It’s pointless anymore to try infoposting on reddit.

Take for example the soldering subreddit. The info on that sub is that you must slather everything in flux in order to solder properly. A guy posted yesterday citing 40 years of experience, saying that’s not how he’s done it. The comments are a mess.

Another post today, someone asks about air filtering the solder smoke. The consensus in the comments is it’s not a big deal. You can literally measure the particulate matter yourself to see how bad it is. Basically an average residential room size, say 100-200 sq/ft. You’ll basically hotbox yourself with smoke.

Another one that’s seen less often but the false idea persists. It’s that capacitors never short and burn out. I don’t know how or why that false idea floats around, but I’ve seen it over the years. I’ve replaced tons of caps that spontaneously combusted. Both electrolytic and SMD caps. Sometimes they just fail and short. No other fault.

Reddit is full of bad info. It’s site that relies on word of mouth and popularity contest. You do not build a knoweldge base of technical information this way. You’re getting an entropic game of telephone. That’s all reddit ever was and ever will be. It’s flawed paradigm by default.

A paradigm that lemmy is built off. So don’t you all be getting the idea that good knowledge is going to be getting sourced from here either.

Something has been lost over the past 15-20 years. It’s like nobody has the mindset anymore of the world wide web era. Where’s the curiosity. Where’s the discovery. Where’s the malleability to find something new to you and try it. Inertia has locked them into subservience.

The internet flipped upside down. It was new frontier for you to explore. Now you lay there as it spoon feeds you.

People have been quantified into units. So they can be packaged and sold as datasets. They’re boxed into what the ad industry categorizes them as. This person is an Apple News user, reddit user, and Youtube watcher. That user is on Twitter and Facebook. Much more fine grained than just what platforms they use of course. They told the system what they like and the system built a reinforced box around them. And then charge them for an air tube for good measure.

We are far gone from the days where a user would be so excited to post a wall of text about using a thing that another user doesn’t know about. These days the reaction is more likely to be,“Who are? Who sent you?!? What’s your real motive???” Skepticism. Distrust. Paranoia.

Often these days, outright indifference. People know these platforms fuck with their minds. With public conscious. They mould the world we live in. People don’t care. The world chose to be Cypher. They wanted to be plugged into the Matrix.

Though that’s not really a good analogy because outside the system isn’t a desolate landscape. The outside world is still normal.

Tech devoured everything as it does. Put some funding back in shop class, arts, home ec., etc. That was the issue around here going back decades.

They defunded all those things here. Back then my high school got a ton of fancy Apple computers. Those went unused except for the IT guys fucking around with them and never actually deploying them for some reason. Only the aging Windows PCs were used by students. That was the only funding being spent anymore.

The world is more than just the big tech industry. It’s no wonder so many trades professions are aging out into oblivion. We listened to techbros who are converting the world into digital zombies.

Give the kids things to do again other than screen time. The rest of the entire curriculum has long ago been gutted down to pure theory. Of course they’re bored to death, and searching for stimulation on their screens.

Have you seen how it is lately? It’s a glorified tabloid. It’s largely used for pop culture gossip. People know it’s slop, and they don’t care. They use it anyways.

Reddit is far from the days of being a modernized tech BBS. At least 10 years removed from it. In it’s current incarnation it’s an interactive daily newspaper with Bat Boy stories on the front cover. That’s what they’re selling. And it does sell.

The conspiracy to destroy American institutions happened in broad daylight.

Anyone remember why they became Meta in the first place? I don’t exactly but there was huge news at the time that they were burying. I think it was a whistle blower that was exposing this exact story or something like it.

He’s too cheap to pay for better data annotators. I heard a few weeks ago that I’m getting a fraction of what others are paid at other firms for the same work.

That doesn’t matter from a user perspective. You can’t expect the layman to know how dangerous a simple widget is.

They’re a key part of the moon missions. The stock will go off once that’s in the new cycle. Elon will also do his media buys to make him look like he did all the work.

