Or even like modern wifi. I saw a vacuum with wifi capabilities. Do I really need to check my vacuum battery level from my phone?
If you don’t pay your monthly vacuum fee, Hoover will turn it off remotely.
Unlock more power for an extra $4.99/month*
*warranty period reduced by 1 week per use of MaxPower mode
Time to wrap my vacuum in tin foil
I saw a Bluetooth toothbrush that send reports to your phone on how good you brushed your teeth, like wtf?!
It also send reports to they corporate overlords. Most probably anyway.
EXACTLY! Hubby has one of those, that function got old pretty quickly.
It does seem silly to me as well, but is it really any different from people who want personal data for their sleep habits or exercise habits?
Saw a “smart” steam ironing board.
I’ll call it smart when it will iron my shirts!
There are a few that do that but feel gimmicky. It looks like the upper half of a dummy and throws vapor to wrinkle out the shirt.
Yes, I’ve considered it in the past.
Those things have been around forever and work very well. For domestic use it’s probably only worth it if you have a lot of shirts.
Adding Bluetooth to a vacuum cleaner does make it suck more.
Well, this is something that I actually used. I have a robo vacuum. I was preparing my home for some guests once, when I saw that the vacuum wasn’t charged fully (because it was mispositioned on its base). I put it to the right spot, let it charge for half an hour, started it and left to buy groceries.
At the store, I checked the app where I have my apartment mapped by the vacuum that shows its route and cleaning progress. And I saw that with the current charge, it will have to go back, charge and continue. So I set it from “max” power to “normal”, to let it at least finish the job.
It is a cool and useful thingThis was not an automated model of vacuum. Connection features for automated models makes sense.
Ah, ok, then yes. If it’s just an indicator on the vacuum against “indicator in an app + register + give us all your data+ “buy vacuum 2.0” notifications”, then fuck them
Yes? Maybe the battery was left uncharged, or used up, so you’re waiting to do more cleaning. Why shouldn’t you be able to check?
I have an automation in my Home Assistant setup to notify me when batteries need to be replaced or charged. Currently it’s only for the smart devices in that deployment, but yes. I want my home automation to keep track of all batteries, so I can see status at a glance and be reminded if one needs attention
Or i could just plug my vacuum in when I’m done with it.
AI isn’t a product for consumers, its a product for investors. If somewhere down the line a consumer benefits in some way, that’s just a side effect.
Think about the ways that information tech has revolutionized our ability to do things. It’s allowed us to do math, produce and distribute news and entertainment, communicate with each other, make our voices heard, organize movements, and create and access pornography at rates and in ways that humanity could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago.
Now consider that AI is first and foremost a technology predicated on reappropriating and stealing credit for another person’s legitimate creative work.
Now imagine how much of humanity’s history has had that kind of exploitation at the forefront of its worst moments, and consider what might lie ahead with those kind of impulses being given the rocket fuel of advanced information technology.
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This is so spot on. I use AI all the time, but the hype and “we should AI all the things” is ridiculous.
I blame it on bullshit jobs. Too many people have to come up with weekly nonsense busywork tasks just to justify themselves. Also the usual FOMO. “Guys, we can’t fall behind the competition on this!”
Yep. I have middle management above me gleefully cheering the fact that ChatGPT can write their reports for them now. Well guess what, it can write those reports for me, the actual person doing the real work, and you are now redundant.
As a person with a useless boss who does almost nothing and (of course) gets paid more than me, I like this take! Let AI report on workers and watch productivity (and profits) soar!
The less ya do, the more they pays ya. It’s so dumb.
As an architect whose job it is to persuade useless bosses to do things the right way or to prioritize their teams to, I love this idea. Let AI take over boss work. They would be so much easier to work with
Like many people, I use it like we used to use Google. Because Google (and most other search engines) suck now, thanks to all the SEO spam out there. My job requires me to be a “jack of all trades” (I am a duct taper with a bullshit job in David Graeber parlance). I have to cover myriad technical things. I usually know the high level way to do things, but I frequently need help with the specifics (rusty on the syntax, etc), so I use the free ChatGPT for that kind of thing. it’s been extremely helpful. I was also the first person to bring it to the attention of my boss ages ago when it first came onto the scene.
