I almost wish I hadn’t started using FBReader. It’s ruined me for everything else.

Everytime I try a different reading app it just feels wrong.

You again? What part of the fossil fuel industry do you work in?

Nobody believes EVs are without drawbacks, but your blind hatred of renewables and EVs comes across as more unhinged every time I see your name on a comment. I’ve engaged with you in good faith before and you have shown yourself to be a bad actor. If you can’t figure out why moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing at least shut up and let the rest of the world get on with it.

You keep asserting that, could you provide some sources for that assertion. Everything I am reading says that you need to commit to a major nuclear program and get everything right to approach the cost of renewables. Adding to this the advances are coming thick and fast, across the range of renewables and storage technologies, more efficiencys and cost savings. The only viable way I have heard of to improve the cost efficiencies of Nuclear is to extend the operational life span of the plants, and those efficiencies will only be realised once the extension is made to the service life of the plant (plus let’s be honest the private owners of the plants by that stage will just soak that up as extra profit).

So if we are going to build out these phenomenally expensive projects we are going to need a fair assurance that the funders and then the operators are going to see a return on investment. If renewables keep being cheaper to deploy, if recycling becomes more efficient, if battery storage prices fall. All of this hurts the viability of Nuclear, and will certainly impact the public will to keep throwing vast amounts of money at infrastructure. The other countries who are building out nuclear capacity on accelerated time frames and lower costs, how many of them are operating within a regulatory framework that corresponds with Australia’s? How many of them are adding additional capacity to existing Nuclear, rather than starting from scratch? How many of them are not budgeting for lifecycle and just assuming they will find the money to decomission when they have to, instead of building that cost in during the operational life of the plants?

How do you plan on convincing people like my father-in-law who hasn’t drawn from the grid in more than a year to be cool that his powerbill will be going up for a service he only keeps connected to sell his excess power? That’s where the regressive authoritarian bit came from, you are going to have to shutdown kw scale solar as it will be too much of a danger to the under construction nuclear industry.

You seem really bent out of shape with the whole renewable thing, no technology is entirely benign to the environment, but if we keep on advancing the tech here we are going to continue to see positive change. Plus it seems so much more feasible to recycle a dead solar panel or battery vs the shielding of a reactor.

I want nuclear to be part of an energy mix, but it’s going to be a huge commitment to build out, there will be delays, there will be cost overruns and there will be graft and corruption. You know how Australians are, it will be an excuse to keep propping up coal and gas, and when the first plant doesn’t deliver on the economies and timeframes of, let’s say the eight plant, there will be some shithead who will stoke up a bunch of populist dogwhistles around how Canberra is wasting tax payer money on a white elephant project.

Imagine the nuclear advocates throwing that much money, time and effort behind nuclear only to see it stall out for another quarter century because the momentum faltered.

Cool, you footing the bill? Because the upfront costs of building out enough nuclear to replace just the current coal plants is going to lead to skyrocketing energy costs. But if you can front the billions it would cost nobody is going to stop you. However what is your plan for the next 15+ years it would take to build the fleet of nuclear powerplants? Since you have decided renewables are evil is the plan to ban them from being deployed while we build out nuclear, keep burning coal and gas during that time? Renewables keep getting cheaper to deploy, are you going to institute a world wide ban on further R&D until Australia finishes its nuclear rollout so we don’t have the equation slipping further into imbalance.

Also our power grids are actively degrading under neglect thanks to deregulation and asset sales, you going to renationalise all that so we can rationalise & remediate transmission costs or are we labouring under the misguided hope that we won’t have bad actors trying to profiteer off the lines and poles?

I get it, I wish we had got onboard with nuclear back when the economics would have made it a home run and social anxiety was the biggest blocker, we missed that boat and now the paradigm has shifted.

I fully believe nuclear should have a role in our energy market, but instituting a regressive authoritarian society to make it a reality just doesn’t seem like a smart decision.

At this point why don’t we just prepare a Petri dish with a sample of every infectious disease we can get to co-exist, call it a freedom lick and get the process out of the way with these muppets. Rather than wasting all that time and effort to educate them just give natural selection a head start. Plus we could immediately quarantine them to stop spread through the community. I have a family member or two who will elbow people out of the way to get their lick in, and it will be a shame to lose them, but not as much of a shame as them infecting my cousin (who has Cystic Fibrosis and has to follow a modified vaccine schedule, not sure of exact details just know she has to be super careful everytime flu season or a new Covid variant rolls around) and killing her.

