I’ll be honest I’ve skipped the last 3 months of threat briefs due to holidays and general disinterest. I should re engage before someone asks me questions I can’t even pretend to answer lol
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I can’t tell you either, but if C-Suites did see Terminator (or any other futuristic/cyberpunk/dystopia), they absolutely would learn the wrong lesson (See Zucks Metaverse after Ready Player One)
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I previously built my computers with reckless abandon because parts were fast becoming relatively cheap.
In the near future, I will be in the process of transplanting my SFF’s guts into a much larger case with significantly more airflow just eek out, hopefully, an extra few years.
Also, I’ll be moving to a mini computer for all my non-gaming needs to further reduce increase my gaming computer’s life; lately gaming has taken a back seat in favor of working on my homelab, networking infrastructure (recently got cable drops at my house so gotta redo my ad-hoc move-in setup). I’m just eating this expensive rig’s life way so I can stare at a bunch of browser tabs
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My wife wanted to spend 200$ on a typing trainer for the kids so I built an app in an evening instead.
There really any number of free websites to train your kids in touch-typing.
She was insistent on paying for one. She tried the free ones. Didn’t like. She tried what I made. Liked.
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This feels like using a jackhammer for a single ant. I mean, sure, I agree that $200 for a typing program for children is excessive by any means unless you’re already expecting them to be competing for Ivy League schools. This feels like an environmentally expensive alternative to avoid trying to convince your wife that a free or cheap touch typing alternative is better than spending $200. I mean, there’s typing games for Chrismas sakes (granted they are typically supplementary to actual programs, but still).
Like, I’m glad you, a non-dev, are empowered to create apps out of thin air, but, like I said, jackhammer for an ant
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My kids are homeschooled. My wife wanted to use the same program that is used by a lot of co-ops and private schools. I’m not gonna limit them to ads ridden, pay wall progress locked, or mini game supplements. It’s either pony up for the paid full course program or create my own. As for the environmental impact of using 10 tokens for a web app in Lovable, it’s basically zero. Furthermore I have offset a thousand lifetimes worth of environmental impacts with the 189 miles of streams and rivers I’ve restored in 13 states. I literally just completed a 12,000 foot stream restoration for impacts related to a solar farm build to power an AI data center.
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Fwiw, edclub has a pretty good free typing course (“Typing Jungle”) that my partner used to learn touch typing a few years ago. It’s a mix of lessons with the odd mini-game interspersed in between and as far as I remember, the ads were rather unobtrusive (standard webpage background ads, no forced “watch this video to progress” stuff). Compared to the paid software I learnt on a good while back, it was comparable/better.
May be worth looking at if you should need an alternative at some point.
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That is factually and verifiably false. Please excuse the hypocracy of using my search engine’s AI for a synopsis to my query
Using AI tokens, such as those for generating text or images, can have a significant environmental impact due to the high energy consumption associated with data centers that run AI models. For example, generating a single AI text query can consume energy at a rate four to five times greater than a typical search engine request, contributing to increased greenhouse gas emissions and resource use.
Also: Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Once a generative AI model is trained, the energy demands don’t disappear.
Offsetting is nice, but what if we just didn’t have to need to offset? Offsetting is a conscious soothing stone. A tax write off. (That being said, I wont’t hold your sins against the sins of businesses and corporations, as that would be entirely unfair, but my point stands; offsetting is malarkey)
Let’s also not forget the fact that everyone, including business (from the almost nonexistent to huge) and their mother wanting to make their own, free app alternatives lead to
Furthermore, instead of integrating and learning how to use enterprise hardware (for my job) in my own personal homelab. I’ll also have to start switching to more consumer, power efficient, hardware just to keep learning the sysadmin side (at least in Florida; if you didn’t know power rates are increasing, but I’m absolutely sure that’s just a coincidence and totally not a monopoly taking advantage of the situation (among other things greed))
This is a false dilemma fallacy. There are so many alternatives, namely, convince your wife that your children don’t need expensive software and likely just about any typing software is just as good
Software level: uBlock Origin, AdGuard
Network layer (router): Pi-Hole
There are literally dozens of typing apps, just move on to the next one
My suggestion was not about “mini games” but rather a legitimate games that use typing as a fun way to apply what you’ve learned. It can even be a reward for however you measure competency. Heck, Steam even has typing software that’s not games; worst case, you just wait a few months for a seasonal Steam Sale
While I’m glad that AI has empowered you with the ability to make something useful (even if there are already dozens/hundreds of extant alternatives), I reiterate my point Jackhammer to an ant
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I agree with the above but also this gets to my recycling analogy. One person isn’t going to change the environment and in the end is more a symptom of the overall larger issue that is corporate greed and money in politics that drives these environmental disaster systems forward without an end in sight. In the end saving money by building a relatively free app is neat and isn’t any worse than my using chat gpt last night to draft that start of a tooth fairy letter for my daughter.
