I wouldn’t say all “AI” was a grift. Machine learning is a useful tool, like a hammer, it’s just not a magic genie for everything. Always has been, always will be.
Same with blockchain, albeit in a much narrower niche. I do think it’s a terrible system for a widely-used currency, though.
Same with quantum computing. It’s a niche.
The pattern is that Tech Bros inflate something narrowly interesting into a “it’s going to ascend the human race if you give us enough money” FOMO thing.
…And, currently, the next target seems to be space travel.
Again, I emphasize. Very useful in certain niches, like science. Stupendously impractical outside of them.
I hate how “AI” is abused in many ways. But it is a huge help for me transitioning to Linux. It’s such a time saver, plus I actually learn from it as I always ask what the commands are for and to explain them to me. Often I can then detect if it’s right or wrong and then come up with better alternatives. I’m a bit ashamed to admit this honestly.
Yeah, the shame is weird.
I’ve been playing with LLMS since 2022 or so, and the transition from being able to talk about them as something neat to the (well deserved) hate was… surreal.
I’d point to trying to use local or open weights models first, but other than that you shouldn’t be ashamed of reasonable use.
Most of Lemmy are idiots and poor people that hate everything. Don’t listen to most the idiots here.
The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaceX, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human
space explorationevolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. Grift+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes.
I mean we have two machines that together convert a basket of dirty laundry into clean clothes. And then by appeal to authority (“There’s no law that says I have to fold my clean clothes.”), voila! It’s done.
Unacceptable. Pathetic. Is that the best humanity has to offer? Some brutish, crude machine that just agitates my clothes in soapy water? And a second machine that just blows hot air on it as it spins it?
No.
I should be able to put my dirty clothes in a receptacle, and say “Hey,
Robot OverlordGoogle. Start clothes cleaning cycle” and when I return the clothes are separated, cleaned, and neatly folded. At a minimum. Really the clothes should also be put away in my dresser by the AI.What if a robot came and gathered all your dirty clothes, made listings for them on craigslist (or whatever people use now), marked up above MSRP or whatever you paid (people will still buy them, even used, even at a higher price than new, if you include a note saying they were owned by a woman, whether they were or not), shipped them to the interested buyers, used the proceeds from those sales to purchase new, identical clothing to what you previously owned?
I’m sure at first I would love it because instead of having to purchase this robot it would be “free” to me.
But after everyone gets used to the clothes robots there would eventually be paid subscription tiers and the next time you open your drawers all your pants have DraftKings ads on the butt.
what if you could bypass that with a draftkings tattoo directly on your butt?
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I’m crazy! 😀
None of these technologies are a grift per say, the economic system we use to develop them and the marketing needed to ensure funding under the aforementioned hellscape are a grift.
capitalism
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Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Anything where a trustless system is important. The “largest users can rewrite history at will” is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
Well, you just don’t know. In the real world there are private blockchains between equipotent participants that don’t rely on burning the planet to function. Helpful reading: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/private-blockchain/
Blockchain is a concept, can’t be owned or affected.
“You just don’t know” doesn’t answer my question. A private blockchain, by design, is already owned by its largest actors.
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
As I understand, it’s normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn’t be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.’
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
All technology from this point on will be a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
Seriously
These technologies are not grifts.
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it’s on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
The picture wasn’t even on the blockchain. It was a url which links to a picture of a cat sitting on someone else’s server
Was it even that or just a hash of the url (or whatever text/data was being “confirmed”)?
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn’t want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
I don’t see why put quantum computer in that group.
It’s a scientific research topic. It is know what it does and what it doesn’t do. And they are not selling you it’s going to be the future.
It’s just a developing technology which have potential to make some algorithms more efficient than binary computation.
They don’t sell you quantum computation, they don’t tell you to invest in it. It’s just something being researched by computer scientists.
Let’s not be that much anti-any-kind-of-progress, shall we?
Artificial Intelligence is also a research topic. But when snake oil merchants figured out that they could use the term to take lots of money from the hands of unsuspecting people, it became a grift. As such I believe the inclusion of quantum computing in the group is on point
Quantum computers are more secure but could also be used to break that security. That’s why the major customers of quantum computers are banks and governments. It is not really for wide mass consumption. Although I heard quantum chips are better and more environmentally friendly but i am not a tech guy so i could be wrong on that or the quantum chip itself.
but could also be used to break that security
Not really, unless really stupid encryption was used. The best quantum can do is the log of a problem space. It can do log(N) if the problem space is N.
