do not negatively-polarize yourself into incorporating an LLM into your daily life because it's from China

Honestly, overuse of AI in the West is likely going to compound our societal incompetence and accelerate our decline

Can this AI power a smart speaker that can actually reliably manage timers and alarms, manage my lights, play music, convert units, and find my TV remote? No?

That's literally all I've ever wanted out of any of this and nobody has been able to pull it off. Every single option is awful, takes like 10 seconds to respond for no reason other than to upload my whole shit directly to the NSA, and has maybe a 1 in 3 chance of being so comically wrong that it's a nuisance.

"Alexa, set a 5 minute tea timer." "Buying 5 kilograms of Earl Grey Tea on Amazon." "NO NO NO NO"

"Hey Google, what's 1/4 cup in ml?" "Playing the Quarter Life Crisis podcast on Spotify." "NO NO NO NO"

The people in Dune were about this one

I'm gonna ask my AI what I should do about this.

AI coding for my general workflow. I do not recommend this in the slightest.

Yes, I use stack overflow like God intended.

This is the cognitive issue. When not exercised, parts of your brain will atrophy. You will start to outsource your thinking to the black box. You are not built different. It is the expected effect.

Tools not systems

i've yelled at a couple cs students about learning things for real and they've at least stopped telling me about it

it's tolerable to use it to get a lead on something you don't understand well enough to formulate search terms but you have to do extra work to verify anything it spits out

I've run some underwhelming local LLMs and done a bit of playing with the commercial offerings.

I agree with this post. My experiments are on hold, though I'm curious to just have a poke around DeepSeek's stuff just to get an idea of how it behaves.

I am most concerned with next generation devices that come with this stuff built in. There's a reactionary sinophobe on youtube who produced a video with some pretty interesting talking points that, since the goal is to have these "AI assistants" basically observe everything you do with your device (and are blackboxes that rely on cloud hosted infrastructure) that this effectively negates E2E encryption. I am convinced by these arguments and in that respect the future looks particularly bleak. Having a wrongthink censor that can read all your inputs before you've even sent them and can flag you for closer surveillance and logging, combined with the three letter agencies really "chilling out" about eg Apple's refusal to assist in decrypting iPhones, it all looks quite fucked.

There are obviously some use cases where LLMs are sort of unobjectionable, but even then, as OP points out, we often ignore the way our tools shape our minds. People using them as surrogates for human interaction etc are a particularly sad case.

Even if you accept the (flawed) premise that these machines contain a spark of consciousness, what does it say about us that we would spin up one-time single use minds to exploit for a labor task and then terminate them? I don't have a solid analysis but it smells bad to me.

Also China's efforts effectively represent a more industrial scale iteration of what the independent hacker and opensource communities have been doing anyway- proving that the moat doesn't really exist and that continuing to try and use brute force (scale) to make these tools "better" is inefficient and tunnel visioned.

Between this and the links shared with me recently about China's space efforts, I am simply left disappointed that we remain in competition and opposition to more than half of the world when cooperation could have saved us a lot of time, energy, water, etc. It's sad and a shame.

I cherish my coding ability. I don't mind playing with an LLM to generate some boilerplate to have a look at, but the idea that people who cannot even assess the function of the code that is generated are putting this stuff into production is really sad. We haven't exactly solved the halting problem yet have we? There's no real way for these machines to accurately assess code to determine that it does the task it is intended to do without side effects or corner cases that fail. These are NP-hard problems and we continue to ignore that fact.

The hype driving this is clear startup bro slick talk grifting shit. Yes it's impressive that we can build these things but they are being misapplied and deferred to as authorities on topics by people who consider themselves to be otherwise Very Smart People. It's.. in a word.. pathetic.

I'm excited that another country is continuing to research AI and LLMs without burning the planet to the max degree. The technology might have better uses in the future but commercializing it now, especially to the ridiculous degree we see in the US (why does my fridge need chatgpt?) Is absolute folly if not a war crime on all future generations who will suffer from the unnecessary emissions

Luckily ChatGPT and deepseek can’t plumb worth a fuck so I’m not too worried about it coming for my job.

Until robots develop the dexterity to crawl under a home, isolate broken plumbing, repair and test after, my job will be human only.

It may be a petty thing, but I hate how people rely on AI programs to make pfp's and thumbnails. I'd rather get a shitty crayon drawing that you even put thirty seconds into.

The only ethical use of AI was when DougDoug made it try to beat Pajama Sam.

this is me with google maps

I naturally stopped using LLMs when I understood how to structure my code. They are useless at generating anything that relies on functions and objects you built up yourself. The exception being famous algorithms that are well documented, because you can generally generate a single function in the language you're using which usually works fine. Saves you the hassle of having to understand math

There is "use the machine to write code for you" (foolish, a path to ruin) and there is "use the machine like a particularly incompetent coworker who nevertheless occasionally has an acceptable idea to iterate on".

