iPhone Duo - Apple Sorry Apple™, I’m really finding it quite hard to justify spending thousands of dollar on your products!

From $1999 or $83.29/mo. for 24 mo.*

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ When it was just me and my wife, maybe, fine, okay. But now I have two young children that also want the same shit™ as we do. This starts becoming a nearly ~$8k expensve just for some fucking whoop-ti-do-da foldable iPhone with a bigger screen.

Who cares? 🤔 I want my ~A$800 iPhone back that fits in my hand. #Apple #Rants #Expensive #Crap

As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.

This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…

Architecture slop:

1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like
   
   
2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
   
   
3. generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building
   
   

Moralizing slop:

History slop:

I recon I might be still missing your point. I see it more like a semi-organised ramble, than a rant. LOL. Sooooorryyyyy!

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

@quark@ferengi.one

talk next to nothing

I could rant about AI a bit and how it ruins every day at work, if that helps? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net built it (as in banner reminder, etc.) and I will come! Joke side, I will join for 30-45 minutes each month, sure! No main topic, no pre-conceived themes, just folks getting together to chat and rant, or whatever. Count me in!

@prologic@twtxt.net Where do I stand on “Chat Control”? How long of a response/rant do you want? 😅 It’s a disaster. As I understand it, they want to spy on me directly on my devices before encryption even happens – jfc, no, fuck off. And since there are so many devices, they want to automate the scanning, which is the worst idea you could possibly have.

Bloody WhatsApp, bloody chat apps on smartphones, I’m going nuts. If you want to TYPE, use a device WITH A KEYBOARD. Don’t send me useless undecipherable gibberish. FFS!

I am so, so, so fed up with the arrogance of people in tech. People think they know everything. Everything is easy and trivial. “Told you so!”, everywhere you look. And this bloody condescending tone, all the time. When I ask for an opinion, I don’t want to get a “well, duh, idiot”. For fuck’s sake.

It’s nothing new, it’s always been like that. Which makes it even worse.

This really makes me not want to work in this field anymore.