KDE has a history of doing that. Plasma widgets are a gaping security hole. You can poke a hole through root. I’m pretty sure you can traverse up the JS object hierarchy from a widget and modify the whole desktop in anyway you want. At least at some point this was possible. A widget can and has deadlocked plasmashell from even loading. Their response was basically “works as intended” and closed the issue.

The problem will go away if they post enough “china bad” on social media.

It could already be happening. The likelihood could even be higher than not.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be a single event. There are already AI systems being sold in healthcare. Even pre-LLMs. Who’s to say these system are being closely monitored and studied. There could statistically be patients who have died or been maimed who otherwise wouldn’t if they had real human professionals instead of someone who used a system that was sold on the doctors office.

Humans are error prone. That goes for both sides of these jobs. I mean the engineers who run these projects.

It’s important to not get carried away with the allure of the tech industry. Especially the LLM hype. The people making these LLM models are human too. They’re not unicorn tech wizards.

I’ve seen projects where the examples they gave us on what to submit were AI slop. They did not notice. By far the most common error with them is unclear and constantly changing guidelines. I’ve seen projects where their training videos were made by someone whispering nervously into the microphone. We had to crank the volume to hear them stumble over their words while trying to explain the project.

Ultimately most of these jobs exist to harvest data for projects that aren’t that important. Forget about AGI or whatever. Think more along the lines of your weekend project. There’s investor money right now so they have to use it.

They won’t be paying people (read: impoverished third world countries) more than a few dollars an hour to grind out mountains of training data to feed into models. They’re not chasing unicorns here. It’s just slop generating LLMs. There’s investor money so they have to use it. Why would they split more of the loot with clickworker tier peons.

Here’s a bonus anecdote. One of the projects showed us literal shit in their training materials. A wet turd. I think it must have been a disgruntled employee. After hearing about how much Facebook employees hate working in the AI division, I think it must have been.

I really doubt the typical tech worker has that much conviction in LLMs themselves. It’s just what’s in style right now and it’s what’s getting them richer.

People are scared because they think they could lose their jobs. Even if they say out loud they don’t think it will happen and that they think AI is useless. They need AI to fail for peace of mind.

If anything they’re most at risk for losing their job due to a stubborn refusal to adopt technology. What people don’t realize is that we don’t live in an ideal world where the optimal solution is the only way. Even if LLMs are less than perfect, there’s a scenario where it remains commonplace because it’s what’s in style. The stubborn abstainers will find themselves left behind when everyone else is leveraging it to complete mundane tasks much faster and checking the work.

We already live in a world full of cumbersome enshittified technology. There’s nothing we can do but make do with what we have. At this point people are dreaming if they think the AI bubble will pop and the technology will be shelved. It’s not going away. It’s already demonstrated usefulness. That it’s not turning a profit is a different story.

Maybe some others are simply scared that they don’t have the expertise to check the work of LLMs in the first place.

It’s a strange phenomenon where people couldn’t fathom complex large scale computing before LLMs. Talk of botnets were met with extreme skepticism to the point of inexplicable naivety. Now that people think LLMs are almost like AGI, they’ve swung to the other extreme. There are those who think a post that is more than a few sentences must be computer generated.

Lemmy has bots too. Mostly those ones used to repost image macros and screenshots from other social media sites.

There’s a stark difference before and after the existence of those types of accounts.

That was my experience playing with the older neural net models back in the day. Usually the initial models and datasets are nearly the best it will get. Trying to feed it more data or trying to tweak the model only gains marginal improvements. Unless you’ve made a critical error in the initial work or miraculously happen upon a much better dataset then not much will change. I mean the whole premise that the machine finds the optimal solution within the limits of its capabilities. Beyond that you’re, rolling the RNG until the output lands on a result you like better, but the capabilities remain the same.

That’s why I suspect LLMs have peaked and these companies must be applying smoke and mirrors to keep the this iteration of AI going. There’s not going to be another leap forward until scientists put out another revolutionary paper for everyone to copy. That seems to be the cadence of AI.

The modern day banality of evil.

Well that’s disappointing. Is there a better brand in their price range?

Confirmed by whom?

spez. You can look it up yourself. Not going to be your personal chatbot.