Rather predictably, my boss now acts like he discovered (borderline invented it) and is always nagging everyone to use it to get their work done faster.
AI has already put some people out of work and will continue to be disruptive. There will be a lot more layoffs coming, is my guess. And it doesn’t really matter if the AI is good or not. If the C-Suite thinks they can save money and get rid of “lazy workers” they will absolutely 100% do it. We’ve seen over and over again how customer service and product quality hardly even matter any more.
I appreciate your take on it: replace the useless middle manager whip-cracker types. Hopefully we see a lot of that…
My company did a big old round of AI layoffs and now it’s barely functional at all because it got rid of a bunch of people actually doing things and kept all of the loud idiots.
They should have asked their AI for guidance on layoffs, LoL
I work for a fairly big IT company. They’re currently going nuts about how generative AI will change everything for us and have been for the last year or so. I’m yet to see it actually be used by anyone.
I imagine the new Microsoft Office copilot integration will be used only slightly more than Clippy was back in the day.
But hey, maybe I’m just an old man shouting at the AI powered cloud.
Copilot is often a brilliant autocomplete, that alone will save workers plenty of time if they learn to use it.
I know that as a programmer, I spend a large percentage of my time simply transcribing correct syntax of whatever’s in my brain to the editor, and Copilot speeds that process up dramatically.
problem is when the autocomplete just starts hallucinating things and you don’t catch it
If you blindly accept autocompletion suggestions then you deserve what you get. AIs aren’t gods.
OMG thanks for being one of like three people on earth to understand this
you don’t catch it
That’s on you then. Copilot even very explicitly notes that the ai can be wrong, right in the chat. If you just blindly accept anything not confirmed by you, it’s not the tool’s fault.
AI bad tho!!!
A friend of mine works in marketing (think “websites for small companies”). They use an LLM to turn product descriptions into early draft advertising copy and then refine from there. Apparently that saves them some time.
It saves a ton of time. I’ve worked with clients before and I’ll put a lorem ipsum as a placeholder for text they’re supposed to provide. Then the client will send me a note saying there’s a mistake and the text needs to be in English. If the text is almost close enough to what the client wants, they might actually read it and send edits if you’re lucky.
I’ve actually pushed products out with lorem ipsum on it because the client never provided us with copy. As you say they seem to think that the copy is in there, but just in some language they can’t understand. I don’t know how they can possibly think that since they’ve never sent any, but if they were bright they wouldn’t work in marketing.
I’m a developer with about 15 years of experience. I got into my company’s copilot beta program.
Now maybe you are some magical programmer that knows everything and doesn’t need stack overflow, but for me it’s all but completely replaced it. Instead of hunting around for a general answer and then applying it to my code, I can ask very explicitly how to do that one thing in my code, and it will auto generate some code that is usually like 90% correct.
Same thing when I’m adding a class that follows a typical pattern elsewhere in my code…well it will auto generate the entire class, again with like 90% of it being correct. (What I don’t understand is how often it makes up enum values, when it clearly has some context about the rest of my code) I’m often shocked as to how well it knew what I was about to do.
I have an exception thats not quite clear to me? Well just paste it into the copilot chat and it gives a very good plain English explanation of what happened and generally a decent idea of where to look.
And this is a technology in it’s infancy. It’s only been released for a little over a year, and it has definitely improved my productivity. Based on how I’ve found it useful, it will be especially good for junior devs.
I know it’s in, especially on lemmy, to shit on AI, but I would highly recommend any dev get comfortable with it because it is going to change how things are done and it’s, even in its current form, a pretty useful tool.
It’s in to shit on AI because it’s ridiculously overhyped, and people naturally want to push back on that. Pretty much everyone agrees it’ll be useful, just not replace all the jobs useful.
