The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won’t train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is insanity. If you’re paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you should be able to get activity history without training or review or storing your data for several years.

Lots of things in life seem to be the majority having to go along with the decisions of the minority. I remember in 2012 when Facebook put white chevrons for previous- and next-photo in the web photo gallery product and thinking how this one product decision by a handful of punks has now been foisted on the world. At the time I was really into putting my photography on FB and, somewhat pretentiously, it really pissed me off to start having UI elements stuck on it!

Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it’s true though — the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives.

And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go’s stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.

> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.

We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.

Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.

There's a humorous vignette in season 2 of "A Man on the Inside":

Our heroes are in the office of a tech billionaire who says "See that coffee machine? Just speak what you want. It can make any coffee drink."

So one character says "Half caf latte" and the machine does nothing except open a small drawer.

"You have to spit in the drawer so it can collect your DNA--then it will make your coffee" the billionaire says.

This pretty much sums up the whole tech scene today. Any good engineer could build that coffee machine, but no VC would fund her company without that spit drawer.

Microsoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about it.

> I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment.

Pretty much my sentiment too.

AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.

Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.

It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.

What I also dislike about the AI is that it promotes a mainframe-like development workflow. Schedule your computation, pay for the usage, etc. Any chance this particular trend stops or reverses? Are we ever going to have local AI that is in practice comparable and sufficient?

Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.

This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises.

For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.

> We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call.

What startups are doing earning calls?

> We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works.

Yeah, I think the days of working software are over (at least deterministically)

VSCode feels like it’s in the “brand withdrawal” phase of its lifespan. I’ve turned off the sneakily named “Chat” and yet it still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar visibility.

> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

I’m not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit? How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does that get managed?

Sure! [1]

[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urg...

The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap.

A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."

If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.

Amazon's Price History feature certainly doesn't need to open their AI assistant, but in addition to be graph I came for, I get a little summary of the graph. I really hope they aren't using an LLM for that when all it's doing is telling me it's the lowest price in 30 days.

Boomers in the manager class love AI because it sells the promise of what they've longed for for decades: a perfect servant that produces value with no salary, no need for breaks, no pushback, no workers comp suits, etc.

The thing is, AI did suck in 2023, and even in 2024, but recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory, which when you look at it from a distance makes sense, eventually if you throw the smartest researchers on the planet and billions of dollars at a problem, something eventually will give and the wheels will start turning.

There is a strange blindness many people have on here, a steadfast belief that AI just will just never end up working or always be a scam, but the massive capex on AI now is predicated on the eventual turning of the fledgling LLM's into self-adaptive systems that can manage any cognitive task better than a human. I don't see how the improvements we've seen over the past few years in AI aren't surely heading in that direction.

What examples of AI integrations annoy you? Because I have such wonderful time randomly discovering AI integrations where they actually fit nicely: 1) marimo documentation has ask button to quickly get some help, kind of like way smarter RAG; 2) postman has AI that can write little scripts that visualize responses however you want (for example I turned bunch of user ids into profile links so that I could visit all of them); 3) Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about. 4) Google's AI Mode saved me many clicks, even just Gemini that can quickly fetch when certain TV Show goes live and make reminder is amazing

In addition to the annoyances mentioned, the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources. I'm sure if, instead of AI being shoved in, want it or not, they said pay $1 if you want AI, the number of data centers needed would be reduced dramatically.

I don’t we’re at the “companies bought too many GPUs” stage yet. My understanding is they still can’t get enough GPUs, or data centers to put them in, or power to run them. Most companies don’t even own them, they rent from the clouds.

We are, however, at the “we need an AI strategy” stage, so execs will throw anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks.

The worst usage of AI is “content dilution” where you take a few bullet points and generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop. These days, I would gladly take badly written content from humans filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes over that.

As usual, those who spent too much money on it use it as a way to show their investors they didn't waste all that money and to get them to spend even more. That's why it's so messed up.

The AI push is not just hype, it’s a scramble for cash. For now the only game plan is to scale up massively with a giant investment gamble, to try to get beyond the obvious limitations that threaten to burst the bubble.

Plus the general economy outlook is negative, AI is the bright spot. They are striving to keep growth up amid downward pressure.

This seems like a fairly reasoned screed. I can't find much to disagree with.

I am, personally, quite optimistic about the potential for "AI," but there's still plenty of warts.

Just a few minutes ago, I was going through a SwiftUI debugging session with ChatGPT. SwiftUI View problems are notoriously difficult to debug, and the LLM got to the "let's try circling twice widdershins" stage. At that point, I re-engaged my brain, and figured out a much simpler solution than the one proposed.

However, it gave me the necessary starting point to figure it out.

If AI was as great as they pretend, there would be no need to force it on us.

I mean, we're in the upslope stage of the hype/bubble cycle. Once this pops and 80% of invested people lose their shirts, the long-term adoption cycle will play out much more reasonably, more like OP wishes.

assume it is being ‘done wrong’, not due to the usual trifecta of greed/evil/stupidity, but due to socio-economic pressure that demands this approach.

AI really needs R&D time, where we first figure out what it’s good for and how best to exploit it.

But R&D for SW is dead. Users proved to be super-resilient to buggy or mis-matched sw. They adapt. ‘Good-enough’ often doesn’t look it. Private equity sez throw EVERYTHING at the wall and chase what sticks…

yeah, we're f&%^ed

As I click into this thread from the front page, "Writing a Good Claude.md" appears immediately above it. Sigh.

Ok fair enough, feel more of the AGI.

>> It is time to do AI the right way.

Some "No True Scotsman"-flavored cope.

try watching a televised American football game. So many ads for AI. Of course ads appeal most to the gullible.

Oh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the need to force every possible use case down our throats even if they don't make any sense or make quality worse.

E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.

If AI was amazing you wouldn’t need to push it, people would demand it!

You need to push slop, because people don’t really want it.

> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible. It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to achieve "liftoff".

I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too. But that's my know-nothing take.

maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image content (and definitely the music content, spotify pushing this slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is open source, MIT licensed. It's not art at all. Go get it (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want to do the right thing).

AI can be thought of as a parasitic lifeform: it feeds on truth and excretes slop. We know AI is no good for us, but those pushing it have a nefarious plan: make people dependent on it, so we can't get rid of this parasite without destroying our society.

Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money.

I’m not opposed to any of the above, necessarily. I’ve just always been the type to want to adopt things as they are needed and bring demonstrable value to myself or my employer and not a moment before. That is the problem that capital has tried to solve through “founder mode” startups and exploitative business models: “It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not, what matters is that we’re forcing you to pay for it so we get our returns.”

  Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money.

AI will with certainty increase productivity of % and the rest will fall behind, perhaps dramatically. Effectiveness with AI can still be a grind, beyond simple prompting, we are getting lots of expensive AI tools heavily subsidized right now, that may not always be the case.