If you are already an expert, it is possible to interpret the hallucinations of the machine to avoid some pointless dead-end approaches. More importantly, you've had to phrase the problem in simple enough terms that it can't go too wrong, so you've mostly just got a notebook that spits text at you. There's enough bullshit in there that you cannot trust it or use it as is, but none of the ego attached that a coworker might have when you call their idea ridiculous.

Don't use the machine to learn anything (it is trained on almost exclusively garbage), don't use anything it spits out, don't use it to "augment your abilities" (if you could identify the augmentation, you'd already have the ability). It is a rubber duck that does not need coffee.

If your code is so completely brainless that the plagiarism machine can produce it, you're better off writing a code generator to just do it right rather than making a token generator play act as a VIM macro.

Completely agree. AI should be just another tool to easy the life of the workers.

I'm not so sure I even like the idea of AI like ChatGPT or Deepseek or the countless others, mostly because I avoided it till now and don't really know much about it, so I need to further investigate to actually form an opinion, tho I would be lying if I said I'm not intrigued by it. The only times I used one of these AIs have been recently to translate a few sentences with Gemini since Google already forced it on my phone. And honestly, with search engines going down the sewer, maybe Deepseek with it's search function could be useful.

One thing I can't really understand tho is generative AI. I don't want to sound like a Luddite, but I really can't see the use of it. Like, it's one thing to have a very specialized AI tool for parts of the creative process, but generating whole images and voices? Just, why? It's depressing. You're removing the human part of these creative works and stealing in the process just to automate it for profit or for the sake of it. I already saw some AI generated ads here in Brasil from some big companies, including Coca-cola, and it just makes me mad knowing they did it just to cut costs by not paying actors, artists, designers, etc. It's fucked up.

And not only that, but artists literally have the ability to draw, paint, sculpt, voice act, etc, whatever they want in their own style and process. Why would they want to generate their whole work for them removing themselves from the process? It just sounds completely dystopic to me.

Butlerian Jihad! Dump the thinking machines!

anyone mentions ai to me and I wince like they farted

Too late. I re-wrote my resume, published a book on amazon, generated 5 new business ideas, and created an app.

The only thing I use AI for is for like trivial specific information that I would otherwise need to hunt down information about on ad filled blogs or videos. Like I was trying to fix something with my toilet and it was way faster to describe it to a bot and have it give me info on likely what’s causing it. Or I’ve also used it for things like figuring out what the best ranked seasons are for some dumb show, with context on each. I feel like it assembles that super low-level information really well. But it does feel like a slippery slope sometimes, I could see it bleeding into other parts of your life unintentionally

I used AI for an rpg character. Using the AI made me want to draw it myself instead because of how completely idiotic it was to make the AI do what I want. I'll just do it myself and it will look better

I've used an LLM once, to generate a few lines at a time of matlab code. It was probably faster than reading the matlab documentation but literally every code snippet it spat out had to be hand corrected either to compile in the first place or to actually run right.

One thing to note about these AI boondoggles is that they represent a decentralization of information and are currently the most accessible means to promoting and accessing leftist or anti-imperialist information. At this point in time, the English (global) internet has been completely fine-tuned to serve US propaganda slop if you're looking for any political information. Google search is now wired to direct people straight to natopedia and that leads to state gov, cia gov, freedomhouse whenever you try to search for anything anti-imperialist. Information has been completely centralized so that any Western propaganda drivel is boosted to a dominant position and every "alternative platform" are also NATO lackeys, like how DuckDuckGo search results now also filter out all Russian sources.

This is where it is actually useful for me because I would tolerate some AI hallucination (which can be reduced to be relatively marginal depending on your queries) over having to shovel through some shit BBC news just to learn about the Sahel state leadership or some natopedia article of small Soviet towns where you need to comb through every second sentence, because some CIA bootlick editor vomited RFE "sources" all over screaming about how it was a "secret KGB torture gulag" or "Stalin once ate all the grain there," just to find out some basic geographical or biographical details. I got Deepseek to compile a list of Marxist-Leninist states because the natopedia article had propaganda all over like claiming the DPRK was "not" ML because some western ultraleftist "Marxist" scholar claimed Juche was not Marxism. I'd prefer the risk of encountering some hallucination slop something like "among the notable Marxist-Leninist-Titoist states during the Cold War period was Asgard" than being made to analyze some ultraleft Western hegemony bootlick "scholar" slop for potential facts.

Deepseek in particular is currently working rather well as a substitute for places like r/genzhou where you used to be able to ask questions about leftist history and theory before it was banned. Its ability to scrape search results means that it works fairly well for finding reading materials without as egregious hallucination as ChatGPT where it makes up book titles. I had it spit out book recommendations from Losurdo, Parenti and Grover Furr when I asked about non-Western slanted sources about the USSR.

Ideally, of course, there wouldn’t be a need for AI to fill these gaps, but given the complete centralization of information and conditions of soft censorship that the Western platform monopolies allow them to enact, I'd say that there is a use case for these LLM chat engines provided that one exercises caution.

I use LLMs for two things: my private, local, beautiful home assistant instance, and writing Python. Any C or Java flows from my fingers, but the fact that I have been forced to learn Python at all is a travesty.