I’m sorry!? this is a joke right?
quantum computers factored 15 in something like 2001
they have yet to factor the number 21 using shor’s algorithm
unilke normal computers where exponential speed up has led to sizeable improvements
in qantum the more progress is made the less it seems to matter
putting this here so i’ll remember to come read the rest of this thread and learn
Just dorks arguing about if skynet will happen or not.
On that subject I worked at IBM when they where pushing Watson super hard to governments and the marketing they used looked so much like the the cyberdyne skynet ads I was actually worried back then lol
IBM has sense tried really hard to hide that promotional stuff like someone must have watched terminator and panicked lol
This is actually the most doomer I get around AI. Granted, I’m no expert on anything but I can’t help but wonder how long it takes before a large swath of the workforce is redundant because of AI. In magical Christmas land that means more focused work and more free time, but I can’t imagine reality is that shiny and happy.
i guess there is a question of how much of the work people do now is actually useful anyway,
for example of you are doing cold call marketing at a call centre, chances are you know that job is not doing society any favours (I have done this)
if that job vanished, and consequently the worker doing it it was payed equivalent wages to do nothing it would be no bad thing in itself.
the only (quite large problem) is that high end wellfare (for no work) would disicentivise all work (including the useful majority)
It’s an almost impossible balance to strike
Currently AI is only really able to fill in low level and entry level work which sounds great in theory but what this means is those with no experience out of college can’t find work to get experience and the knowledgeable experienced work force is going to start aging and not get replenished as easily.
Most of the tasks AI can accomplish probably are repetitive and or simple and time consuming but without people doing those things there isn’t a way to elevate to the more experienced job levels. It’s a problem our future selves are going to have to grapple with or eventually hit a point where either AI isn’t worth the harm or we switch to a Universal income policy which I can’t decide which one is worse. Regardless once the educated and experienced workforce dies off what then… do we enter idiocracy and no longer have experienced and intelligent workers?
This is where I think AI fails. We are going to hit a breaking point that AI doesn’t mesh with our current systems and the friction will be too great for people to be willing to adapt..
Skilled work replaced with automation, each 10 jobs replaced with 1 soul sucking bureaucracy job. The displaced workers immediately falling into the “the unemployed” and being sneered at, blamed, and cast aside. We are just living in any or possibly all of Vonnegut’s novels.
If you guys don’t mind… I don’t wanna start another thread about this, but since you guys are talking about artificial intelligence, I’d like to bring something up just to see what you guys think?
On Friday, I went to an Apple Store to pick up a 17 pro. Obviously, even though I had an appointment, I was sure I would not be the only guy at the store what I got there it appeared that everybody in my part of the universe, other than people whose funerals I’ve attended Was at the store, in front of me. I’m really not sure why they were there? But I knew it was most likely related to the exact same reason I was there.
When he brought the phone out, I was asked to open the sealed box myself. Upon opening the box and starting the phone, the dialogue for the Apple representative, seem to focus on activating the artificial intelligence mode as the phone was being connected to the Verizon service. I didn’t feel like the Apple representative was brainwashed… But that being said, they seem to be making an exerted effort to convince me that my experience with the new iPhone would be much more fulfilling and worthwhile if I allowed the AI to be activated.
When I got to that screen with the representative, obviously looking over my shoulder, I chose the option of setting up the AI later. I immediately glanced at the eyes of the representative who seemed to feel let down that I wasn’t convinced about how I needed it so much. About how my experience would be less rewarding if I didn’t allow something to help me think.
So here is my question to most of you in this thread, who obviously know more about AI than I do.
For those of you that have the newer iPhones or Samsung‘s or whatever you have, do you feel that it is more advantageous and effective to have your phone thinking for you?
Have you ever been messing with your phone trying to get something done and all of a sudden thought to yourself… Boy I could process this situation a lot faster if I had the AI mode working…
Or if you’re using your phone and then all of a sudden the window pops up and says something about watch this short video showing what AI can do for you and your phone using experience… Move into the future today and let AI work for you.
…… since my appointment was in the afternoon… And I work in the afternoon… I decided to just take a vacation day so I wouldn’t be playing beat the clock in case I obviously ran into the situation that I had an appointment from 1 to 115 and was suggested that I get there in a timely manner… And when I got there in a timely manner, the line look like a government program, giving away free cheese or something.
So since I gave myself the day off and being a curious, kind of a guy, I decided to extend my Apple experience by hanging around the store like the mystery shopper and looking at all things, Apple. At the same time, I was scanning the scene and the products I was obviously listening to what the various reps were saying to the various customers they were dealing with. It seemed to be a common thread that the Apple reps were discussing the finer advantageous aspects of AI with their respective customers. AI this… AI that… It’s such a great way to have a more fluid flowing experience… It’s amazing how much better your phone will seem to function and work with you to get things done, blah, blah blah.
So my take away as I left the store was that, even though they were strong, arming anybody… The Apple reps seem to have been compelled to at least make an exerted effort to convince people that no matter how well their Apple product was designed to function… Activating the AI mode Was the only way to truly experience the potential of the phone or iPad or MacBook or whatever?
So if anybody happens to read this… Do you or don’t you feel that your electronic product experience is improved by using AI?
Thanks for any thoughts?
