FaceDeer

Sure they can. The fundamental similarity here is anti-intellectualism, a distrust in the notion that science and technology are positive things that can enhance our lives. America is rife with it these days and the result is all sorts of beliefs sweeping through society that stand in opposition to what the “experts” say. Vaccines cause autism. Pasteurization is bad. “Chemicals” or “GMOs” are bad. Transgenderism isn’t real. Data centers are responsible for vast quantities of water consumption. LLMs are incapable of creating anything original. And so on. Once these beliefs get rooted then any effort to dislodge them only becomes part of the narrative of untrustworthy oligarchs and technocrats trying to manipulate people, which is especially tricky because many of them are trying to manipulate people. Makes it hard to know which authorities to trust without learning enough to become one yourself, and learning is hard when you don’t know which information sources to start with.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to counter such a large-scale movement in society. As the old saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. A lot of the anti-science sentiment comes from irrational sources - fear of the uncertain future, fear of losing prestige and power, fear of loss of personal autonomy. Some of those fears are rooted in real concerns but the reactions they can provoke are not necessarily productive.

It was indeed a good day.

It later got squandered, sure. But that day was good.

Hey, at least Alberta’s UCP lets you look at your conservative party and think about how much worse they could have been.

Alas, “the least-worst candidate who had a plausible chance of winning” is generally the best outcome for most democracies.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or the “well he’s okay I guess”, in this case.

So the good guys won but didn’t win hard enough for your tastes.

Just take the W and have a nice night. Now there’s an opportunity for improvement, that’s a good thing.

The Alberta separatists getting brutally stomped on last week was also very nice.

Let’s see how the American midterms go now.

On the plus side, from what I’ve read they’re mostly old fashioned sane conservatives rather than Trumpian lunatics. Some of them are on the far right edge but hopefully the rest will keep them in check, the party’s actual policies aren’t too bad.

Damned conservation laws.

Oh no, one fewer shines for neo-Nazis to worship at!

There’s a fine-tuned version called Swift that’s been trained to use 58.3% fewer reasoning tokens, apparently with almost no loss of quality. I’ve not been in a hurry with my personal usage (I set my coding agent loose on a task and then go have tea or whatever) so I haven’t experimented with it much but it might be worth checking out if the verbosity of reasoning is a problem.

Qwen4 will be coming out soon too, it has a 27B version, so perhaps they’ll have incorporated more efficient reasoning into it from the start. I’m looking forward to testing it out.

Ooh, this looks fantastic. My first thought was “doesn’t this just move all the costs to the relay?” But the relay has a 30-day retention limit, so that’d keep storage costs well under control there.

Heh. I use Qwen3.8-27B as my main coding agent, and I sometimes feel really bad for it as I watch the stream of thought go by filled with “wait… am I doing this right? What if I’m completely wrong about this? Is this really what I should be doing??” I want to pet it and assure it that it should have more confidence in itself. :)

But it’s the tradeoff that Qwen made to cram that much smarts into such a small bundle of parameters, I guess.

If the kink you’re referring to is the amount of time Qwen’s “thinking” about your greeting, that’s not necessarily actually a problem. I’ve seen common misconceptions about exactly this kind of scenario.

Models like these are trained to follow instructions. When they receive a user input they think “what is the user asking me to do, and how do I go about doing it?”

If all you’ve said is “Hi”, that leaves them with a huge puzzle and no hints how to solve it. What does the user want them to do? Is this a test? Did they start writing an actual instruction and accidentally hit enter partway through? Do they want me to write a “hello world” app, and if so in what language? Is this the outout of a “hello world” app that I wrote in a previous round that I now need to check up on?

Qwen’s models are known to be rather “thinky” in the first place - it’s part of how they’re able to hit so high above their weight class - so it’s not surprising that it’s taking its time to figure out this challenge you’ve presented it with.

There is demand, but that demand only exists because consumers aren’t being exposed to the actual price of AI.

I use AI extensively and it’s mostly via local models, which I pay 100% of the inference costs for.

If the only way this keeps going is propping up the industry with investor money and circular financing, then when one of those eventually give and the public are exposed to the true price of AI - what happens then?

Reduced AI usage. Not no AI usage, though. For example, my usage wouldn’t go down one whit. The price wouldn’t change at all for me.

The alternative was to not know how to fix it and bring it in to the shop for someone else to do.

How much do you use ChatGPT? Have you had much experience with its car repair suggestions recently?

I haven’t used it and don’t intend to, so that is my stance on the technology.

You actually are, though. Lemmy makes use of AI in its development.

And is the money in fact pouring in or is it trapped in a very well disguised circular motion between key companies?

To what end?

There are clearly identifiable “drains” for that circulating money. When a data center gets built money flows out to purchase real estate, it flows out to construction companies, it flows out to power providers, it flows out to chip manufacturers who pay staff and buy raw materials and so forth. Money is leaving the system. That can’t be sustained for long without it coming in to the system from somewhere, and AI’s been booming for four years now. Someone’s got to be getting something valuable out of it, I’m dubious that literally all of this money is just being dumped in by investors who haven’t seen a dime of return in all that time.

That list I linked to shows that an enormous number of real-world software projects are using AI for various things, for example. Money’s changing hands for at least some of that usage.

Sounds like there will be even bigger demand for automation and AI with a population drop like that.

None of those things you mention are analog.

I’ve fixed my car by describing the problem to ChatGPT and being given an explanation of what I need to do to resolve it. There’s nothing incompatible here.

People are getting tired. Everywhere.

Speak for yourself. You’re free to drop out, but if everyone feels like that then why is AI development continuing? Money is pouring in because there are people with money who want this stuff. Capacity is being built because capacity is being used.