She swallowed her tooth and I’m as poetic as a toadstool so chat gpt filler fluff actually works great in this use case.
My bigger complain is when did the tooth fairy get so expensive. When I was a kid it was a quarter now it’s like 2-5 bucks… inflation man it’s real…
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Software developers create AI then software developers pontificate on how terrible AI is…..
I’ll just stop posting in this thread.
If I had been given the choice to make “AI” or keep both consumer hardware and power bills cheap and/or readily available (and not to mention the environmental impact), I would have told them to go to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks and burnt the building to the ground. But here we are, in a world with rampant AI usage and consumer hardware prices.
AI should be treated like alcohol. AI Responsibly people need to make conscience effort to weigh the ethical, moral, environmental/etc issues against what they are doing. I can only speak for myself, but I would not be using AI in my job if my livelihood didn’t depend upon it. I’d tell them to go to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks as well, however, in this economy, I’m not afforded the ability have too much morals
AI, true AI that is (not whatever this is), would be amazing, and if used correctly (which I doubt it would because gestures broadly, but one can hope), would alleviate a lot of problems and reduce human errors significantly. However, AI, as it currently exists, should never have been released into the wild hands of consumers. Forget about environmental impact, forget that there is less friction now than ever for non-devs to create apps. The fact that someone can use, idk, Grok, for such explicitly illegal things, especially in a world where many government’s laws have just barely been updated to cover brick era cellphone issues, honestly is quite an alarming problem. We haven’t even discussed copyright concerns
Admittedly, that kinda tangented out of scope towards the end, but all of this is to say, AI, as it stands today, should never have been released for public consumption. In fact, if I’m being honest, I’d go as far as to say, unless there are some short term solutions profit, energy consumption and environmental devastation is not only going to continue into the near future, I’d be willing to bet it gets worse quickly
Edit: When I said short term solutions, I mean short term profit. I’d dive further, but brings politics and economics into scope of a topic that’s already kinda outta scope
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I shift back and fourth between doom and understanding there is a bit of value in the current instance of AI. It’s hard because I deny allot of garbage daily and now I’m getting AI slop in security documentation even from vendors that often isn’t being reviewed by humans. It’s easy to tell because AI writing is pretty easy to identify and when an on premise environment starts talking about S2 buckets I start questioning what I’m reading…
The fact that AI needs good prompt generation and human review really puts it into almost the territory of an intern in productivity for me as it requires way more oversight than just doing something myself but I also wouldn’t waste cycles on those low level tasks so it allows me to expand the scope of work I’m able to accommodate.
One day AI will put me out of a job and I’m cool with that but today it’s more effort in some instances than it’s worth. Idk I fight this battle every darn day.
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Yeah I know if we don’t deal with the power issue in the short term soon my generator is gonna start putting in work weekly. Hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am
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Yeah it’s all corporate greed. I don’t see the point in shaming an individual for using 10 tokens to try to make their life easier when my daily cap at work is 2000 tokens and there are thousands of devs even after the 16,000 layoffs. They are currently building metrics and dashboards to track AI use and force its usage, and lay off those that don’t. We’re rapidly approaching a world where you will have to choose between using AI all the time or feeding your family. it is what it is. It will fall over and explode, turn into Idiocracy, or keep trucking.