That’s going to be a hard one to provide definitive answers on. Anecdotally though I saw it with my younger brothers, I saw it with my kids, I have seen it with my friends kids. I am convinced enough, but I will be swayed if someone with the right research and peer reviewed science can make a compelling case. If I had all that I would be presenting my thesis as a best selling book on behavioural psychology, finding a university that would offer me tenure and relaxing into a cushy life of academic celebrity, not posting on Lemmy.

I have played around with a bunch of tools at a self hosted level. The big thing I found puts inherent brakes on the process is the technical capability to actual use them, when I played around with ESRGAN to upscale images I was limited in application by time and equipment, I achieved better results than I could have on my own, markedly worse results than if I had the technical ability and equipment to just reshoot the images with better resolution.

I tried some photogrammetry, similar outcomes. I could have done better by being better with Blender. NERFs as well.

What we have is people yelling “Monorail! Monorail!” And using free credits or buying them.

The industry is already losing obscene amounts of money and the actual use cost is still entirely obscured from the general public. Once enough of the world is hooked on using LLMs for everything we are going to see the true costs emerge, then it will be another iteration of the haves and the have nots, society as a whole cannot afford to make LLM usage profitable, where does that get us?

I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.

If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.

I’d love to be wrong, but I feel like we are wired in certain ways by the evolutionary process we are the product of. I think the nurture comes in to play with regards to overcoming some of those baser instincts and drives. Anyone who has raised boys can tell you that for most boys they go through phases of being overly aggressive and or violent, that can often be redirected into better ways of getting that out. Can’t speak for girls or people on the intersection due to lack of first hand experience and want to reiterate that I am fully aware that my anecdotes are not universal and everyone falls into a range of behaviours. I feel like what we lack is an elder species we can look up to and emulate, so we are going to need to figure it out for ourselves. I like to think we have the ability, here’s hoping.

Your looking at this in a fundamentally different way, you seem to think it’s like electricity or indoor plumbing, where it’s primarily a benefit and enabler of further growth in society.

I see it like asbestos, or to borrow another posters example radium. A technology that has super narrow ETHICAL applications, but since we have elected to make it the only economic force that is driving large swathes of the world’s markets, we are in the jam it into everything and see how it works out phase. Humanity keeps on making this one fundamental mistake and because we haven’t completely collapsed society and killed ourselves en masse yet we keep on doing it thinking “this time it will turn out differently”.

I am trying to convey that this is a poison whose LD50 is microscopic, why do we as a society all have to experiment with dosing ourselves to find out how much we can take before it corrodes us to death?

It’s already taking a bite out of the computing landscape, it’s damaging the environment, its increasing the wealth disparity, its causing actual fatalities and its destroying the ability of people at large to think and retain information. Software development is probably one of the strongest cases for LLM usage, so please tell me how many untrustworthy browsers do we need to offset the above mentioned costs?

If we had focussed a similar level of effort, and money, into transitioning away from fossile fuel based energy grids as we have on this nonsense the world would be in a better place, but it doesn’t allow for the malignant growth of wealth to the 0.01% percent so it could never happen. Please make me understand why this is a good thing?

But they aren’t distinct things, they are both heads of the same capitalism hydra. How much of the training data for these LLMs has been harvested directly from Social Media? I sure as shit don’t know and I would argue nor do many other people.

Radium is probably a good analogy actually. Thank you. It’s toxic in almost every application we can imagine, it’s got a legacy that extends out to the current day, it formed a massive economic block, and it turns out it should only ever have been used under the strictest controls. We should never have had “entrepreneurs” being the driving force behind it.

It should have ALWAYS been a controlled substance that required people who understood and respected how fucking dangerous it is. Instead we are intent on jamming LLMs into every aspect of life regardless of how badly we suspect and/or know it will fuck everything up.

The problems are human nature, capitalism and greed. Doesn’t mean we have to give in, and frankly all the appeasers out there that keep saying “You have to use it or you will be left behind.” are effectively the drug pusher in the locker room telling the insecure young man “Oh yeah everyone else is juicing, you don’t do it you won’t be able to compete.”

Nobody believes the drug dealers are handing out drugs because they are humanitarians, they have a financial interest in destroying that kids life while he tries to justify it to himself.

We know LLMs are harmful on SO many different levels, but the US economy would literally collapse if people acknowledged that and stopped supporting them. So we race headlong towards societal collapse to keep the plates spinning. Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and so many others should all be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity once the collapse occurs. The sooner our societies start stringing these monsters up rather than celebrating them the more hope we have as a species.

