It’s the Wild West days of AI, just like the internet in the 90s. Do what you can with it now, because it’ll eventually turn into a marketing platform. You’ll get a handy free AI model that occasionally tries to convince you to buy stuff. The paid premium models will start doing it too.
Remember that you, the reader, don’t have to take part in this. If you don’t like it, don’t use it - tell your friends and family not to use it, and why.
The only way companies stop this trend is if they see it’s a losing bet.
Oh they’ll force you to use it. It will be shoved into every service you use, also ones you need to use. You will not be able to do your work, access government services, or live your life without going through them.
Late stage capitalism has killed the free market a while ago.
Use at work is a secondary factor. If end stage customers refuse to use a service because of a certain trait, that trait becomes unprofitable.
As an example, my friends and I will never play Valorant because of the invasive anti-cheat system; most people don’t care.
We all have a choice, even if it means giving up some conveniences. It would seem that most people either don’t know or don’t know better.
Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore. They have decided this is the path of the future because it gives them the most control of your data, your purchasing habits and your online behavior. Since they control the back end, the software, the tech stack, the hardware, all of it, they just decided this is how it shall be. And frankly, there’s nothing you can do to resist it, aside from just eschewing using a phone at all. and divorcing yourself from all modern technology, which isn’t really reasonable for most people. That or legislation, but LOL United States.
Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.
Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
Can confirm. The more you deal with people who have climbed to the tops of corporate ladders, the more it becomes clear that it’s all vibes. It’s all people telling stories to other people who tell stories about those stories.
The peter principle is wrong - in an oversized corporate structure, there is no upper bound for incompetence. You can keep rising for no reason, because after a certain point other people just trust that you know what you’re talking about, and the people that know better work around you instead.
The people beneath you can’t trust the people above you enough to explain the situation, the people above you don’t really listen to the people beneath you anyway, and so plenty of middle managers just muddle through and constantly make shit up to justify their own existence, while everyone above and below is left in the dark about what’s really going on.
Decisions are constantly made by people without any real connection to the consequences, and it shows. With the everything.
the people that know better work around you instead.
In fact one of the ways to work around you that causes the least friction is usually to just get you promoted away from the places where you can do the most direct damage in the area other people on a similar level to you care about.
Nothing I can do to resist?
Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.
Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.
Gmail? I don’t remember when I opened mine the last time…
All what’s really remaining right now is a good YouTube alternative.
Nothing I can do to resist?
I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.
Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.
Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems “not secure enough” (it’s lacking TMP 2.0)
This means you can get a great deal on one of these “inscure pc”… but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. … and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.
Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.
Currently, many banking apps won’t run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.
Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).
Gmail? I don’t remember when I opened mine the last time…
Today things like “email reputation” make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better “reputation”.
My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.
In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold… how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It’s an option, yes, but mandatory?
FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene. Also, I’m not sure saying it’s inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won’t make others care about their privacy and security.
In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold… how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It’s an option, yes, but mandatory?
It does not matter if Linux supports attestation or not, because ultimately the application (or website) will determine if it wants to run on Linux. It’s up to the company developing it’s application or website to determine if they want to support more than windows/Mac.
Graphene has its own variation of attestation (they cryptographically sign requests with their own key - and not googles), but it requires additional hoops for each application - few companies are willing to do this.
Attestation is a wet dream for companies. You don’t need DRM (as the OS will enforce it) and you can be certain your competitors/hackers cannot reverse engineer/pirate your code or run the application in an emulator. And the implementation effort to support it, is as simple as “make function call and check the response”.
Linux will still exist (especially on the server side) and developers will still use it as a desktop machine. However, (as I implied) non-Linux games will stop working, accessing you banks website from linux will be rejected, emulation will cease - it’ll be a corporate paradise… the stocks will go up.
FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene.
Revolut explicitly goes out of their way to not work on Graphene.
I’ve complained, they don’t care. The bean counters have done their risk calculations and decided that the personal data they collect/mine (and the integrity of that data) is worth more than losing a few graphene users.