And a chunk of the jobs it will replace were on their way out the door anyway. There are already plenty of fast food places with kiosks to order, and they haven’t replaced any specific person, just a small function of one job.
I expect it’ll be useful on the order of magnitude of Google Search, not revolutionary on the scale of the internet. And I think that’s a reasonable amount of credit.
It will take the market by storm, just like NFT with bored apes.
I’d love a boosted Clippy powered by AI! It would have incredible animations while sitting there in corner doing nothing!
The problem with GenAI is the same as any system. Garbage in equals garbage out. Couple it with no tuning and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Good GenAI can exist, but you need some serious data science and time to tune it. Right now that puts the cost outside of the “do it by hand” realm (and by quite a bit). LLMs are useful given that they’ve been trained on general human writing patterns, but for a company to be able to replace their functions with highly specific tasks they need to develop and push their own data sets and training which they don’t want to spend the money on.
I think it massively depends on what your job is. I know quite a lot of people at work use AI to to draft out documents, it’s a good way to get started. I also suspect that quite a lot of documents are 100% AI since we have a lot of stuff that we write but no one ever reads, so what’s the point in putting effort in?
I tried to use it to write some documentation for various processes at work but the AI doesn’t know about our processes and I couldn’t figure out a way to tell it about our processes and so it either missed steps or just made stuff up so for me it’s not really useful.
So it works as long as you don’t need anything too custom. But then we have engineers that go out to businesses and presumably they don’t use AI for anything because there’s nothing it can do that would be useful for them.
So right there in one business you have three groups of people, people who use AI a lot, people who’ve tried to use AI and don’t find it useful, and people who basically have no use for AI.
I was watching this morning’s WAN podcast (linustechtips) and they had an interview with Jim Keller talking mostly about AI.
The portions about AI felt like he was living in an alternate universe, predicting AI will be used literally everywhere.
My bullshit-o-meter hit the stars but comments on the video seem positive 🤔
I have one guy using AI to generate a status report by compiling all his report’ statuses!
I’m hoping to be one of the people to benefit, if Security would approve AI. As a DevOps guy, I’m continually jumping among programming and scripting languages and it sometimes takes a bit to change context. If I’m still in Python mode, why shouldn’t I get a jump by AI translating to Java, or Groovy, or Go, or PowerShell, or whatever flavor of shell script? As the new JavaScript “expert” at my company, why can’t I continue avoiding Learning JavaScript?
So you are saying that AI today is like Bluetooth today
I use Bluetooth all the time for speakers and headsets, also the PlayStation 3 controller was Bluetooth, so would that not mean AI will be a top of the line tool in 2 years? I personally don’t use it for anything at the moment, but in 2003 Plantronics released Bluetooth headsets for corporate environments (IP phones usually still used to this day).
Seems like more of a we aren’t sure where this tool is most useful yet, but it will be used by many people around us.
That’s very fair. I don’t like how unpredictable Bluetooth is when you have multiple peripherals and multiple hosts paired to eachother and all within range of eachother.
Say what you want about bluetooth, but I’m amazed by the battery life of those devices
I remember seeing a DankPods video about a rice cooker with quote-unquote “AI rice” technology. Spoiler alert: there is no AI in there.
So… it’s not even putting it in something where it’s not useful, it’s straight up false advertising.
No no, they mean “artificially interesting” rice
“Now that’s what I call rice”
-Tefal’s marketing team, I guess
I was in an auto parts store yesterday and saw that you can buy a can of that stuff to fix your AC and the damn can has Bluetooth capabilities. So no, we’re still not done putting Bluetooth where it doesn’t need to be.
That sounds cool, I don’t have a smart home setup, but Bluetooth sounds kinda nice to me for changing the temperature on the thermostat in the house, car not so much. Now I do know many people who use Bluetooth to cast their phone calls to their hands free devices in cars, as well as to hook up those diagnostic tools and have the error codes go to your phone instead of buying a product that costs hundreds of dollars to have a screen you would only use for that one purpose.
Oh no, this was strictly for the can to refill your car’s air conditioner liquid…the name is drawing a blank for me what it’s called, exactly.
