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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that worry me the most about AI is that it enables some of the most sloppiest and laziest operators to become even more sloppy and lazy.

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The future is probably mediocre. Things that are "good enough" replace real craftsmanship.

Except where it is needed the most. I doubt you’ll get a fusion reactor running with sloppy craftsmanship.

I install heavy machinery for a living. The devices I install simply won’t work unless I do it near perfect.

Simpson's predicted that

That thing isn't even "good enough". I mean it literally has label "dck" on it. Not even "dick", "dck". It's hilariously bad for anyone bothering to look for like 5 seconds, and yet it was supposedly peer-reviewed by multiple serious scientists, and absolutely hilariously awful diagrams were just fine. I don't think it raises to the level of "mediocre", it's more like "anything goes as long at it looks pretty from afar".

I disagree. AI makes us all better. AI makes the fastest possible draft faster. AI makes the best possible quality output better.

The problem is that some people go for volume over quality.

How do we name and shame those people?

Hence the washing machine that dies 1 week after the warranty expires. Yay for capitalism!

I suppose manufacturing washing machines that reliably give up the ghost months within warranty expiry is its own kind of impressive.

Not that hard when they have a processor in that knows the date or an Internet connection. I'm not suggesting anyone has done that yet. But only a matter of time, surely?

Great, I can't wait for appliances that stuxnet themselves shortly after their warranty period.

New home automation hack: have your pi-hole pull double duty by running a local, pirate NTP server that forever makes the appliances think they're only a year old.

GE washing machines did exactly that.

have you got a link for that?

I imagine its quite difficult to get a washing machine to die as close as possible to the end of the warranty, but not before it. Just one week must take some real skill.

Precision enshittification. You'll soon be able to do a masters degree in it.

> "Precision enshittification. You'll soon be able to do a masters degree in it."

Only until someone trains an "AI" model to do it automatically... ;~)

Let's not forget that OpenAI has probably scraped that POS paper and added it to ChatGPT. Someone should ask it what "iollotte sserotgomar" is.

Also Note on the Mission Statement:

"Frontiers follows the guidelines and best practice recommendations published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors should refer to the author guidelines for full details.

Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology is member of the Committee on Publication Ethics."

Maybe COPE better get its ethics guidelines updated for AI.

I wonder what happens when the majority of the Internet is bullshit generated by LLMs (which can't be long, surely), which is then used to train the latest LLMs. Will we pass an LLM bullshit horizon where the entire Internet becomes "iollotte sserotgomar" and it's brethren?

I guess we always feared ai would train on itself and become super smart, turns out the opposite happens

IIRC, the quality takes a dive when an AI is uncritically trained on its own output.

I guess that's the "singularity" we've been told about - when the amount of bullshit is so massive that it completely overwhelms any attempts at making sense of anything online or find anything.

Yes, singularlity is a good word to use. I wrote up my thoughts here: https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/02/18/the-ai-bullshit-si...

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39422528

This is deliberately adversarial, not sloppy

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