bemtevi

I miss the days when I opened one file at a time in a text editor and there was no version control....

I read the study. The "problem" with it is that it only examines biodiversity before and after abandonment, but without the abandoned areas being rewilded in any way.

Some areas are so destroyed by human activities that they need some help in rewilding, which is definitely possible. Of course, this study does point out that some management of the land that resembles previous human activities could help biodiversity. And of course, as the study mentions, they did not include "Mosses, lichens, mammals and invertebrates—including soil organisms such as nematodes and molluscs".

Keep in mind also that biodiversity is difficult to measure can be counterintuitive. Farmland and managed land creates edge habitats, or a confluence of habitats, where measured biodiversity is higher. Of course, when that edge habitat disappears the measurements can go down. But that does not imply that merging a huge number of farmland back ot a more contiguous wild are won't support biodiversity better in the long run.

> Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.

I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:

* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.

* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).

Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?

That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.

AI in science is a lot different than AI in progamming in some ways. It seems pretty harmless in programming a lot of the times because it's used to speed up rote tasks like writing boilerplate. But in science, if it does give scientists a boost in discovery, I think it's likely to lead to an even more cavalier attitude about the power that such discoveries can have, and thus lead to much more abuse of power by the wealthy and malicious actors.

One thing I've observed is that people who use AI rarely want to hide that they're using it. With text or even images, it's sort of like a dialect. AI-generated/assisted stuff is becoming somewhat like a fashion trend where people tend to use it and it becomes part of them, rather than something they want to pass off as entirely human-made.

So I think there's very little incentive for an arms race to occur in this case.

I don't think that quite makes sense. Sometimes it's useful to point out/shame unsettling things that happen in society, even if it doesn't directly cause harm.

I think it's rather poor taste to code something like this. Usually when buildings or other things are destroyed in movies or even a game, it's to tell some kind of story. In a way telling the story brings the justification because the destruction in the story is usually counterbalanced by someone trying to stop it, which brings the story to the level of good being done.

This is just wanton destruction and has nothing good in it.

I wish there was a filter in the app store to filter and only show apps that having nothing to do with AI. It's become increasingly hard to find a decent, non-AI app these days.

The one bottleneck in this new AI era of math is still human understanding. No matter how much new stuff you can prove, to understand something you still have to basically do stuff the old fashioned way. Maybe AI can help a little, but without working through problems and proofs, you still won't get much farther. Ultimately our minds are limited that way.

I tend to think that the progress of mathematics before AI was roughly suited to the way humans assimilated understanding, but now with AI, the progress in mathematics is going to go much faster, oustripping our ability to understand it.

It is true that more mathematicians could theoretically eventually go through it, but the process of progress itself is discouraging and thus paradoxically renders this new AI era of math much less interesting to many.

I guarantee that after the intial "look at all the stuff we can prove", the benefits of using AI will dwindle rapidly.

No, I meant to say Google in particular is unnecessary. Not necessarily search.

I found a few lists that I found genuinely useful, like self-hosted. But I also think the problem with them is they were gamed for some reason, maybe because of Github stars and the fact that Github attention is useful for other things. I think it would have been much more useful to have them almost on a different platform. IMBD lists for example seem to work better because there's not much reward in making them except a love of movies.

Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...

> I also think that in the grand scheme of things, we have “burned our hands” plenty of times and we still don’t seem to care because “the benefits outweigh the risks.”

Not really. Most of the wealthy, who make the decisions, have not been burned. With climate change, the rich insulate themselves by moving or with AC. I also never suggested we burn ourselves. I suggest that it would be better if we were burned, rather than continue down the current path of reckless innovation.

Indeed, AI is part of a greater phenomenon whereby technology creates more problems that in turn requires technology to solve. In short, technological determinism. I won't explain it here because it's very well explained in David Skrbina's book "The Metaphysics of Technology" and one could consult Jaques Ellul's work for some additional details.

