Programmer Humor

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[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Blockchain solves a specific problem: safe transactions without a trusted authority.

It has a lot of downsides to solve this problem without a trusted authority, so in any case where you can use a trusted authority (for example a central server) it's much better to use that instead of a blockchain.

So everyone who added blockchains to their projects gained all the downsides while never having the problem it was meant to solve in the first place.

AIs, and I assume you meant LLMs with that, are a different breed. LLMs are new: never before could a computer handle natural language to such a degree.

Problem is, that it's still new. So no one knows what the "killer applications" are or what monetization should look like, or what the laws about it will be.

People just throw every against the wall and see what sticks... And hope for AGI/ASI and to be on the side that rides that nearly infinite potential to the moon.

Or, you know, crash and burn in case AI reaches a wall/diminishing returns/systemic problems that can't be fixed.

We will see.

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[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I think semantic search could be a use for it, except our corporate overlords won't give that for us, as that wouldn't be as futuristic as a "talking computer".

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Blockchain is good if you want everyone to know who you send your money to.

Which sounds stupid, but if we used it more for things that aren't stupid money, perhaps we could find something where transparency and permanent immutable logs are a good thing. For currency those may even be bad things because privacy. Which Monero solves and that's actually another useful thing - ability to make untraceable payments remotely. Used to have to use cash for that.

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[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

permanent immutable logs

My understanding of current blockchain technology is that it's only permanent so long as someone is online maintaining the block integrity. If enough machines go down, or if enough machines come up that refute it, then anyone can push an alternate history.

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago

A Bitcoin heist where you install a false ledger using a botnet.

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

It assumes that the stakes are high enough for there to be a significant network online, yes. You could of course still compare your local history to the online one but by then the technology has failed its purpose.

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[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

The stakes may not be high for me but if it has value to someone, all I have to do is build my bot net and then hold their ledger ransom.

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[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

False.

How do you modify a transaction that occurred 100 blocks ago? You'd have to also modify the 99 other blocks since that modification. But for those new blocks to be valid you need to find the new magic number that brings the hash below a certain threshold, 99 times. But there aren't enough machines.

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[–] Electricd@lemmybefree.net 1 point 1 year ago

There are a couple of good uses of blockchain, not only currency, but yea

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[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Blockchain is an adequate solution to a problem that already has other, cheaper solutions.

AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information). Unfortunately, all the money is in that solution being applied to problems where it's not adequate (content generation, user interaction).

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[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information).

Sentiment analysis machines and such have been around before LLMs and eat much less electricity.

LLMs taken over the "AI" label so much that any success from a machine learning context is attributed to it, while it actually defunds and kills research out of ML all into LLMs.

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[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

It's true that LLMs (and GANs) are taking over a term that contains a lot of other stuff, from fuzzy logic to a fair chunk of computer linguistics.

If you look at what AI does, however, it's mostly classification. Whether it's fitting imprecise measurements into categories or analyzing waveform to figure out which word it represents regardless of diction and dialect; a lot of AI is just the attempt at classifying hard to classify stuff.

And then someone figure out how to hook that up to a Markov chain generator (LLMs) or run it repeatedly to "recognize" an image in pure noise (GANs). And those are cool little tricks but not really ones that solve a problem that needed solving. Okay, I'll grant that GANs make a few things in image retouching more convenient but they're also subject to a distressingly large number of failure modes and consume a monstrous amount of resources.

Plus the whole thing where they're destroying the concept of photographic and videographic evidence. I dislike that as well.

I really like AI when used for what it's good at: Taking messy input data and classifying it. We're getting some really cool things done that way and some even justify the resources we're spending. But I do agree with you that the vast majority of funding and resources gets spent on the next glorified chatbot in the vague hope that this one will actually generate some kind of profit. (I don't think that any of the companies who are invested in AI still actually believe their products will generate a real benefit for the end user.)

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[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

If you look at what AI does, however, it’s mostly classification.

Not necessarily, a huge use case is regulation and control in the engineering, not the political sense. Like driverless cars, independently flying drones and such. And yeah, they need classification subsystems under the hood to work, but their ultimate outputs are complex control signals, not simple classes.

And don't get me wrong, I also like ML and AI as a field, I just don't like how OpenAI fucked the field with text generators that they got Silicon Valley to worship like gods. I even like LLMs, just not the grotesquely outsized cult around them.

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[–] primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexus 2 points 1 year ago

Right. We've tried to slay 'truth' before and nothing else has worked. Weve tried to end consciousness before, and we came up with a solution in the 40s but everyone was too chicken shit to use it, so we had to build something nastier.