They’ll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.

See the rest of my post: the people who are making it and why they’re making it.

I have no complaints about the people making LLMs that can spot tumors better than humans can, but I 100% agree with every single one of your points. The grifters and the AI fad of venture capitalism are ruining a useful technology and ruining the world and society along with it for a quick buck.

The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.

The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.

It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.

Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.

Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.

I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.

Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.

“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”

Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.

A lot of this started in the US because the big telecom companies were paid a lot of money by the government to roll out broadband in the middle of the country, where customers are spread out enough that they didn’t want to bother building the infrastructure, but they took the money and did none of the work. So, these communities did it themselves. Some of them literally burying fiber optics cables by hand through their farm fields.

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago about how this is feasible on the neighborhood level now at potentially better speeds and cheaper than the telecom companies with a satellite connection that people can use via a wi-fi network across the neighborhood.

Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”

I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.

I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.

And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.

People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.

Didn’t it also have something to do with a brand deal? Like the suit got extra funding for the movie by making a deal with Duracell to have their batteries in the movie or something.

Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.

I think you’re right that they were Apple only for a few years at least.

This is what Tumblr did too after they banned porn. It couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs.

Affinity is also on Windows - at least Designer is. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now.

That’s what I was thinking. Deep fakes have existed since photo manipulation was invented, and Adobe hasn’t cared one iota about it before. The only reason I can see for them to care now is if they think they can get in legal trouble for what people create with their products.

That’s what I was thinking. Apart from the porn locked up in the Disney vault, big companies aren’t in the business of making porn. And the companies that do aren’t going to be interested in deep fakes. The people who are using Photoshop to create porn are small fries to Adobe. Deep fake porn has been around as long as photo manipulation has, and Adobe hasn’t cared before.

Bearing that in mind, I don’t think this policy has anything to do with AI deep fakes or porn. I think it’s more likely to be some new revenue source, like farming data for LLM training or something. They could go the Tumblr route and use AI to censor content, but considering Tumblr couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs, I think that’s one fuck up with a major company away from being litigation hell. The only reason that I think would make sense for Adobe to do this because of deep fakes is if they believe that governments are going to start holding them liable for the content people make with their products.