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   Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:40 JST Baldur Bjarnason

   "LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:37 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     Responding to “modem speeds are unworkable and if we don’t fix that the internet is a dead end fad” with “the internet is still extremely useful” isn’t a counterargument, it’s self-identifying as a member of the subculture that will remain after the fad peters out

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:37 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @baldur Same vibe as responses to technical and social problems with fediverse... 🤦

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:38 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     And if you think LLMs are "good enough" as they are, then the only thing I can say is I hope you're right because at the moment it looks like the tech industry is trying to bake a broken toy into every aspect of our society in the belief that the only thing that actually "breaks" tech is regulatory interference

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:38 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     Addendum: even if we were on the path towards developing an “actually works” replacement to current era LLMs—which all suffer from the same problems—that hypothetical future tech is not what’s being baked into everything. Even if they did manage to magically come up with an LLM that “works” nobody’d be using it because broken shit will be what’s built into everything.

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:39 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     The modern AI Bubble is 100% a "modem speeds were good enough and the dot-com companies only failed because they didn't have enough funding to get them over the hump created by the government's regulatory fight with Microsoft" delusion.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:39 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     Modem speeds are very much not enough and if broadband had proven to be infeasible for some unexpected technical reason, then the web would definitely have faded away into a hobbyist-oriented subculture in the style of ham radio.

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:16:40 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     I can't emphasise strongly enough how this ISN'T happening with LLMs. They are throwing all their money into building ON the broken tech and next to nothing in developing a replacement that has an actual chance at fulfilling the promise LLMs hint at, because there genuinely aren't any plausible pathways to get there from here

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 21:23:34 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     The difference between thinking about how any given tech impacts you individually—harm versus utility—and thinking about how it impacts society if adopted at scale is effectively the difference between concluding that:

     “Cars are fine, actually, the bigger the better. So helpful.”

     Versus…

     “We’re destroying ourselves and our planet because public transport is less profitable than the car industry.”