For one, what’s her name? Perhaps I just forgot meeting her, otherwise my point still stands.

For two, I’m Australian, it would be extremely insensitive for you to make negative statements about my dialect.

I will admit I am being inflammatory with that language, but honestly the only person I have met who I would call an honestly good person who was super positive about LLMs, giant math nerd who talked over my head for 10 minutes about the implementation of convolutional networks. He might have just been super excited I was taking an interest and doing my best to ask questions that didn’t make me sound to dumb.

You haven’t been keeping up to date on the damage they are doing to existing projects have you? Ask the team behind curl how useful the slop submissions are. They are reaching breaking point just keeping up the flood of crap. It’s not that LLMs will out compete, they will overwhelm and infect.

How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you might credit. Rendering engines on the other hand, yeah there’s not much variety there.

Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I’m afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilic terrorists faster than you can blink.

Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.

We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?

Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?

At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of “AI” I’m really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.

So LLMs are going to achieve what Microsoft has been unable to, destroy open source and upend the world of coding. Nice. We really are living in the dumbest timeline. Can’t wait for Nintendo’s lawyers to decide they found a fragment of Nintendo code in the output of an LLM and start the lawfare to destroy the pesky breeding ground of emulator writers.

Said it in another thread, I have yet to meet a strong advocate for LLMs that isn’t a cunt.

How do people gain the ability to make these major projects if not for cutting their teeth on the small ones though. We cut the apprentice and journeyman stages of mastering an art out, replace it with slop, and then ten years from now we wonder why kids these days are so incapable of actually creating anything.

I have talked to kids who have told me that the assignments they got at school were so trivial they just ran them through ChatGPT rather than waste their time. When I pointed out that the reason the assignments were “trivial” was to give them the skills and confidence to do the big projects when the time came I got, at best, blank looks.

I said it somewhere else, if you are using an LLM to generate unit tests I find it hard to be terribly mad at that. If it’s scaffolding documentation, meh whatever. If it’s generating the main body of your project, I have concerns. Plus I circle back to how can you open source code that may have been stolen from a copyrighted work?

And it’s so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it’s swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive “work” on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.

I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn’t like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It’s so insidious, by being “helpful” it reinforces its necessity.

I still don’t think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it’s amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?

Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can’t be better it will be subsumed in slop.

Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these “AI” companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.

I’m not going to get too deeply into this because frankly I am not qualified. However people who I know that are well informed have talked about what it will take to overcome the cost and lead time issues with nuclear. Apparently there are two methods, one is we all agree to pay, A LOT, to cover the capital expenditure required to get a functional nuclear grid off the ground. The other involves a time machine and a jaunt back to the late 70s early 80s to squeeze an extra generation of nuclear R&D in.

Nuclear is either a great long term goal, or a smoke screen.

Just using publicly available figures, in 2025 worldwide nuclear generated 2667 TWh. In 2024 Australias energy generation was 265 TWh. So we would need to generate 10% of the total worldwide nuclear output just to supply demand in Australia. That’s a phenomenal amount of construction we would need just to match today’s demand.

Plus have you seen the amount of material involved in constructing a nuclear powerplant, they don’t grow on trees and they are certainly not small. And yes I know we get to talk about SMRs now, they aren’t ready yet, and will only ever be a component in an energy mix.

Inevitably when we talk about 20-50 year lead times and trillion dollar investments to meet current demand if we go nuclear the offered solution is to maintain coal and gas, put all that together and the economy and ecology arguments don’t seem to hold water.

Plus you seem to assume renewable generation and storage technology are not improving at a rate of knots. Or that we can’t recycle and remanufacture. Plus as we are all about to experience, local production and distribution are often significantly more resilient than highly centralised networks.

Australia should have owned solar technology, we did so much of the initial work to make it mass manufacturable but we as a Country gave up on it because the people who actually make money off our resources didn’t want anything upsetting the coal applecart. It’s too late for us to be the technology and industrial leaders in this sector, let’s not fail to embrace it as consumers just so we can continue to line the same pockets.

Plus so much of this is ideological. I honestly have no fixed preference when it comes to which technology we use going forward. If a sound case could be made for nuclear energy being the absolute best way to go forward I would give it my full backing, but it’s just not there. And I really don’t want my power to be 8x more expensive at wholesale level (who knows how much on my power bill) just so team nuclear gets to have the win.