Benefit depends on preference. There is no universal utility. If your value is that nature should be preserved over economic development, then you'll likely see AI as a detriment, whereas if your only value is innovation, then you'll likely see it as a positive. People who believe in putting nature first will not see civilization as a benefit, similarly.

Besides, most of the world does not think AI is a benefit. In my library for instance, tehre was a general survey with hundreds of responses and over 50% of people said AI was a bad thing for the world.

Most creatives and artists think similarly.

It's obvious that it is. But I think it's also obvious that one can follow curiosity pathologically and have curiosity rewarded to the point that it becomes harmful. Even information can be addictive to the point that we pursue curiosity beyond a healthy level - or in other words to the point that we ignore other things like simplicity and minimalism.

For example, it seems that this is the trend in modern academia and science, where huge amounts of resources are used to pursue knowledge that wouldn't make sense if it weren't incentivized the way it is.

I don't think building huge datacenters to make a priveleged person like yourself have an even easier life is a worthy use of all the energy and space that could be used for wild nature.

> If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?

I only added it because I don't consider that use case a valid exception and I'm just anticipating that sort of comment.

Then it could be a good thing if Google restricts search to your school, wouldn't it? Because then the school would be forced to acknowledge the mediocre job they're doing and do something else. If your school already does such a poor job, then perhaps you should hope that the tech they do use collapses because then they'd actually have to do something useful for a change.

I think you can conclude something even stronger: big tech doesn't *want* people to think, at all.

I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials.

I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.

Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.

Darn right! Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can see any value in this, except those at the top. Yes, LLMs make us more efficient in SOME cases, but does that improve life for the average man or even average programmer? Or even the end user, who has to deal with more AI-generated ads and scams now?

The only end benefit seems to be that more people can make more software now, and it's not even clear that this will be a good thing in the long run, considering how much technical debt we're accumulating.

That hundreds of hackers can complete a few neat hobby projects doesn't really count as a serious benefit, by the way.

I really don't know what you mean because I don't use AI at all...

> Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and make everyone worse off if used.

The difference is most people have not experienced any immediate effects of nuclear weapons. But people will experience the immediate effects of AI taking down the electricity grid, for instance.

So if it has happened, should we now proceed with even more powerful and dangerous tools, with a much tighter integration with society?

Indeed, and it's just going to end up as a zero-sum game where the winner is the one who can most adeptly manipulate the machine to cause harm to the other.

Of course I read it. But my thesis is that one cannot avoid that. Causing harm, whether direct or indirect, is the fundamental nature of AI.

Would it? I don't think so. Not if the weapon is an indiscriminate one and makes everyone worse off. Yes, some people (maybe military generals) might support it. But there would be near universal hatred for it, if people wake up one day and find their bank accounts not working or their eletricity not working.

This is why I think AI is so stupid. It's just too powerful for anyone to control, especially with the inertial mass of capitalistic society powering it through the incremental, short-term advantages it gives.

I don't think accelerationists think we can do anything. The thought process of the accelerationist is partly fueled by the 'excitement' of betting and playing musical chairs and hoping to be the first ones out holding a bag of money and partly fueld by the delusion that technological advancement is always good at any level of complexity.

I have to spend extra time just trying to find AI-free things, AI-free writing, AI-free communities, and people who aren't addicted to AI. And get noticed/get a job by having to push through all this AI static. And having to interact with AI-based customer service agents that take 10x as long to resolve the problem as a human being. And having to wait a bit longer because there are 10x more 'Are You Human' Captchas slowing down website loading. And having to download OS updates that are 2x as large because they contain AI models. And having to double-check everything because there's so much more hallucinated crap out there.

The other day I hired an accountant and even he sent me an AI answer that sounded right but was actually bullshit.

In short, it takes a LOT more time just to find some sanity now.

AI is shit.

> We need to build it as fast as possible because it could cure all disease

Hell no. We need to risk pumping out even more CO2, causing more environmental disaster, ruining entire human communities, just to cure diseases? You might as well say it's better to be in prison because you're guaranteed three meals a day. The logic of some pro-AI people is baffling.