Voroxpete

You mean like this chain of thought?

Definitely worth it to keep reading. He's finished the series now, and the payoff is solid (personally I felt he could have gone for another book, but I really like the ending he chose).

Look, at this point I'm basically just "That guy who recommends the Luna books", but this is yet another situation where they really are the right answer. Luna: New Moon is your starting point. The series is absolutely bursting at the seams with diverse and interesting female and non-binary characters. It also features some wonderfully atypical male characters who really play around with our understanding of what it means to perform masculinity. I am obsessed with Lucas Corta, iron fisted patriarch whose one weakness is for the beautiful young man who plays bossa nova for him, and I'm equally obsessed with his son Lucasino, the rich kid playboy who has fucked his way through his entire friendship circle, and loves makeup, androgynous clothes and baking.

Anyway, Luna: New Moon by Ian MacDonald. Give it a look.

Noted. I'll have to play around with that sometime.

Despite my obvious stance as an AI skeptic, I have no problem with putting it to use in places where it can be used effectively (and ethically). I've just found that in practice, those uses are varnishingly few. I'm not on some noble quest to rid the world of computers, I just don't like being sold overhyped crap.

I'm also hesitant to try to rebuild any part of my workflow around the current generation of these tools, when they obviously aren't going to exist in a few years, or will exist but at an exorbitant price. The cost to run genAI is far, far higher than any entity (even Microsoft) has any willingness to sustain long term. We're in the "give it away or make it super cheap to get everyone bought in" phase right now, but the enshittification will come hard and fast on this one, much sooner than anyone thinks. OpenAI are literally burning billions just in compute right now. It's unsustainable. Short of some kind of magical innovation that brings those compute costs down a hundred or thousand fold, this isn't going to stick around.

Read some history mate. The luddites weren't technophobes either. They hated the way that capitalism was reaping all the rewards of industrializion. They were all for technological advancement, they just wanted it to benefit everyone.

Yeah, that word is doing some real heavy lifting here.

More and more advanced tools for automation are an important part of creating a post-scarcity future. If we can combine that with tearing down our current economic system - which inherently requires and thus has to manufacture scarcity - we can uplift our species in ways we can currently only imagine.

But this ain't it bud. If I ask you for water and you hand me a glass of warm piss, I'm not "against drinking water" for refusing to gulp it down.

This isn't AI. It isn't - meaningfully and usefully - any form of automation at all. A bunch of conmen slapped the letters "AI" on the side of their bottle of piss and you're drinking it down like it's grandma's peach tea.

The people calling out the fundamental flaws with these products aren't doing so because we hate the entire concept of automation, any more than someone exposing a snake-oil salesman hates medicine. What we hate is being lied to. The current state of this technology is bullshit and hype. It is not fit for human consumption (other than recreationally) and the money being pumped into it could be put to far better uses. OpenAI may have lofty goals, but they have utterly failed at achieving them, and right now any true desire to create AGI has been totally subsumed by the need to keep pumping out slightly better looking versions of the same polished turd in order to convince investors to keep paying for their staggeringly high hosting costs.

This example doesn't prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn't demonstrate "reasoning" in any meaningful way.

It's weird how so many of these "technophobes" are IT professionals. Crazy that people would line up to go into a profession they so obviously hate and fear.

Fuck you, that made me smile. And I haven't even had my coffee yet.

I hate to say it bud, but the fact that you feel like you have more productive conversations with highly advanced autocomplete than you do with actual humans probably says more about you than it does about the current state of generative AI.

I feel like you could probably create a helper script to do that more reliably.