I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

To be honest the answer is obvious, straight forward and impossible. Society just needs to reject entirely any company that embraces shitty “AI”.

I mean it’s not as though “AI” is in any way intelligence, it’s just utilising large data sets to make it look that way, think about it, you meet a person at a party who is entirely oblivious to social norms, incapable of understanding tone, not able to improvise and adapt to conversation, but is really good at stating and restating and respinning facts that they picked up in previous conversations, is that the smartest one in the room?

In every one of my interactions with AI it has reminded me of talking to my ex’s autistic son, he was astounding with the things he could remember and repeat (and would do so with absolute conviction) but would crash out when given too many explicitly contradictory tidbits of information.

So assume that any company that replaces workers with it is happy to embrace slop and ask yourself if that is a company worth your business?

Unfortunately the world is far too influenced by America and has spent too long buying into the narratives that have been used to strip Americans of all the characteristics that they like to believe define them.

So the general public is dumb, reactionary, intolerant and beligerent in far too many places around the world.

The tiniest trace of class solidarity and any company that opted to embrace the shit slop as anything other than a tool to enhance the existing workforce would be shunned and reduced to irrelevancy and the world could move on.

For what it’s worth I fully 100% believe that AI is attainable, but when we get there we will see LLMs as equivalent to alchemy and shake our heads about the amount of resources we spent trying to turn virtual lead into digital gold. I also wonder if our descendants will curse our wholesale destruction of the planet following these modern day charlatans down the path of environmental collapse just to explore a dead end that was never going to yield a positive result.

Actually I am misremembering, apparently capacitors are bad for audio, so to get the best you have to have chunky inductors and circuitry to do powerfctor correction to get a PF of 1. I was remembering big chunky power conditioners that look like batteries but are actually huge iron core inductors. They get your audio equipment “closer” to the power generation, which “improves your soundscape”. I’m sure he was using the stupid crazy priced audiophile powercords as well.

Oh, I was going to say you know a higher grade of audiophile than I do, but then I remembered that no I have met one. He had installed what was in effect a powerwall with supercaps and was generating his own waves through. His speakers cost more than my car, individually. I want to say Palladium Studio References. Wow yep. Thanks for that little blast from the musty vaults of deep memory… Well a 10 minute conversation 20ish years ago and a lot of “Ohs” and “Ahs” at his photo album.

Oh and the latencies, the really minimal processing that a CRT does compared to an LCD means that input lag could be insanely low. Subtlely different to refresh rate, I always felt it was the gamer equivalent of audiophile grade speaker cables personally, but some people swear they can detect it.

Oh that’s OK I just wanted to reminisce on the glory days, my backlog is so long already I could use all my spare time for the next year and still barely make a dent.

First time I attended a LAN party was with a group of 40 people who hired out the two conference rooms at the local library. First medal of homour game was a blast, especially 1 moment where I ended up last alive getting advice from the other 7 people on my team who were clustered around trying to coach me through taking on the last three Germans from the other team. Also helping to cart all the monitors in was some good cardio, kinda miss moving 24" Sony Trinitron CRTs around… Oh wait no I don’t at all.

You should give the Amiga version a go via an emulator. You might be interested in the differences. Loved that trilogy back in the day.

Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because “they are so easy”. Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.

They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.

I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.

I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).

The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it’s worth the effort to scale them.

I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that “Ignorance is bliss.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.

Maybe the writers at Games Workshop pulled a bit of prescience out when they did their exercise in hyperbolic projection of trends across 38,000 years.

Or maybe it was influence of the warp and Tzeentch…

I am not arguing in any way that there should be some basic competence required of everyone who uses tech, in the same way that despite my aversion to cars I know how to change a tyre, check and top up my oil, feel the windshield wiper resevoir and check the radiator level. It is incumbent on me to have that knowledge as a foundational level of being a driver and car owner, and yes I am aware that there are a number of drivers who do not know these things, but that is another discussion.

I think that far, far more important than all this is teaching critical thinking, media literacy and scepticism. A grade 11 & 12 (I’m Australian so not sure how closely that maps but 17-19 year olds) health teacher I was talking to recently told me that more than 80% of her students admit to recieving the vast majority or all of their health information from TikTok. It genuinely does not matter if they understand the finer points of say file system structure, if they are uncritically listening to a shitty AI voice over a video of three people doing a synchronised “dance” telling them that oranges cause shin splints.

If our society, not just a segment of it, was taught to understand what media is, how it interacts with culture, and how rich people use it to establish and maintain control. That control from a ruling elite via newspapers, or TV, or the Internet is IMHO far more responsible than anything else for the state of your country… And my country… And the world. With that in mind I put my effort into trying to get my kids to research things for themselves and to look for the hidden motivations behind the facade of everything they do.

OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…

They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.

Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

Which I found scarily insightful.

Had a big thing written out, didn’t like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.

Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.

Crustaceans attached to your eyes… That’s… Well that’s going to be a no for me. But you do you.