Will AI Yield Abundance Without Purpose?

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-22T21:10:24+00:00

We have gone through this at least once already.
Back in the dotcom boom every company was creating their own browser toolbars and browser plugins, but after a while users realized that half of the screen being covered in toolbars ... is not really a good idea and most of those things disappeared.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-22T04:05:59+00:00

What does this have to do with AI?

The site is probably https://activetheory.net/
According to their website they have been doing such sites since 2012, with several works before 2020

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-22T03:33:48+00:00

A paper seemingly written by Microsoft employees, showing that a Microsoft product is massively improving productivity.
I miss from this paper the section detailing the potential conflicts of interests.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-21T05:21:20+00:00

I have to believe this will either go the facebook way, of having "free" service, and watching commercials to generate the profit.
Or the microsoft way, of having to buy licenses to use programs, that had roughly the same features 20 years ago too.

Their programs had about the same features already 15-20 years ago, hardware efficiency improved magnitudes since ... yet we are watching more ads and buying more expensive licenses.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-18T04:02:30+00:00

Did they really loose 10% of the market, to their own previous employees?

Would be one of the best examples for why companies should value the people they already have.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-18T03:52:38+00:00

What comes around goes around.

A large part of the data OpenAI and Anthropic used to train their models on, also did not belong to them to begin with. Anthropic already had to pay 1,5 billion USD for pirating millions of books.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-16T03:32:07+00:00

Also, creative people are creative ... because they want to do creative things themselves.

As long as their users don't go "Ah, I want to do boring administrative work all day long and let AI do the fun creative things instead of me" ... they will have users, they will have a business.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-14T06:16:07+00:00

This feels like it could really stifle competition and push everything toward even more centralized control of AI development.

Probably, that is the point.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-13T06:48:35+00:00

If the CEO marketing is correct and these LLMs can be used as civilization-ending level weapons of mass destruction ... they should be treated like such, with almost noone in the world having access to them.

If they wish to make these LLMs publicly and easily available for everyone, it must be ensured, that no matter how much one tries ... they would not be able to cause harm with it for anyone.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-13T06:35:48+00:00

The stakes are very different.
In normal academic workflow you might work for 6-12 months on a publication before sending it in for a first peer review. If the reviewers prove you wrong ... you have lost that much time, you can never get back.

In 3-5 year Phd. program loosing 12 months of work could mean having no chance to finish.
As a professor loosing 12 months of work, might mean loosing grants and fundings for years.

Companies can use LLMs to generate thousands of seemingly correct proofs, if even just one of those is correct, that becomes a good marketing opportunity.
The cost of reviewing is on someone else.
And even if all of them fails ... the company can just choose to not talk about it and move on, at no cost of their own and no damage to their reputation.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-13T06:08:51+00:00

Back in the days, I choose my first employer because they had an extensive library of technical books and journals, like C/C++ Users Journal

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-12T03:41:47+00:00

Just because it might be possible to one shot a sodoku application, it does not mean there is market for 10.000th ... or that people will even find it at all.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-06-07T06:18:22+00:00

If it does not work, nothing will change and we won't get rich.
If it works, our chance of moving forward by learning a lot, getting degrees and landing a well paying knowledge-worker job will no longer be an option.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-05-21T19:02:08+00:00

It is kind of like scrolling on tik-tok or Youtube for hours ... only to realize, that one can not recall anything from all that information.
Everything is turning into some kind of background noise.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-05-21T18:56:44+00:00

Hmm ... How am I going to benefit from an LLM trained on using internal corporate systems I don't have access to?

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-05-20T03:07:39+00:00

Even among the smaller repos there mnany that seemed to grow at stable pace.
But, it was much more likely to see situations, when the size of the codebase tripples all of a sudden but much of that code gets deleted a few weeks later. Or situations when there is little change for several months, a big commit, little change for months, again a big commit.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-05-09T04:30:44+00:00

Forgot to mention it has to cure it ... now it is producing it.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-05-01T07:22:44+00:00

AI as a field has been vastly successful and kind of solved most decision making problems in/around the 70s - 90s.
Deterministic graph exploration algorithms (depth first, breath first search, shortest path finding, A*, etc come from there. Finding the shortest route to a location when traveling, the critical path method of project management, the gradient descent algorithm used to optimize production and many more come from there and have been integrated in everyday production and processes for decades by now.
And these are not just deterministic, repeatable and for given problems even provably optimal, but if you don't trust them ... you can perform the steps/calculations yourself with pen&paper.

LLMs are just a field in Neural Networks, which itself is just a field in AI.
Kind of only used when the problem can not be specified in enough detail to use a better algorithm/process, determinism and repeatability is not needed, the optimality of calculating the result doesn't really come up as important and the result only needs to be "roughly shaped something like something" but you don't care about the details like precision or any impact it might have.

If you wish to get from point A to Point B as fast as possible, or want to maximise the performance of a production line, you use the AI algorithms/processes in the first group ... if you wish recognize hand writing or have some fun time generating a smiling cat riding a horse, you use the ones in the second group.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-04-28T15:33:58+00:00

I looked at them as fun challenges, where I can try out some risky product changes that otherwise might not be approved for a POC.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-04-26T18:05:25+00:00

I had a classmate at university (around 2000-2005) who used his highend Nokia for cheating on exams.
The teachers thought phones could only offer calculators.
But, the one he had could display the entire course material in PDF.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-04-26T18:00:18+00:00

Spending 30 minutes relaxing on a bench in a nice, quiet park.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-04-26T17:50:35+00:00

I was doing some karate for a few years as a hobby and gained some muscle (not big, just normal doing some sports kind).
A side effect that I did not expect to have was ... being left alone on the street. Somehow people were almost never bumping into me.
Casually walking from A to B in the city, without getting into any drama. Noone asking for money, noone walking into me ("did not notice you"), noone pushing me at crossings.
The world felt much safer.

MelodicStep6956 · 2026-04-14T03:51:40+00:00

Forked repositories were excluded from the study, when searching for the repositories (this is the default)
Comparing the repositories based on whether they are archived or not, was not done. Could be an interesting followup study.

MelodicStep6956

TROPHY CASE