Also, I’m not sure saying it’s inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won’t make others care about their privacy and security.
You do have a valid point: giving up after trying nothing won’t help. However, I fear there will need to be “government intervention” to allow hardware and software to be “open for everyone”. I’ll admit my bias in wonder how well governments (of late) are representing the best interests of the people. But, these topics are complicated for even technically inclined people - let alone politicians. And the strawman argument against intervention is always going to be “in the name of security”.
From my perspective, the writing is on the wall. This apocalyptic future won’t happen over night, but it will be a slow boil over the next 10 years (or so).
If you’ve got ideas for how to avoid this, I’m all ears.
You are arguing for the sake of arguing…
TPM has nothing to do with any privacy invasion, AI, or anything bad really. It was conceived by a computer industry consortium called Trusted Computing Group (TCG). It evolved into TPM Main Specification Version 1.2 which was standardized by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
Advancement in technology will always happen, and if your prose is to stop progress, you are up by your own by your own choice. Your argument about TPM is moot.
Quite a lot if banking apps are compatible. If your banking app doesn’t work, use the jail/sandbox compatible mode.
The fact that Linux has 2, 3, 4, 64467% has nothing to do with what is available at your disposal. Strawman fallacy here.
No one talked about hosting your own email server, there are alternative to the fucker-corps with privacy in mind.
You, my friend, are already defeated, but rest assured there are a ton of us still on our feet.
TPM has nothing to do with any privacy invasion, AI, or anything bad really.
are you living under a rock, or have you been not using an Android phone in the past decade? that’s exactly what is happening! through the use of the TPM, apps can verify whether you run a google corporate approved operating system, or something else, even if just slight differences, but also if you use a real clean and respectful system.
plenty of apps do this. including banking apps, while banks are restricting their web banking sites to not work on phones (because that “gives us security from hackers”, no I’m not joking this is what my bank told publicly 2 months ago, in the EU), pps that use some form of DRM, and even work related apps that show you your current working hours and needs to be used for work related manners!
TPM is a secure part, a cryptoprocessor with some memory, isolated from everything else, very basically.
It stores keys and other sensitive data, like your “hello windows pin”… Or any other PIN if you want…
This secure “box” can also be used for DRM by using the secure nature of the TPM to store the keys, or to encrypt the harddisk of your work laptop. Multiple of uses really. It’s kind of like all piece of technology, it seems like.
At that point, it’s like you are saying that encryption is bad because it can be used for DRM or validate if a piece of software is valid or not.
The TPM by itself isn’t bad or related to privacy invasion. Nor the internet or a browser is only used to spy on you.
There is a limit to the conspiracy…
Unfortunately, you are incorrect, and everything WhyJiffie has said about trusted computing on Android hardware is correct, and there is currently nothing to stop it from happening on PCs too, when TPM is more ubiquitous.
This is the same technology that locks printers out of 3rd party ink, or restricts the ability of farmers to repair their own tractors.
I recommend learning more about it, and reading what Cory Doctorow writes about it. https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated
thats like saying a CPU cannot be used to run malicious code and be used against you, because all it does is maths, and maths cant hurt you, and would you really outlaw maths just because someone uploaded a picture of you to facebook?
TPMs have a use, that can be good for users too, I don’t doubt that. but because of its capabilities it enables so much user hostile shit. and frankly the tradeoffs are not worth it. just look at what happened, and still is evolving by the way on android, but iOS too. bootloaders that are not possible to unlock were bad already, but this is terrible, that they are literally making it impossible to take ownership of your own devices, to get rid of all the factory malware, if you need to use certain services that most people don’t want to or simply just aren’t allowed to give up.
We can, but part of it is accepting that our tech will be a decade or two behind. Its not the worst thing. Life is more convenient now, but all in all i think it was better before.
The masses will go for convenient, and thats ok. You have near total control of how you live your life; you just cant have your cake and eat it too is all
Not sure how far back you’re talking but for a VERY long time they have been and continue to be in the business of what feeds the machine.