I’ve seen some of these cans have a digital display on them which I guess this Bluetooth is supposed to replace. But it’s still so weird to me especially because these cans are generally disposable.
Freon, or it used to be
That’s it, thank you!
Or like the blockchain 5 years ago
Or like VR 10 years ago
Or like 3D 15 years ago
It is the hot new thing that you have to use for the VCs to fund your company and for investors to buy your stocks, regardless of the actual utility. AI does seem to have at least more possibilities of usage than those technologies, but it also have an incredibly higher possibility of misuse that is being completely ignored by these companies
It was always clear that VR, 3D, blockchain were fads. But AI is already useful as is. The hype may not be as high in the future but AI is here to stay.
VR is also around, it’s possibly the most popular it’s ever been. It’s still a small niche compared to its initial promise.
Linux on desktop is more popular than VR…
But that’s just because
200120022003200420052006200720082009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024 is the year of the Linux desktop!
Nobody used blockchain besides scam artists and money laundering schemes. VR was a super niche toy and was not shoved into anything. 3D was… Okay you have a point with that one, but AI can actually be pretty useful where it’s actually useful.
Most people now use chat gpt to some extent voluntarily, without it being shoehorned into an otherwise unrelated product. My mom told me how she was using it to help her rewrite her resume just the other day. I agree that there’s a fad of it being forced into everything that doesn’t need it, but i think it’s here to stay.
Also, agree to disagree on it having an “incredibly higher possibility of misuse”. It’s just a tool to let people do things they want to do, whether their intentions are good or not.
This reminds me I’m into season 5 of Burn Notice and Sam said at one point, “I’m on Bluetooth if you need me”. It was a weird reminder that once upon a time people were paid to advertise just… Bluetooth, because that’s a brand name. These days it’s just everywhere.
The product placements in that show are not exactly subtle. Excellent show though, I did not expect it to hold up so well.
You sure they didn’t mean it like “put it on a USB?” As in, they use the name of the connectivity technology to imply a single class of product that might use it?
Didn’t they say “bing it” at one point CSI or something
Apparently that was Hawaii 5-0. My favourite CSI moment though was the huge ad for Microsoft Photosynth
I am currently in season 6 and also laughed about that line. Still a good show (although the b-roll scenes are also often quite cringe these days)
Almost a good take. Except that AI doesn’t exist on this planet, and you’re likely talking about LLMs.
In 2022 AI evolved into AGI and LLM into AI. Languages are not static as shown by old English. Get on with the times.
Changes to language to sell products are not really the language adapting but being influenced and distorted
LLMs are a way of developing an AI. There’s lots of conspiracy theories in this world that are real it’s better to focus on them rather than make stuff up.
There really is an amazing technological development going on and you’re dismissing it on irrelevant semantics
The acronym AI has been used in game dev for ages to describe things like pathing and simulation which are almost invariably algorithms (such as A* used for autonomous entities to find a path to a specific destination) or emergent behaviours (which are also algorithms were simple rules are applied to individual entities - for example each bird on a flock - to create a complex whole from many such simple agents, and example of this in gamedev being Steering Behaviours, outside gaming it would be the Game Of Life).
They didn’t so much “evolve” as AI scared the shit out of us at such a deep level we changed the definition of AI to remain in denial about the fact that it’s here.
Since time immemorial, passing a Turing test was the standard. As soon as machines started passing Turing tests, we decided Turing tests weren’t such a good measure of AI.
But I haven’t yet seen an alternative proposed. Instead of using criteria and tasks to define it, we’re just arbitrarily saying “It’s not AGI so it’s not real AI”.
In my opinion, it’s more about denial than it is about logic.
You’re using AI to mean AGI and LLMs to mean AI. That’s on you though, everyone else knows what we’re talking about.
Nobody has yet met this challenge:
Anyone who claims LLMs aren’t AGI should present a text processing task an AGI could accomplish that an LLM cannot.
Or if you disagree with my
Oops accidentally submitted. If someone disagrees with this as a fair challenge, let me know why.
