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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’d have to ask a real expert, I’m more of what you’d call an armchair expert.

    As I understand it, horses are a species that can be domesticated. That means with relatively benign actions (intensives with food, corrections with hitting with a paddle or small whip) the animal can be made to do what you want it to do. And usually once a horse is domesticated, they will stay that way and won’t become aggressive. However this isn’t universal, not all equine species can be domesticated, it’s just that humans only keep the most useful around. We’ve also done so for so long, selective breeding is probably a huge factor in this. Horses can be dangerous as well, but far less so than bears. A horse can throw a human, kick or step on them, but usually that’s not enough to kill someone. Bears can do anything a horse can and on top of that they are usually bigger, have sharp teeth and sharp claws. Another aspect is probably that horses are prey animals where bears are predators and pretty high up in the food chain at that. Bears probably hunted humans, before humans invented stuff like fences and fire and stuff.

    Bears can’t be domesticated, they can only be scared so much they will obey. The techniques used are usually very brutal, with a significant amount of animals not even surviving the process. They won’t ever truly obey, only when they are afraid. So they will be abused continually, to keep them afraid. And even then, when the animal sees an opportunity to strike back or see something as prey, they will act upon that instinct.

    But in the end I personally don’t think humans have the right to domesticate any kind of animal and raising something living with the express purpose of using/abusing/consuming them is morally incorrect. So in that case there is no difference between a horse and a bear. But from my experience with people who hold horses these days, they are more like pets, being loved and cared for rather than working animals. So it is a spectrum and bears are more on very much not OK side as compared to horses.


  • Because they are wild animals that don’t lend to domestication very well. All so called “tame” bears have been tortured to get them to behave. And even then they don’t always behave and leads to them getting killed because they are too dangerous. On top of that, they are so large and powerful, they can easily kill or severely injure humans by accident.

    Domesticated bears is animal abuse and outlawed in most of the world.









  • Well maybe one person is a little bit more impressed by some pretty pictures than another person. I really don’t see what that has to do with a company like Microsoft putting their money into this? They don’t make songs or movie trailers.

    To me I’m stunned but that’s just me, on top of this we’re only in year like 5 of AI going mainstream, where will it be in 10 years? 20 years?

    This is a common trap a lot of people fall into. See what improvements have been made the last couple of years, who knows where it will end up right? Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that. Improvements made in the past don’t guarantee improvements will continue in the future. There are ceilings that can be run into and are hard to break. There can even be hard limits that are impossible to break. There might be good reasons to not further develop promising technologies from the past into the future. There is no such thing as infinite growth.

    Edit:

    Just checked out that song, man that song is shit…

    “My job vanished without lift.” What does that even mean? That’s not even English.

    And that’s just one of the dozens of issues I’ve seen in 30 secs. You are kidding yourself if you think this is the future, that’s one shit future bro.


  • What’s your point?

    Sure that’s the point of venture capital, throwing some money at the wall and see what sticks. You’d expect to have most of them fail, but the one good one makes up for it.

    However in this case it isn’t people throwing some money at startups. It’s large companies like Microsoft throwing trillions into this new tech. And not just the one company looking for a little niche to fill, all of them are all in, flooding the market with random shit.

    Uber and Spotify are maybe not the best examples to use, although they are examples of people throwing away money in hopes of some sort of payoff (even though they both made a small profit recently, but nowhere near digging themselves out of the hole). They are however problematic in the way they operate. Uber’s whole deal is exploiting workers, turning employees into contractors just to exploit them. And also skirting regulations around taxis for the most part. They have been found to be illegal in a lot of civilised countries and had to change the way they do business there, limit their services or not operate in those countries at all. Spotify is music and the music industry is a whole thing I won’t get into.

    The current AI bubble isn’t comparable to venture capital investing in some startups. It’s more comparable to the dotcom bubble, where the industry is perceived to move in a certain direction. Either companies invest heavily and get with the times, or they die. And smart investors put their money in anything with the new tech, since that’s where the money is going to be made. Back then the new tech was the internet, now the new tech is AI. We found out the hard way, it was total BS. The internet wasn’t the infinite money glitch people thought it was and we all paid the price.

    However the scale of that bubble was small as compared to this new AI bubble. And the internet was absolutely a trans-formative technology, changing the way we work and live forever. It’s too early to say if this LLM based “AI” technology will do the same, but I doubt it. The amount of BS thrown around these days is too high. As someone with a somewhat good grasp of how LLMs actually work on a fundamental level, the promised made aren’t backed up by facts. And the amount of money being put into this aren’t near any even optimistic payoff in the future.

    If you want to throw in a simple, over simplified example: This AI boom is more like people throwing money at Theranos than anything else.










  • There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.

    This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.

    With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.

    This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.