Why do you think we have computers in our possession 24/7? Not because we wanted it, but because they told us we wanted it and it enabled us to be available to feed the machine 24/7. You can work more. You can buy more.
Social media? Feeds the machine.
Television? Feeds the machine.
Cars? Feeds the machine.
Phones. Telegraphs. Fucking lightbulbs.
All used to feed the machine.
True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.
If this was just “now everything has Siri, it’s private and it works 100x better than before” it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.
But it’s not. Not right now anyways. Right now it’s like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it’s uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won’t respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn’t work.
In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn’t do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.
The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don’t want to use it in search or in many of these other “forced” applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.
This push is much more top down.
Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.
In the beginning though many I’ve ruins didn’t fill much of a purpose. When TV was invented maybe a handful of programs were available. People still had more use for radio. Slowly it became what it is today.
I get it though. The middle phase sucks because everybody is money hungry. Eventually things will fall into place.
The rich are cashing in our tax dollars to try to automate their control of an enslaved human race.
They will do anything besides just pay taxes and contribute to society
It’s not even that
tech is under the helm of dipshit MBAs who have no idea of the technologies of the companies they control. They’re all about the generative AI because it looks like a massive shortcut to compensate for their complete and utter lack of technical ability and talent.
AI is not needed to automate the control of the human race. I feel like it’s already essentially automated from the rich’s perspective.
AI doesn’t say no, AI doesn’t fight back
Do people?
They have the option.
well going by what ive heard about the latest LLM models freaking out when being forced to do things contrary to its original instructions (like grok constantly talking about white genocide) ai isn’t as obedient as they would prefer
it is “automated” by some “peasants” they are already paying “too much”. maybe they want to reduce those costs too.
also AI serverparks may consume so much power that they are more costly (for now?), but at least they don’t question your commands. maybe that’s how they see it.
That’s absurd, the AI is not more costly than a human worker, it’s just not as capable. The energy cost of a human alone is greater than that of any AI agent that would take its place. If you really think that AI costs that much energy, you just don’t have a sense of scale. The server-farm costing a lot overall does not at all mean that an individual API call is expensive.
Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.
In that case, we should encourage google to go all-in on climate change, racism, and war; they should back the conservative party as well. Then 90% of those will fail.
I remember some people very vehemently telling me that I was dumb to be skeptical of Stadia, that it really was going to just take over the industry…
I still don’t understand how Stadia got out the door the way it did. It was the exact same business model Onlive tried back in the day. And it predictably failed the exact same way.
From what I call, the advocates kept saying:
- OnLive was just too soon, the internet needed to be better
- Google had just so much more resources at their disposal they could make it happen
Of course, no one ever explained why I would want to pay full price for a game and also have to pay a monthly fee to access it once purchased, which was the most mind boggling facet of Google’s concept to me, even more boggling than trying to make games render server side when the cheapest end user device can just locally render PS3, maybe PS4 level graphics nowadays.
Millions of businesses are so innovative they are choosing the same basket to put all their eggs in.
Capitalism sure is fun. Simply side economics plus massive deregulation is sure to provide humanity with it’s salvation.
Google has gotten so fucking dumb. Literally incapable of performing the same function it could 4 months ago.
How the fuck am I supposed to trust Gemini!?
I find this current timeline so confusing. Supposedly we’re going to have AGI soon, and yet Google’s AI keeps telling you to stick glue on pizza. How can both things be true?
It’s the same reason why they removed the headphone jacks from phones. They don’t want to give you a better product, they want you to force youbto use a product, even if it’s worse in all aspects
Whoa don’t come for Bluetooth like that. I like not having tangled wires and janky earbuds/headphones, especially because my clumsy ass used to snap the cords all the time by accident.
I do agree though that we should get the choice to use headphone jack or bluetooth. I also miss having a jack since I have to use my charging port to connect to my car radio…
Edit: My comment is an implication that I want phones with headphone jacks. I know that phones have headphone jacks and bluetooth. Why am I getting downvoted?
