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Essential oils. Homeopathy. Chiropractic. Reiki. Juice cleanses. Perineum sunning. Internet accelerator software. Iridology. Faith healing. Organic food. Oil pulling. Gold plated digital audio cables.
Majority of the “AI inside” software and solutions. It’s in a bubble and everyone is throwing crap to a wall hoping it sticks.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Do these companies realize that literally no one is asking for this shit? I also saw an ad for a computer mouse that had AI inside it. Whatever that means.
Don’t knock it too quickly. I thought like you but one evening I was a little tipsy and started chatting with a PDF document. Let’s just say things got a heated and now we’re engaged.
Oddly enough, that’s one of the few functions I’ve found the LLMs useful for. Looking through big pdfs for specific information, lots of times “ctrl+f” doesn’t do the trick because the exact term I’m looking for doesn’t appear. Worse sometimes it’s a phrase that could be in there under many synonyms. Using the LLM to find the actual info is pretty nice, it just isn’t “AI”.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents
I belive you got that notification but I honestly have no idea what it even means.
It’s from the Adobe Acrobat app. Basically you can ask it to give you a summary of whatever document you’re reading.
“AI” is the new “blockchain”. It’s a solution looking for a solid problem to tackle, with some niche applications
I just wish people had long enough memories to see the cycle for terms like these. Some new word catches vogue, companies fall over themselves trying to find ways to implement them for shareholders and consumers who have no idea what they actually represent. As that fades, a new term arises… it’s sad.
And virtual reality gets a free revival every other technology, while we’re at it.
I’m predicting VR coming back into the limelight, try again, shortly after everyone loses interest in AI.
Also, I’m still pissed that flying cars aren’t in the limelight more. I was promised daily updates, and I’m not seeing them. That’s the biggest proof that the media is completely disconnected.
We have flying cars. They’re called helicopters, and they suck for most activities
Good point.
I’m willing to accept a reality where the science magazines are constantly excited about every development in helicopter technology.
I mean, at least Ai has SOME useful applications, the blockchain was just wasting energy for some numbers.
Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.
It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.
In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.
useful and important
solution in search of a problem
Mhhh
Blockchain also has problems its solving I recon the whole not bullshit was a psyop by thr us government cos finances that they couldn’t have absolute control over would allow the people to bs free. I recon monero is the best as of present especially since its actually anonymous payments.
My research was literally on AI back in college. Most AI solutions are just basic algorithms and don’t use real AI solutions. There’s a huge difference.
Watched a bit of a video of a guy that went to Computex and asked any vendor with AI plastered somewhere what they were doing with it. Most spouted some meaningless word salad and a few literally shrugged.
I can’t wait to get a Smart AI refrigerator that tells me I have a bunch of food that isn’t really in there even when I didn’t ask it to.
I am so over hearing about AI. It’s getting to the point that I can assume anyone dropping the term at work is an idiot that hasn’t actually used or utilised it.
It’s this LLM phase. It’s super cool and a big jump in AI, but it’s honestly not that good. It’s a handy tool and one you need to heavily scrutinise beyond basic tasks. Businesses that jumped on it are now seeing the negative effects of thinking it was magic from the future that does everything. The truth is, it’s stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective. It is a tool, not a solution—at least for now anyways.
There’s one good use case for me: produce a bigload of trialcontent in no time for load testing new stuff. “Make 2000 yada yada with column x and z …”. Keeps testing fun and varied while lots of testdata and that it’s all nonsense doesn’t matter.
I’ve found that testing code or formulas with LLM is a 50/50 now. Very often replying “use function blabla() and such snd so” very detailed instructions while this suggested function just doesn’t exist at all in certain language asked for… it’s still something I’ld try if I’m very stuck tho, never know.
Very often replying “use function blabla() and such snd so” very detailed instructions while this suggested function just doesn’t exist at all in certain language asked fo
I’ve noticed this a lot too—especially for M. But even though it makes up a function, it sometimes inspires a more optimised idea/method that can be more flexible for future datasets.
But most times it starts to massacre things and disregard prompted parameters or even producing an identical suggestion immediately after being told not to, why not to, and reconfirming original parameters of the query.
Some times punching in the same prompts five times for five iterations produces completely different results, but one may be on the right track and I can code the rest. It helps to set it’s personality first, so it’s sharing ideas it’s seen out there, rather than trying to please.
At the least, it’s a big time saver. Gone are the days where I get a few days spare to work on solving a complex problem through trial and discovery, so it’s an excellent tool for reducing testing time and speeding up the route to an optimised method.
The truth is, it’s stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective.
So, like a hammer. A very expensive, environment-destroying hammer.
Genuinely curious, how does it destroy the environment?
Massive energy consumption. Huge datacenters and not enough green energy. Now they want to build small nuclear plants. Without talking about the waste problem.
So AI uses energy, and it’s how we are choosing to provide that energy is destructive to the environment? So AI isn’t itself destructive.
Ah yeah, just choose a different energy souce. Simples.
Have you seen the growth in % of renewable (incl, nuc biofuel and waste) electricity generation over the past 30 years. (36% i in 1990 , dropped to about 33% in late 2000s up to 38% recently) this is global, IEA figures.
There have been two years since 1990 when renewable electricity output has grown faster than total electricity demand. 2008/9 recession and 2020 covid. The only way renewables will come close to meeting current electricity consumption is actually to start reducing those demands.
If we start transerffing gas( domestic heating), and petrol( low-capacity road transportation) onto the electricitry grid then the scale and speed of renewables needs to ramp up inconcievably quickly - it has grown fast over the past decade, but it hasn’t been cheap nor has it been fast enough to keep up with current demands.
