Thank you! They get trashed on all occasions here in the fediverse and I get the animosity since every corp and their mother now wants to ride the hype train. But I’ve kinda changed my mind about AI since having been recommended two AI tools that actually cite sources for their answers (Elicit and Perplexity). They’re an absolute godsend for the literature search on my Bachelor’s Thesis

Here’s how I see it. Gen AI and LLMs are really good for things that I won’t pay money for. It’s undoubtedly impressive tech, but it really deserves to remain as a cool research project rather than an actual functional product.

Oh yeah, definitely this. The economics will probably never allow it to be deployed at a scale where it will make any sort of difference.

Instead, it is used as an excuse to not take any action on climate change which is actually realistic, albeit hard.

Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.

I hate this one. People who have been following carbon capture for years know who is doing it sincerely and who is using it for greenwashing. Of course oil companies who say they’re doing carbon capture are doing greenwashing, no one should be surprised about that. Companies like Climeworks are doing real CCS.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Id go so far as to say SaaS in general. Small startups are paying $5000/month to send emails and we’ve come to the point where inboxes are monopolized and if you don’t pay up to a cloud provider your emails end up in spam.

Take this and repeat for everything. Monopolize, ratchet up the costs, profit.

Not apologizing for carriers, some are really on the edge of lying to consumers, but you have to separate the 2 parts that make 5G different from 4G.

1. Higher frequencies: means higher throughput but also shorter range (you can literally block that signal with your hand). Only works if your phone supports these higher frequency bands, you have to be in areas where the carrier has deployed cells supporting those, and you have to be close enough.
2. Increased efficiency: mostly affects carriers, you likely won’t notice the difference. Basically means, areas that were congested before with LTE will now see less congestion.

I found most 5G ads infuriating. If you know the tech, you understand whats going on and how they aren’t telling the complete story. If you don’t know the tech, you’ll think, “Yay, higher speeds.” Nope…

From what I understand, 5G was first about increased capacity. Increased speed was a secondary point. It optimizes how multiple users can share the same bands, and adds use of higher frequency bands that don’t propogate as far. So for very high congestion areas, they can deploy smaller cells and which each can maintain higher speeds per user. I think the “faster” part was just marketing to get users to buy into the new technology. I mean I think that was the intent. Something about the implementation needs tuning though.

Works great here with almost 100% coverage

that technology doesn’t even make sense

It ain’t just your country… 5g speeds marketing was total bullshit.

So if that was the lie… Why did they shill it so hard?

It’s totally possible to make cool mobile apps, but most of the ones you see are just a big company porting their website.

For me, the sweet spot is in plug in hybrids, as long as you actually, you know, plug them in. You can cover all your daily commute and grocery getting 100% electric and then if you need to take a longer trip occasionally, you’re covered by the gasoline engine. We use like one tank of gas every 4 months on ours.

My electric skateboard still blows my mind. It’s crazy how well it works as compared to gasoline skateboards.

I think the phone industry is trying very hard to look interesting but it’s been a while since anybody cared? Or is it really just me?

I feel like it’s hyped just enough. It does have the potential to revolutionize computing but we have no practical applications for it at the current point in its development. There’s only so much you can hype something that can’t even act as a simple calculator better than a handheld calculator can.

The two nuclear developmemts I’m watching closest are the test molten salt reactor in Oak Ridge, TN and just recently heard about a new permit to build one for Abilene Christian University in Texas.