I’ve been presenting this challenge repeatedly and in my experience it leads very quickly to the fact that nobody — especially not the experts — has a precise definition of AGI
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 has a good take on this question
Words have meanings. Marketing morons are not linguists.
As someone who still says a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, i agree with your sentiment.
Amen. Kibibytes my ass ;)
I’ve given up trying to enforce the traditional definitions of “moot”, “to beg the question”, “nonplussed”, and “literally” it’s helped my mental health. A little. I suggest you do the same, it’s a losing battle and the only person who gets hurt is you.
artificial intelligence noun
1 : the capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior
also, plural artificial intelligences : a computer, computer system, or set of algorithms having this capability
2 : a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial intelligence
Op is an idiot though hope we can agree with that one.
Telling everyone else how they should use language is just an ultimately moronic move. After all we’re not French, we don’t have a central authority for how language works.
Telling everyone else how they should use language is just an ultimately moronic move. After all we’re not French, we don’t have a central authority for how language works.
There’s a difference between objecting to misuse of language and “telling everyone how they should use language” - you may not have intended it, but you used a straw man argument there.
What we all should be acutely aware of (but unfortunately many are not) is how language is used to harm humans, animals or our planet.
Fascists use language to create “outgroups” which they then proceed to dehumanize and eventually violate or murder. Capitalists speak about investor risks to justify return on invest, and proceed to lobby for de-regulation of markets that causes human and animal suffering through price gouging and factory farming livestock. Tech corporations speak about “Artificial Intelligence” and proceed to persuade regulators that - because there’s “intelligent” systems - this software may be used for autonomous systems that proceed to cause injury and death on malfunctions.
Yes, all such harm can be caused by individuals in daily life - individuals can be murderers or extort people on something they really need, or a drunk driver can cause an accident that kills people. However, the language that normalizes or facilitates such atrocities or dangers on a large scale, is dangerous and therefore I will proceed to continue calling out those who want to label the shitty penny market LLMs and other deep learning systems as “AI”.
The term has been stolen and redefined . It’s pointless to be pedantic about it at this point.
AI traditionally meant now-mundane things like pathfinding algorithms. The only thing people seem to want Artificial Intelligence to mean is “something a computer can almost do but can’t yet”.
AI is, by definition these days, a future technology. We think of AI as science fiction so when it becomes reality we just kick the can in the definition.
Makes me feel a little better. In 2024 I Can’t get a “Windows ready” Bluetooth dongle to be recognized by my still supported Windows computer.
That scene in Better Call Saul with the investment guy permanently on his BT earpiece was such a wave of nostalgia for me, used to see those everywhere in the 2000s with a little blue light on them flashing.
is it just me who hasn’t ever had any bluetooth problems?
Quite possibly. I don’t think I’ve ever had any Bluetooth device work without hiccups. My old earbuds used to disconnect or lose pairing all the time. A couple of game controllers I have only worked intermittently for years. My phone is always losing connection in our car. I’ve ironed out some of the problems, but I’ve never had Bluetooth just work for me.
Bluetooth with mobile devices I’d agree. But my work pc hates Bluetooth devices. Such as refusing to use the correct audio channel with headphones, so I still use wired headphones.
I’ve always felt Windows could be temperament with Bluetooth, especially pre Windows 7. Like XP seemed to be a shitshow for Bluetooth.
I hate everything wireless when it comes to PC peripherals. They just randomly stop working or have a weird, noticeable lag. I have a 3 bucks WLAN adapter on my RPi that surprisingly works OK, but that’s it.
Bluetooth is like the SpongeBob “repeating then saying something different” meme where you go through the whole annoying pairing process, then it plays through the PC speaker anyway
So you don’t know how to select an audio device on you computer eh?
Why are you personally offended by Bluetooth being bad?
Bluetooth gives me the same sensation as a stove with faulty knobs. It’s like there’s a veil between me and the machine.
And it will inevitably lead to security compromises.
Hey! Bluetooth is more useful than AI.