TBH I don’t know where AI lines up next to EVs in scale of potential extra demand, probably lower but still an added demand (unless it can substitute for other stuff and improve efficiency somehow).
Electricity source is not really a choice, it is resource and tech constrained many sources are needed; the cheapest fuels will continue to be in the mix used so long as demand keeps increasing so fast.
Maybe, If you ran all AI in peooles houses in cold countries in winter, it’d substitute for heating - that’d be one way it could reduce its impact. Or maybe it can get its act together and spark widespread, frequent, deep, long lasting recessions in economic activity.
Maybe renewables is not the solution to our energy needs if it can’t scale up like we thought it could. Conservation of energy is not the answer. We as a society must find new, cleaner, sources of energy. Maybe AI can help us do it.
Their waste is less destructive than coal plant though. Perhaps this could be a silver lining to finally get nuclear back in action and get closer to dropping coal once and for all.
Tbf the energy issues are getting better, or at least there are some more efficient models being created. Back in April there was a version of Llama that only needed 8gb to almost match GPT4
That’s actually a pretty good analogy.
I think more like discovering making fire or something. 90% of all the energy burnt is people worshipping it as it blazes away, never actually fulfilling any practical use except being marvelous to be around.
But once the forest is all chopped down, people are forced to understand fire and realise a couple small logs in a contained place was all they needed to have it be incredibly effective.
Oh, but that’s too hard. It’s magic right now. All hail the AI bonfire!
I equate an AI to an intern. It’s useful for some stuff but if I’m going to attach my name to it I’m going to review it and probably change a lot about it.
notice how all of those crypto features were quietly removed from platforms after people realised they were paying millions for some numbers, i think that will happen with Ai
It’s even better than that. A lot of companies are taking NVIDIA’s pre-built workflows, running their data through them and selling the results as their own AI. “We build proprietary RAG AI!”
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn’t the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there’s a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while “hi-res” audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren’t capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say “the placebo effect is a helluva drug.”
which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
50 GB for a BRD rip is one that is not re-encoded, that’s a straight rip from the disk.
50GB for the simple dual layer discs. You can theoretically reach 100GB with triple layer disks. The largest BDRip I have is 90GB for the Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Edit: UHD Blu-ray only supports dual and triple layer disks, not quad. Quad layer discs do exist though, with up to 128GB of capacity.
You use something called VMAF to manage this 50GB problem.
If you can figure out, you just won the lottery. Wasting space is not necessary even for archival purpose.
Right you are, but don’t start telling everyone so I can’t silently download my lossless albums from Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz anymore.
It’s for all the pets at homes hearing the same audio, now with original insects and birds outside and mice in the walls.
True. There’s something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.
What genres are your bats listening to?
Goth.
All you really need is the Nyquist frequency of human hearing to know. That’s a good breakdown for audiophiles I’m sure but it is broadly as simple as the Nyquist frequency.
I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
i think hi res is for professional work. If you’re going to process, modify, mix, distort the audio in a studio, you probably want the higher bit depth or rate to start with, in case you amplify or distort something and end up with an unintended artefact that is human audible. But the output sound can be down rated back to human levels before final broadcast.
O couse if a marketing person finds out there is a such a thing as “professional quality”. . . See also “military spec”, “aerospace grade”
Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you’ll want a higher sampling frequency so you don’t end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless
It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
I think this is the case where certain people simply can’t see it here the difference.
I collect video game and movie soundtracks and the main difference I can hear between a 320kbps VS a FLAC that’s in the 1000kbps range is not straight up “clarity” in the sense that something like an instrument is “clearer” but rather the spacing and the ability to discern the difference where instruments come from is much better in a Hi-Res file with some decent wired headphones (my pair is $200). All this likey doesn’t matter much though when most users stream via Spotify which sounds worse than my 320kbps locally and people are using Bluetooth headphones at lower bitrates since they don’t have better codec compatibility like aptX and LDAC.
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A lot of it will depend on your output device; cheap headphones will wreck audio quality.
I remember the bad old days when .mp3 files for streaming were often 128kbps (or less!); I could absolutely hear audio artifacts on those, and it got significantly worse with lower bitrates. 320kbps though seems to be both fairly small, and I can’t personally tell the difference between that and any lossless formats.
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
256/320 MP3s also do well. 128 MP3s not so much.
Yeah they do, although CBR performs noticeably worse than VBR with Lame MP3. As I mentioned elsewhere, MP3 @ V0 or V1 VBR sounds just as good as the above. I just personally haven’t used MP3 for years because the newer codecs are more efficient.
VBR is always preferable over CBR, no matter video or audio encoding. I use OPUS a lot. Also YouTube providing OPUS 160 VBR as audio stream option for all of its content is very handy.
Yeah, I’m thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it’s just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
Extra expensive digital hifi cables.
Blue light filter on glasses. When I got my glasses, the lady said they come with blue light filter for free, and I said, “I don’t want that, my job requires that I see colors accurately, so I can’t have any sort of color filter.” She said don’t worry, it doesn’t filter any colors. Ok, then what the fuck is it exactly?
If you run a website: Paid SSL/TLS certificates. Free ones like Let’s Encrypt and ZeroSSL are just as good, and can be automatically renewed.
Trickle down economics
Quite literal. The Chlorine Dioxide Solution scam came to me through a podologist a year or so ago. What makes this outstanding to me, it’s they succeeded at having some academic backup, though, completely out of context. It’s an absolute rabbit hole, you are warned.
IPhone.
Apple products
Software/game DRM/anticheat (as a service/product) that involves code obfuscation and/or kernel driver.
MS Windows
Subscriptions.
Most antidepressant usage. Many of those people do not have a chemical problem in their brain, they are just unhappy due to all the societal problems. You can’t treat social problems with a chemical.
Upward mobility
