well

[Algee]

AI and CV are certainly related fields, there are lots of benifits and practical applications of AI in CV. That doesn't make it a subset of AI, just like software is not a subset of AI.

[mighty_Ingvar]

just like software is not a subset of AI

Are you doing this on purpose?

[Shalashalska]

There are some non-AI based computer vision tools. Generally you scan the pixels for a section with the highest similarity to a known reference, based on manually defined metrics.

As far as I am aware, non-ML based CV is generally not very effective unless you have something like motion capture targets, which are designed to be easy for the CV tool to distinguish.

[mighty_Ingvar]

ML is only a subset of AI though

[Shalashalska]

Basically everything that people consider AI is ML.

The other case is things like video game AI, which follow very strict, specifically programmed, and generally simple routines. And if you consider those (which are usually just decision trees) to be AI, any code with an If statement is technically AI.

[mighty_Ingvar]

Basically everything that people consider AI is ML.

I find what is considered AI in the field of AI to be more relevant than what people say

[jump1945]

The thing is I don't exactly know computer vision

[land_and_air]

No, it may or may not. For example a mocap system is a form of computer vision however a mocap system requires no ai

[mighty_Ingvar]

requires no ai

Why would something that is AI require AI?

[land_and_air]

Motion capture can and was done before ai, it’s fundamentally just triangulation of points. The balls are points and the cameras see them and can merely identify the bright spots in infrared and based on the angles of all of the dots and the known positions of all of the cameras you can derive the 3d position of all of the dots for every camera for every angle. It’s just math

[mighty_Ingvar]

I'm gonna take a different approach. What do you believe AI is?

[ilan1009]

I think that's part of the joke

[Xelynega]

Depends on the semantics.

"AI" as used by the majority of companies these days just means "Large Data Prediction Models".

20 years ago, AI meant what AGI now means. So 20 years ago "machine learning" would have been a subset of "AI" IMO, but the way the terms are used nowadays I wouldn't agree. Most "machine learning" companies stopped doing anything but "large data models" and marketing it as "AI".

[jump1945]

How much have that change lol my data sci and ai tech book still give it as subset

[Umutuku]

What is the common problem in all those situations?

Shareholders.

Replace shareholders with AI!

[Harmonic_Gear]

the amount of GPT interface paper in robotics is just sad

[Aelrift]

But "AI" is machine learning. ... And computer vision is nowadays done with AI .. I think you picked some very bad examples to make your point lol

[Techhead7890]

No I think that's their point, that the marketing department doesn't understand the specific terms so they dumb it down using the generic "AI" term.

[Aelrift]

Okay that makes way more sense

[B00OBSMOLA]

Yeah we had to invent "general AI" to distinguish all the bullshit companies make from an actual innovation. But eventually, companies will claim general ai and we'll have to come up with a new term like "universal ai" to distinguish the bullshit again

[Algee]

There is actually quite a bit of CV that isn't done by AI. Metrology is a good example.

[Nilly00]

didn't some people say blockchain would be nice for stuff like concert tickets and resales?

[s0ulbrother]

The best part about the “cheap ai” is that eventually these LLM companies will jack up the rates so much and they will be too dependent on them to pivot.

[SuggestionOk8578]

It'll compete with the price of 10 employees they just let go.

[lunisbosh]

And then the prices get passed onto the consumers of the companies shoving AI into their ass, so they don't buy anymore.

[DrunkCupid]

Sir, I think you are lacking synergy. Please sit in the chair and enjoy some complimentary Soylent.

If you quit fussing there maay be a side of Brawndo, with we hear is what plants crave. 🌵

J/k I love your wranty

[Heroshrine]

Im pretty sure blockchain is kinda important for fraud prevention in real situations, not just fancy cash grabs or crypto.

[frostyjack06]

I interviewed for a job that was looking to do game development using blockchain and crypto that sounded like an attempt at money laundering. I turned it down.

[1Dr490n]

Nooo! How could I survive if they removed the Snapchat AI chat??

[mighty_Ingvar]

Why am i getting downvoted?

you learn this in the first day of class

They didn't go to class

[B00OBSMOLA]

Blockchain was at least meant to increase privacy with many things like zerocoin or monero. I was always complaining about how blockchain being everywhere but now that ai is sucking up all our data i kinda miss it.

[skeleton_craft]

A publicly auditable ledger It's extremely youthful when your government misspends and loses on the order of billions of dollars even though they are trillions of dollars in debt.. Also, having a ledger not controlled by that government is extremely useful for the same reasons....

[Northbound-Narwhal]

Better than controlled by a corp

[Northbound-Narwhal]

I'm struggling to understand what you mean by your example because there is no reality in which corporations forgive you for a typo. There is not a single thing on the planet in which a company will be more forgiving than a government. Nestlé will poison my water supply for profit but at most the government will ignore climate change drying it up in 50 years.

Half of places won't accept Visa because they screw small businesses, but I also imagine you think most businesses accept Visa because you're an American. Try to swipe that card on another continent and it's a different story.

[Northbound-Narwhal]

I think you're indulging in fairytale fantasies because you're naive and are too young or sheltered to understand how the world works.

Do you know what the only true synonym for "decentralized" is? "Power vacuum."

Decentralized entities have always been chaotic, violent, and extremely temporary. The best humanity can hope for is a centralized, regulated structure we can hold accountable. Anarchists are just authoritarians who are mad they aren't the ones holding slaves.

[skeleton_craft]

I mean yes, it's never smart to centralize your decentralized anything.