• MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
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      15 hours ago

      I kid you not, I took ML back in 2014 as a extra semester in my undergrad. The complaints then were the same as complaints now: too much power requirement, too many false positives. The latter of the two has evolved into hallucinations.

      If normal people going “I made this!” is not convincing enough that it is easily identified then who is this going to replace? you still need the right expert right? all it creates is more work for experts to come and fix broken AI output.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        14 hours ago

        The complaints then were the same as complaints now

        Despite results improving at an insane rate, very recently. And you think this is proof of a problem with… the results? Not the complaints?

        People went “I made this!” with fucking Terragen. A program that renders wild alien landscapes which became generic after about the fifth one you saw. The problem there is not expertise. It’s immense quantity for zero effort. None of that proves CGI in general is worthless non-art. It’s just shifting what the computer will do for free.

        At some point, we will take it for granted that text-to-speech can do an admirable job reading out whatever. It’ll be a button you push when you’re busy sometimes. The dipshits mass-uploading that for popular articles, over stock footage, will be as relevant as people posting seven thousand alien sunsets.

        • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
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          13 hours ago

          the results do keep improving of course. But it’s not some silver bullet. Yes, your enthusiasm is warranted… but you peddle it like the 2nd coming of christ which I don’t like encouraging.

          • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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            1 hour ago

            I’ve done no such thing.

            I called it half-decent, spooky, and admirable.

            That turns out to be good enough, for a bunch of applications. Even the parts that are just a chatbot fooling people are useful. And massively better than the era you’re comparing this to.

            We have to deal with this honestly. Neural networks have officially caught on, and anything with examples can be approximated. Anything. The hard part is reminding people what “approximated” means. Being wrong sometimes is normal. Humans are wrong about all kinds of stuff. But for some reason, people think computers bring unflinching perfection - and approach life-or-death scenarios with this sloppy magic.

            Personally I’m excited for position tracking with accelerometers. Naively integrating into velocity and location immediately sends you to outer space. Clever filtering almost sorta kinda works. But it’s a complex noisy problem, with a minimal output, where approximate answers get partial credit. So long as it’s tuned for walking around versus riding a missile, it should Just Work.

            Similarly restrained use-cases will do minor witchcraft on a pittance of electricity. It’s not like matrix math is hard, for computers. LLMs just try to do as much of it as possible.