For the first time in years I thought about buying a new phone. The S23 Ultra, the previous versions had been improving significantly but the price was a factor. Then I got a promotion and figured I would splurge, the S24 Ultra, but it was all aout AI so I just stayed where I am…it does everything anyway.
Which phone do you have now?
Developer: Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the consumers who are wrong.
DeveloperStackholder: Am I pushing the wrong ideas onto the managers?No, it’s the developers who don’t know how to implement the features I want.
I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
Seeing the whole thing as Knowingly Trading in Hype is actually a really good insight.
Certainly it neatly explains a lot.
Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.
If the whole sector turns out to be garbage it won’t matter which particular set of companies within it you invest in; you will get burned if you cash out after everyone else.
OpenAI will fail. StabilityAI will fail. CivitAI will prevail, mark my words.
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
That’s an even worse ‘use case’ than I could imagine.
HR should be one of the most protected fields against AI, because you actually need a human resource.
And “prompt engineer” is so stupid. The “job” is only necessary because the AI doesn’t understand what you want to do well enough. The only productive guy you could hire would be a programmer or something, that could actually tinker with the AI.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
My doorbell camera manufacturer now advertises their products as using, “Local AI” meaning, they’re not relying on a cloud service to look at your video in order to detect humans/faces/etc. Honestly, it seems like a good (marketing) move.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing these tech investor pump n’ dump patterns faster collectively, given how many has happened in such a short amount of time already.
Crypto, Internet of Things, Self Driving Cars, NFTs, now AI.
It feels like the futurism sheen has started to waver. When everything’s a major revolution inserted into every product, then isn’t, it gets exhausting.
TimeSquirrel made a good point about Internet of Things, but Crypto and Self Driving Cars are still booming too.
IMHO it’s a marketing problem. They’re major evolutions taking root over decades. I think AI will gradually become as useful as lasers.
don’t forget Big Data
Internet of Things
This is very much not a hype and is very widely used. It’s not just smart bulbs and toasters. It’s burglar/fire alarms, HVAC monitoring, commercial building automation, access control, traffic infrastructure (cameras, signal lights), ATMs, emergency alerting (like how a 911 center dispatches a fire station, there are systems that can be connected to a jurisdiction’s network as a secondary path to traditional radio tones) and anything else not a computer or cell phone connected to the Internet. Now even some cars are part of the IoT realm. You are completely surrounded by IoT without even realizing it.
Huh, didn’t know that! I mainly mentioned it for the fact that it was crammed into products that didn’t need it, like fridges and toasters where it’s usually seen as superfluous, much like AI.
I would beg to differ. I thoroughly enjoy downloading various toasting regimines. Everyone knows that a piece of white bread toasts different than a slice of whole wheat. Now add sourdough home slice into the mix. It can get overwhelming quite quickly.
Don’t even get me started on English muffins.
With the toaster app I can keep all of my toasting regimines in one place, without having to wonder whether it’s going to toast my pop tart as though it were a hot pocket.
Bagels are a whole different set of data than bread. New bread toasts much more slowly than old bread.
I mean give the thing an USB interface so I can use an app to set timing presets instead of whatever UX nightmare it’d otherwise be and I’m in, nowadays it’s probably cheaper to throw in a MOSFET and tiny chip than it is to use a bimetallic strip, much fewer and less fickle parts and when you already have the capability to be programmable, why not use it. Connecting it to an actual network? Get out of here.
Yea I’m being a little facetious I hope it is coming through lol
It’s more of a macroeconomic issue. There’s too much investor money chasing too few good investments. Until our laws stop favoring the investor class, we’re going to keep getting more and more of these bubbles, regardless of what they are.
Yeah it’s just investment profit chasing from larger and larger bank accounts.
I’m waiting for one of these bubble pops to do lasting damage but with the amount of protections for specifically them and that money that can’t be afforded to be “lost” means it’s just everyone else that has to eat dirt.
I get AI has its uses but I don’t need my mouse to have any thing AI related (looking at you Logitech).
LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn’t waste their money.
Many of us who are old enough saw it as an advanced version of ELIZA and used it with the same level of amusement until that amusement faded (pretty quick) because it got old.
If anything, they are less impressive because tricking people into thinking a computer is actually having a conversation with them has been around for a long time.
So you want to tell me they all spent billions and made huge data centres that suck more power than small country so we can all play with it say it was fun and then toss it away?
This is kinda insane if that’s how it will play out
Not the first time this has happened. Even recently. See NFTs. Venture capitalists hear “tech buzzword” and throw money at it because if they’re lucky, it’s the next Google. Or at least it gets an IPO and they can cash out.
Yeah but like we could be doing something worthwhile with all these finite resources it makes me a bit dizzy
We could, but they don’t care about making the world a better place. They care about getting rich. And then if everything collapses, they can go to their private island or their doomsday vault or whatever and enjoy the apocalypse.
I agree with this, my sentiments exactly as well. Getting AI pushed towards us from every direction & really never asked for it. Like to use it for certain things but go to it when needed. Don’t want it in everything, at least personally.
Honestly they’re still impressive and useful it’s just the hype train overload and trying to implement them in areas they either don’t fit or don’t work well enough yet.
AI does a good job of generating character portraits for my TTRPG games. But, really, beyond that I haven’t found a good use for it.
So far that’s been the best use of AI for me too. I’ve also used it to help flesh out character backgrounds, and then I just go through and edit it.
Yeah exactly, as a tool that doesn’t need to be perfect to give you a starting point it’s excellent. But companies sort of forgot the “as a tool” part and are just implementing ai outright in places it’s not ready yet like drive-thru windows or voice only interface devices…it’s not ready for that shit currently (if it ever truly will be).