TIL RSA is a pretty stupid encryption algorithm.
I am not against any of the tech i listed, i think they all are neat and quite interesting to study and use.
you have probably not been around the forums to realise why i put it there, QC discussion these days are leaning towards the it’s a grift/ it will never be viable territory. This is mostly in large part due to M$ and their claims. there is also some subtle fear mongering going on with the recent push towards quantam resistant encryption standards.
So i am not calling QC a grift, I am calling out that whenever it becomes viable for the companies that are researching it to rent their computers to consumers, people will start calling it the next grift.
Maybe you’ve mistaken criticisms of the MS claims for criticisms of quantum technology in general?
I agree from the standpoint of research for research sake is still worth doing but anyone telling you that they have a working quantum computer that is just around the corner from working is most likely grifting.
Quantum computers are a thing, and they’re very useful for certain things…
But business idiots in the tech world do be slapping the word “quantum” on stuff. It’s not a huge thing at the moment, but it’s probably gonna be the next insufferable hype cycle after they get tired of branding random shit as “AI enabled” because they stapled a chat bot on to it.
Like, give it a few years, someone will be trying to tell you that a quantum computer will somehow make a vacuum robot able to do your laundry because “something something better path finding”
I mean it’s definitely something that companies are trying to sell. Even if it’s just marketing BS right now, they’re using this to sell their LLM products.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/majorana-2-microsoft-discovery-agentic-ai/
They are not selling that to end users or business.
That’s a line of product for research purposes.
They sell that to people researching quantum computer.
How about Mullvad advertising quantum protection or whatever?
What?
Post quantum encryption algorithms are the ones that any serious company should use right now.
Because one of the algorithms that it’s stated to be far more efficient on a quantum computer than a binary one are number factorization, which is the bases of many public private enceyption algorithms like RSA.
Right now it’s not possible, but listen now decrypt later means that anything encrypted now might be decrypted in not so many years by a quantum computer.
They are not selling you a quantum computer, they are “selling” the algorithm you should be using if you don’t want your communications to be easily decrypted when a quantum computer with a higher number of stable qbits hits production.
Those algorithms are, anyway, public and well know, like parabolic curve algorithm or lattices. You could implement them yourself, any company can do so.
So they’re not using it as an advertising buzzword, it just happens to be a buzzword they’re using while advertising their feature. I stand corrected! 😌
Capitalism makes every innovation into a grift
I agree. No matter how much a technology will eventually be useful, it’s always turned into a gift beforehand, then there’s the collapse and only after that it settles into a reasonable thing.
See: the dot-com bubble
So what innovation would socialism turn into a grift?
Vanguardism, as seen in Russia and China.
We’ve seen this movie already
The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.
Nah they’re not inherently grifts; they’re pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.
I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don’t understand he technology and it’s limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it’s about selling shares and inflating share prices.
Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it’s slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it’s not a quiet revolution but it’s also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.
We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we’re in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
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I really disagree about fusion. It will have nearly zero impact on the electricity and power market. It’s dead on arrival economically. There’s no way a fusion plant is going to be cheaper than a fission plant. And it’s already far cheaper to provide base load power with solar and batteries than it is to do so via fission. And this is the state today. Imagine how cheap these will be when commercial fusion finally happens. Realistically, even for constant 24/7 power output, fusion will probably cost 3-5x what solar does. Fusion plants would have a smaller physical footprint, but no but no one really cares about that. There’s no shortage of space to put panels.
Fusion will have a lot of utility in the very far future. As humanity ventures ever further outward, it will be invaluable for true deep space colonization. Fusion provides the power necessary to expand to the Outer Solar System and beyond. 500 years from now, fusion will be a really big deal to folks trying to make it out there. Fusion allows you to turn any random ice ball in the Kuiper belt into a colony capable of supporting millions. And it would probably be a necessary prerequisite for interstellar colonization.
But for anyone living closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, fusion will be of little use beyond perhaps niche isotope synthesis or as a neutron source.
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole’s money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I’m open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I’m an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you’re not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of “”“voluntary”“” employment contracts? Then yes, you’re hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I’m a bit surprised that you’re reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it’s bog standard socialist analysis. Like I’m not saying anything controversial there unless you’re just not a socialist.