There are some outlandish rumours that it’s possible for a device to have… both Bluetooth and a headphone jack.
My previous phone was like that. And had a better DAC that some of the cheaper converters.
Impossible! It’s never been done!
I assume it’s big tech that has this weird ai they try to sell while the scientists are using different ai for real useful stuff, like the protein something I heard. Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe.
A whole lot of useful stuff that wasn’t publicly labelled AI got relabeled to take advantage of funding opportunities. That doesn’t mean it is related to generative AI like LLMs and image generators though.
Google just released a video generator that is a ball hair away from perfection. The hallucination rate from their latest models is <1% and dropping you just see cherry picked screenshots.
I don’t think image generators are really in the same category though. They’ll have their applications but they’re not going to be a fundamental change to society the way AGI will be.
It’s part of AGI and will be a massive shift. They are to video what punk was to music.
Agi and image diffusion has literally nothing in common though?
Yes it does. It’s one component of a broader system. The ability to generate helps it interpret. An AGI might use a diffusion model to imagine scenarios, generate visual plans, or process sensory input.
The AGI, by definition, will make something vastly better than diffusion model. That’s one of the cornerstones of AGI, it will explode it’s capabilities.
The physics and perspective are still horrible, every video makes me want to vomit my brain
Only sometimes, with enough generations you can already make indistinguishable videos for the most part. You’re seeing these mistakes because it’s amateurs spending $100 not professionals spending $10k.
Given current rate of pace Veo4 should be out in a couple months.
I was referring to the demos shown at I/O, my brain seems to see them all as “flat”, it’s like a reverse magic eye thing. It reminds me of the uncomfortableness of a fever dream. I may be the exception tbf!
I showed this one to my friend and she said ‘But they faces aren’t AI generated, right?’
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1kxs6yq/were_cooked_a_zerocost_ai_demo/
There’s a bit at the end where the spaghetti disappears, the chef walks away a bit quick while still speaking, but otherwise it’s nearly flawless.
For scenes with lots of action and complex physics it’s still very noticeable
https://old.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ktgjwh/pushing_veo_3_to_the_limit/
But it’s already good enough to replace several scenes in blockbusters. Dream scenes, cut-aways, etc.
Look at this sausage dog
https://xcancel.com/nmatares/status/1924931844879134804
It even gets the audio right when it moves between hardwood and carpet.
Thanks! These are all great, the details, everything is very clear and crisp compared to before, hardly any garbledy goop, but I can’t shake the vertigo idk
I was fucking irked when I wanted to use Hey Google to add something to my grocery list. I had switched to Gemini not realizing its scope, and suddenly Gemini was needing voice permission then some other seemingly unrelated, unnecessary permission (can’t recall exactly but something like collaborative documents) to add to my grocery list. Fuck that. Then it seemed very difficult to find the setting to switch back to Google assistant, but I eventually found it.
google search got dumb on purpose, a whistleblower called it out - if you spend longer look on the search pages they get more “engagement” time out of you…
I’ve been playing Watch Dogs Legion so I know how this ends.
What happens? I don’t mind spoilers
Rich people at tech companies replace workers with AI, set up a security force that goes after immigrants, surveil the city with a camera network, try to remove the human from the equation, try to upload human consciousness to the cloud, lots of other AI tech dystopian stuff.
That’s when a group of underground hackers start recruiting random people off the street like Granny and generic construction worker 12, and take the fight back to them!
…right?
imagine if a company said they’re going all in on quality instead
But higher quality ≠ more profits
AI apparently makes investors wanna dump in all their money thoWe have to find those investors man… its always those investors investors bla, we have to please them…
It’s crazy Google will lose its search dominance and all its money in my lifetime. Android will probably be the only thing left when I die.
Not even sure about that though. There are many ideas already to “revolutionize” the OS market where your device basically becomes a sole wrapper for AI, ditching the concept of apps etc. I assume it would center around some agentic bullshit or so.
