• 1 Post
  • 1.4K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 16th, 2025

help-circle
  • The contribution of AI to greenhouse emissions is tiny compared to the actually significant contributors - like transportation and rearing animals.

    And with that 90% of people have stopped reading and thing I’m an AI booster so congrats for still being here.

    I also think the utility isn’t going to be for techbros primarily. Software developers can already do the things that LLMs are good at, and are better than LLMs in important areas. But think about writing a 500-line script to extract data from a database and do some simple data analysis on it, then displaying it. Software developers, again, can do that easily (it’d probably take a few hours - more if it’s more complex or if they polish it).

    But most people cannot. Yet there are a lot of situations in business or in government which could benefit from being able to say, “show me the average of (X) over the last 10 years, stratified by variables A, B, C.” And AI will do write a script to do it (so the actual computation is not done with unreliable bullshit) with ease. The script will have way too many comments, may well be laid out in a nonsensical way, and may reinvent the wheel stupidly, but in my limited experience of asking the LLM we have at work to do things like this for giggles and because I’m not paying for tokens, it will do it correctly.

    I’m not saying to buy the hype, but if you think it’s useless for everything but “making it easier for some techbros” you’re just as immune to evidence as the hypesters are.




















  • Right here on Lemmy, someone argued with me for weeks that the mathematical conventions on order of operations can be proven, and that all calculators obey them. You can find calculator manuals with explicit examples that don’t obey the conventions, and as a one time mathematician, his attempts at proofs are pathetic. Anyone who persists with him no matter how polite, will be faced with rudeness and condescension.

    I found the guy on Mastodon where he peddles the full suite of common mathematical wrongness (he thinks 0.999… ≠ 1) and recently he tried to do an inductive proof in an “educational” thread and got completely schooled by someone else. He was unable to understand that he was wrong.

    He claims to be a maths teacher, but his ability ran out at school and he’s to arrogant to realise.