My iPhone 15pro which is the lowest hardware I can have and still get the AI features. I don’t really use them honestly. I mean it all is active but often they get in my way more than anything wise. The AI stuff often has me back tracking fixing text and idk just not getting a fair use of it. I’m also not enjoying the AI picture upscaling because it doesn’t look natural… idk I see it as gimmicks being thrown into the phone to be able to say we are selling an AI forward device that looks good to investors which goes back to my point earlier in this thread. We are in a bubble and AI isn’t providing the value it’s consuming at the moment and not moving as fast as investors expect which is going to lead to a crash.
Also all these AI features just burn through my iPhone battery after updating to ios26 I know they say it should even out but I’m not convinced it will. I’m tempted to just disable AI entirely to save battery but trying to let the phone settle in for a full week or so before I go that route
I use it for research sometimes. I don’t find it to be any sort of reliable narrator in any particularly useful way because of the inaccuracies and hallucinations, but it does what it was designed to do very well at this point: distil concepts and be conversational.
One of the largest roadblocks I constantly run into when I’m trying to research stuff I have little prior knowledge on is figuring out what to ask, and then when I finally find a keyword that works I have trouble expanding it into a usable information request. The current Algorithmic Iterators do very well at taking a request along the lines of
“I am looking for a non-mechanical method of bright polishing titanium, either chemical or electrochemical, that uses chemistry free of perchloric or hydrofluoric acids. Please provide several examples of such processes and their safest associated chemistries.”
and returning with suggestions that I look at deep-eutectic solvent electrolytes and higher voltage electroplasma polishing. It can even point me at specific industry sources, specific expert forums, or scientific sources. In one case it has even pointed me directly at the patent that had the process I was after.
Of course it also returned with suggestions that I had explicitly told it to dismiss, such as the idea to use abrasive buffing compounds and the more hazardous chemistries of chemical and electropolishing, but the ability to conversationally steer away from useless results and refine your query is very helpful because it was able to condense information to draw the relationships between where I was and where I needed to go.
I think that making connections to concepts is where it excels, and that’s what makes it so damn nice to use when you’re trying to do things like search through an instruction manual or get specific information about a vague idea.
Problem is that I think it kinda stops there. I don’t see much use in the way that it seems most want to use it. Generating code, generating artwork, generating articles or other novel works from nothing just isn’t what its good at. It doesn’t seem to ask questions well in my experience. It can’t create anything it hasn’t seen before, even if it can Lego disparate pieces into weird arrangements that are somewhat novel. It is a machine that takes a lot of information and condenses it into something that approximates what a human might generate.
It also can’t adapt particularly quickly. The nature of an LLM is that it must be trained on a solid dataset. To my knowledge, there’s no good way to train it on new information once the model is trained. If GPT5 is trained on a dataset with 100+ trillion items and a set of 300+ billion parameters, any additional items or parameters that need to be incorporated would take an insane amount of petaflop/s-days. If I remember right, GPT4 needed something like 200,000 petaflop/s-days on the low end, possibly up to over a million? I’ve seen theories that GPT5 used at least 10x that compute, if not more? Adding anything to that training set is crazy expensive both monetarily and temporally.
Until those larger updates, you’re just kinda SOL being stuck with what it “knows.”
Suffice to say I find it useful in certain specific tasks in my daily routine as a tool that serves a role, but I don’t think its ever going to be something I truly rely on to get my job done.
I actively uninstall copilot (which Microsoft installed itself) on my work computers gemini and bixby on my samsung phone and disable it in browsers and search engines
I prefer to think for myself
This past week’s AI use cases.
Work
Home
I was just forced to sign up to get access to our new internal llm and most likely we will align with the business line and have to do a weekly report on usage of AI to show value.
For your individual use or team use? Netflix recently published a thing saying the one task the generative AI helped most with was just finding information across the team. Super easy to just ingest the whole company corpus 
(modulo clearance issues or intentional separations of information; I don’t have to deal with that so much).
Interesting. We just pushed several new AI workloads around here and it’s all going to end up being my problem so let’s see how it goes. Some of it is still hands on, although that means it’s entirely my problem rather than the bots problem. Best of luck on the journey.
I mean, I suppose I could try finding productive uses for AI like this. So far it’s mostly cheating though and that’s not cool. Lucky for me, I don’t cheat. I get F’s by midterms instead (it’s been a hard semester. I’m burning out fast).
It’s cheating because teachers say “no generative AI” and they are right to do so. Just like a graphing calculator, it could do all the heavy lifting for you, but you’re there to learn and so it’s important for you to both understand the core concepts and understand how to use the tools available to you.
Generative AI is new enough that I doubt they are teaching college level courses in its use yet, but I definitely had one class in college that was basically “learn matlab,” so I could see them having these eventually.
I am presently being incentivized to use generative AI at work. I work in a unique niche of engineering efficiency where it is highly applicable. In truth I was highly skeptical of it when I first started working with it but it has proven its merits to me and been super useful.
It’s a tool a little unlike any other because its output is non-deterministic. This means it can and does make mistakes, which means that it’s important to plan your use cases around that assumption. At the simplest level this means “check its work” which when generating, say, a paper, means thoroughly editing, particularly for factuality. In software this often means using it as a part of a system with deterministic validation criteria (“Did it produce build-able software? Does it pass the test I gave it?”)
This post authored without the use of generative AI 
My college actually had an AI pathway! Maybe I should change to that. Except I am the worlds most incompetent programmer so I assume I would build the worlds worst llm.
Both