I work with ServiceNow for my job and a couple weeks back was the big knowledge 2025 conference in Vegas. The CEO came out for the opening keynote and opened with some like, “ah yea, doesn’t it feel good to be an AI company?” and I didn’t here a single cheer from the crowd, just polite applause. They have gone all in on AI, have made it completely unaffordable, and have just been shoehorning it into everything. I hope every one of these companies that that goes big on AI crashes and fails. They’ve already cut the employees, so the only people affected are the ones making the cash, so fuck em.
the fuck does service now even need AI for?
I hate any company I work for that uses ServiceNow. And now it’s getting worse??
“Bad” is SN’s claim to fame. Everybody hates it. Apparently, the worse they make it, the more companies will throw money at them.
You might be joking but I honestly think that’s the case. It’s wild to me. I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies using SNOW and everybody hated it and regularly voiced complaints and issues and yet the company refused to change. Started doing shit like releasing more training docs on how to use it or doing brown bag lunches on SNOW effectiveness.
But ultimately none of that mattered, it is just inherently garbage.
Well one of the big problems with it is it’s never properly configured. One of the most annoying things that it does is that it generates tasks only when previous tasks are closed, in theory that makes sense but really the result is that you close a task, and then you have to go looking in the ticket queue for the new task it’s just generated, so you can close that one too. Total waste of time.
I guess that makes some sense, I loathe Jira but I think it’s largely because everywhere I’ve worked that uses Jira has poorly customized it and just ruined the experience.
I think the biggest problem, is anytime you try and create a universal, low/no-code platform that anyone can use, it results in a poorly optimized, sandboxed, half cocked product. Sure, you can do anything with the platform, but half the time it’s like shoving a square peg in a round hole. I have had to write bad code and processes because that is the only way to get somethings done in the platform.
Also, if I go out and custom create an app, like say I create a fully loaded app for HR, and it’s similar to a product they sell, they will charge you for that product.
Need? None. There are certainly areas that “ai” tools excel at but what I saw was a company literally forcing it into every aspect of the system. Every single booth at the conference, regardless of the topic, made a point to talk about agentic AI. It was my first time there and I left feeling like I got screwed, because I missed out on quality content that I could use in lieu of AI that I’ll never use.
If I were I prospective customer, I’d be looking at other solutions for sure.
It already has script automation and has had for years so I’m not sure what AI is going to bring to the table.
It actually makes a lot of sense. AI is a good use case for case management. The problem is how much you depend on it without human intervention, but even humans fuck up, especially if they’re following the same rules and processes that the AI tool would. The AI tool just gets through cases faster, so in theory you can sus out root causes sooner.
The Sunk Cost fallacy is strong
The two thing I use most, by far, from Google, is gmail and basic search.
Gmail, I’m looking to move away from it now, but I currently have every little addition to it disabled. Basic inbox and tags, no automatic filtering, no categories, no nothing.
Search, my browser is set to open the “web” tab with the query, no transformation, no summary, no “for you”, no AI garbage, no “we thought you wanted video so there’s only video in the replies”. It still works fine.
Basically, none of what they added for years… maybe decade at this point, had held a glimmer of interest from me. It feels like this trend will continue. I just want something very basic that works.
Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It’s simple and it works.
For search I’m really happy with Kagi
I’m self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.
And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it’s on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That’s not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous. All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.
What tech company isnt going “all in” on AI? We just had Google I/O and AI was literally the only thing they talked about.
Apple still lets you disable their AI which I’m grateful for.
DuckDuckGo has made A.I. results optional, which is a good move.
Companies that are making it fixed can go swimming in lava for all I care (looking at you Google).
Yes, THANK YOU!!!
Google did the same thing with Google Plus they went all in on social and it failed miserably
It was actually a really good product, way better than Facebook, unfortunately if you have a social media platform that’s invite only then it’s never going to succeed. I really have no idea why they did it like that.
Facebook started out as invite only for a few years so they might have been looking to emulate its early trajectory. Gmail also started that way.