They are all completely half-baked products being rolled out before they’re ready because none of these billion dollar tech companies will allow a product to not immediately generate revenue.
I’m really enjoying seeing the backlash of everyone unanimously being sick of having this unfinished tech shoved down our throats.
One place where I found AI usefull is in generating search queries in JIRA. Not having to deal with their query language every time I have to change a search filter, but being able to just use the built in AI to query in natural language has already saved me like two or three minutes in total in the last two months.
I like my AI compartmentalized, I got a bookmark for chatGPT for when i want to ask a question, and then close it. I don’t need a different flavor of the same thing everywhere.
“Water is wet! Fire is hot!”
Yeah and that is largely fueled by two things; poor/forced use of AI, and anti-AI media sentiment (which is in turn fueled by reactionary/emotional narratives that keep hitting headlines, commonly full of ignorance)
AI can still provide actual value right now and can still improve. No it’s not the end-all but it doesn’t have to solve humanity’s problems to be worth using.
This unfortunate situation is largely a result of the rush to market because that’s the world we live in these days. Nobody gives a fuck about completing a product they only care about completing it first, fuck quality that can come later. As a sr software engineer myself I see it all too often in the companies I’ve worked for. AI was heralded as christ’s second coming that will magically do all of this stuff while still in relative infancy, ensuring that an immature product was rushed out the door and applied to everything possible. That’s how we got here, and my first statement is where we are now.
If I could have the equivalent of a smart speaker that ran the AI model locally and could interface with other files on the system. I would be interested in buying that.
But I don’t need AI in everything in the same way that I don’t need Bluetooth in everything. Sometimes a kettle is just a kettle. It is bad enough we’re putting screens on fridges.
I like the vast majority of my technology dumb, the last barely smart kettle I bought - it had a little screen that showed you temperature and allowed you to keep the water at a particular temperature for 3h - broke within a month. Now I once again have a dumb kettle, it only has the on/off button and has been working perfectly since I got it
I really fucking hated the android update where holding the power button summons Gemini before actually giving you the shut down menu.
Oh yes I was so confused when trying to restart my phone and holding the power button just summoned the google assistant
AI is garbage.
Who knew that new technologies that are great for businesses’ bottom lines wouldn’t also be great for consumer satisfaction.
Say it ain’t so.
Initially great for bottom lines. Then consumer dissatisfaction finds a way.
Unless you have legally reinforced monopoly.
Too big to fail, babyyyyy…
Send them anthrax spores, then they will fail
I literally uninstalled and disabled every AI process and app in that latest galaxy AI update, which was the whole update btw. my reasons are:
1- privacy and data sharing.
2- the battery, cpu, ram of AI bloatware running in the background 247.
3- it was chaging and doing things which I didn’t want especially in the galary photo albums and camera AI modes.
I was considering a new Samsung phone - is that baked into it? (Assuming you’re talking Samsung anyway, based on the galaxy name)
Samsung is a nightmare, don’t purchase their products.
For example: I used to have a Samsung phone. If I plugged it into the USB port on my computer Windows Explorer would not be able to see it to transfer files. My phone would tell me I need to download Samsung’s drivers to transfer files. I could only get them by downloading Samsung’s software. Once I installed the software Windows Explorer was able to see the device and transfer files. Once I uninstalled the software Windows Explorer couldn’t see the device again.
Anything Samsung can do in your region to insert themselves between you and what you are trying to do they will do.
2nd this. Samsung is for people who hate themselves but can’t commit to ending it all.
This is a great summary I’m going to make use of
What’s a good brand then?
I use Pixel for Android. IMHO it’s the easiest to modify and if you want it stock, its vanilla Googled Android and it gets the updates 1st and most often.
The software bloat is not dissimilar to what I’ve heard in the past, but I’d forgotten since I haven’t gone in depth researching yet. Which phones do we prefer today? Loosely off the top of my head, less bloat/intrusiveness, nice camera, battery life enough for a day, and maybe on the smaller size to fit one hand are probably what I’ll be looking in to.
Apparently Pixel is the easiest to install an alternative OS on, going to start looking into that soon.
I’ve got a Ulefone, I’m quite fond of it.
Ooo I haven’t heard of Ulefone before, I see some of their phones have a built in thermal camera? That sounds cool. How’s the Android/software experience? I’m not familiar with the Chinese phone lines, do they have their own bloat like Samsung?
No bloatware, although mine has a “feature” called Duraspeed I need to uninstall that restricts background applications, including fitness tracking ones I actually want running, and notifies me multiple times per day about this.
Them and Doogee I really like, especially since the phones don’t need to be in a case.
Care to share how you disabled every bit of AI in the phone?
Yee. No root required, neither recommended for samsung devices. In short just enable developer mode from phone settings, then debug it with adb platform to uninstall and disable any system app, and can also change lines, colors, phone behaviors, properties and look, install and uninstall apps which you could not before…and so many things.
Do you have to do this every time you update your phone?
No off course. Once and all the OS and security and all updates all work fine
Absolutely, I was pretty upset when Google added Gemini to their Messages app, then excited when the button (that you can’t remove) was removed! Now I’ve updated Messages again and they brought the button back. Why would you ever need an LLM in a texting app?
Edit: and also Snapchat, Instagram, and any other social media app they’re shoveling an AI chat bot into for no reason
Edit 2: AND GOOGLE TELLING ME “Try out Gemini!” EVERY TIME I USE GOOGLE ASSISTANT ON MY PHONE!!!