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This is so true and scary
Personally, I don’t have a problem when using AI (moral, ethical, environmental impacts notwithstanding), especially if you’re going to be creating a niche app or services like
and
My problem is using it for stuff that already exists where the quantities, while not limitless, are already factored in the dozens (a quick google search for typing apps for children resulted in at least one full page of a bunch of different sites, some of which, have show apps.
Admittedly, I may have gone overboard bringing environment and moral impacts into scope, but unless you had super specific needs out of this typing tutor (which, as of writing this, is not paying $200; a need easily circumvented by a simple google search) using AI to create the 201th app.
Since it was already brought up, I wouldn’t mind using AI (heck, I might make my own dumb/niche apps) so much if it my company didn’t lean into it 0-200% in a week flat while also being as cheap as possible for training. We went from “we’re considering AI” to “You need to certification befitting your career path and also, low-key, we’re monitoring your usage, or lack thereof” in absolutely no time. I’ve still got whiplash from the turnaround. To make matters worse, knowing that they can do this so fast, but we’re still fighting to keep some of the tools we need (‘member me talking about that?) and we’re still discussing not just keeping them but free/cheaper alternatives 1+ years out. Honestly, blatant disrespect has soured my view of AI (not to mention what @AudreySickburn said about how we can’t afford not to use it in this economy). I’ll get off my soapbox now
In summary, in a broad scope, AI good vs AI bad, in which I’m admittedly/clearly leaning towards the latter, but my issues with AI specifically is that it’s current implementation is horrifying; it’s expensive, damaging, and the fact that AI is currently a corporation’s toy and whip leads me to believe it’s going to get a lot worse; no optimization/reducing various impacts are going to happen unless money can be made quickly and with in a shareholder’s meetings time because all the resources are going to be devoted to how to make money and faster.If corporations showed any faith at all that AI had plans on being optimized, morally/ethically respectable (,and, for devs, made it more clear that it was merely to be used as another tool rather than basically us training the newer, hotter, younger, cheaper hire how to do your job and show ourselves out the door), AI would be a phenomenal thing. I’d absolutely use it a ton!But as a doom and gloom kinda guy, who has watch corporation after corporation, time and time again, show that the bottom line matters more humans, (I’m going to leave this unfinished)
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@TheThrowingGnome I wanted to apologize. @AudreySickburn‘s right. I didn’t realize it at the time but as I as typing up an edit to expand on my previous thoughts, I realized I wasn’t upset at you, specifically, but rather the terrifying thought that all the years I took to learn a specialized skill to have a good paying job and avoid a minimum wage job in a field I had believed to have good job security is going to effectively be neutralized. And the one forced to train my own replacement!
I still think you should have done some more research or tried harder to convince your wife that $200 for a typing app for children is asinine (Honestly, $200 for a typing app for adults is asinine, like what does it do? Type for you?). But again, the fact that you can make your own app is bittersweet when one remembers the real world. Anyone can create an app! That’s flippin’ dope! But at the same time, that means “Anyone can do my job” Which, as you can imagine, is not as dope
I know I said
and then kinda threw the weight of the world at your shoulders anyway. Again, for that, I also apologize
I still think offsetting is conscience soothing stone horsepucky, but I’m glad you’re trying to make the world a better place
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Big props for self evaluation and apologizing. Not something you see often on the internet and worth commending.
You are 100% right that the rollout in corporate spaces has been atrocious. AI just dumped on the workers porches with a sudden use this or else threat. No training or documentation or helpful info. And it all happened over the course of 1-2 weeks. Faster than anything has ever been rolled out in tech.
It doesn’t help that as an autistic person I suffer from something called Pathological Demand Avoidance. Basically the more vehemently you tell me to do something the less I’m willing to cooperate. Also the more you tell me something is impossible the more determined I am to do it anyway. It can work out well for me when a manager is like you couldn’t build blahblahblah in a week that’s impossible. In your face I did it in 3 days. But then you tell me to use this new AI tool or else.
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