But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.

If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.

Oh wow. That’s just incredibly fascinating. How did you get a job like that?

I’ve heard that corvids in general are really smart and resourceful birds. Do you think they could have ended up becoming the dominant life form if humans never developed?

We’re incredibly lucky that they are as small as they are. I’ve heard that crows can remember you very well, and if you mistreat a one, you’re going to pay for it later.

Imagine if that happened with a creature bigger than an elephant and about as ferocious as an owl. That’s not a minor inconvenience any more. One day, you’ll realise your car has been torn to shreds and your house has lost its ceiling and two walls. The deep footprints on the lawn tell you exactly who you pissed off 17 years ago.

I can see that these birds must have inherited something from T-Rex or common ancestors.

I know many people who use meta platforms, and they don’t seem to be very happy with the material they find. AI slop is getting totally out of control over there.

When I want to talk to friends and family, I just give them a call, send an SMS or have a group chat on signal. I don’t need meta platforms for that.

YouTube is a mixed bag though. I still find some value in there, but that’s through sheer quantity of videos in there. Finding good ones is getting harder every year. Alternative platforms are getting better, but the selection seems to be pretty narrow by comparison.

I tend to block most of the internet cancer out there and only hang out in places where the internet doesn’t suck that hard. Anything touched by Meta is obviously out of the question. So as far as what people generally call social media is concerned, I just avoid all of it. Nothing of value was lost when I abandoned that burning pile of trash. Lemmy is ok though. It’s clearly a social media, but everything about it is just so different that it probably doesn’t even count as a “social media” in this context.

What about AI then? It’s complicated. AI in general is pretty cool, but I’m using that word in a very broad sense. Stuff like isolating human voices from a messy audio signal involves AI. When a camera focuses on a human face, it’s using AI. When your postal service uses OCR to read the address off a letter, it’s using AI. Oh wait, nowadays even your phone can do OCR. Anyway, none of that really counts in this context, now does it? That’s not the AI people are angry about.

AI that generates text, audio, pictures and video definitely counts, but that’s just a fraction of what AI really is. It’s currently visible, popular, widely used and commonly discussed. That’s the type you’re really asking about, now isn’t it? My answer: it’s still complicated. The technology itself is just fine. The way it’s used to ruin the internet isn’t.

For example, LLMs love to use specific phrases and people love to use LLMs to generate text for anything and everything. What you get is AI slop text that has all the telltale signs of being generated by an LLM and proofread by nobody. The internet is filling up with low-effort trash like that, and I’m completely fed up with all of it. Still not fed up with AI as a whole though. Everything under the peak of that ice berg is still very cool.

Yes. Nothing lasts forever.

For millennia, horses used to be crucial for everyday life. Nowadays, we have cars, airplanes and other CO2 emitting atrocities that made horses effectively obsolete. Before the petrochemical industry changed the world, it was very hard to imagine life without horses. When was the last time you saw someone plow a field with a horse? Oh, you haven’t even worked on the fields. Oh, boy has the world changed in unbelievable ways.

For centuries, paper letters were the standard form of long distance communication. Before the internet, it would have been pretty impossible to imagine life without letters. When was the last time you received, let alone wrote one of those? Yeah, the world has changed, now hasn’t it.

Sooner or later, all the famous sites will be obsolete, just like oil lamps, gas stoves, and quills. Currently, it’s pretty hard to imagine what that new thing would be. Usually, these changes happen gradually. Eventually, you just realize you haven’t used that old thing in a while, because you’ve been using the new thing for such a long time.

They ran out of money long before LLMs took over the search business.

Besides, regular TV channels and their programs suck. Nothing of value was lost when I decided skip connecting my TV cable. It’s basically a glorified display now, and the computer provides all the videos I could ever want.

You could think of it as a “smart TV” setup of sorts, since the computer is smart and can do so much more than any smart TV out there. You can watch all sorts of streaming stuff on it, it can block ads, and even YouTube is barely tolerable now that I installed sponsor block. I’ve even installed Steam on the PC and played some simple games on it. It’s not quite a console yet, but after a few upgrades it could be.

That’s why you get a computer, slap it under a large TV or display and watch online videos with ublock origin on. The computer gets the ethernet while the TV gets the HDMI.

No risk, no reward. You wanna fly the coolest airship or not.

You can also use unobtanium plates with adamantium rivets if you want to make it look cooler.

That’s why you put a vacuum in there. It’s made of nothing, so it doesn’t react, and there’s plenty of it in the universe. Besides, it’s also lighter than anything else you could throw in there.

So far, oil has been absurdly cheap. Because of that, various industries have been built on the idea of bringing stuff. If oil becomes more expensive, all those industries will suffer, because someone just pulled out one of the cornerstones.

Maybe it’s about time we started figuring out alternative way to travel. Maybe something that doesn’t require burning fossil fuels.

Just like any other tool, you need to know how to use it, and you need to adjust your expectations accordingly. Many people don’t seem to know what it’s good for or what to realistically expect from it. The way I see it, many people seem to have inflated expectations, but apparently the CEOs in the article are gradually coming to terms with reality. Clearly a step in the right direction IMO.

Lemmy is indeed a very special place. :D

Anyone with a balanced view on AI automatically attracts downvotes from a specific crowd in here. The problem isn’t that you explained what you use AI for. They couldn’t care less. The problem is that you clearly don’t hate AI with a burning passion.

I can see that there’s clearly some great potential to have fun with a crowd like this. Just haven’t figured out a good method for it yet.

Looks like AI is finally diving into the trough of disillusionment.

Exxon wanted to make an example out of them. If shareholders are allowed to do whatever they want, the oil business is screwed.

Yeah, the effect of subscribing seems to be very subtle. So far, the experiment hasn’t lasted more than a few days, but I think I’m beginning to see a pattern.

The channels I subscribed to do show up a bit more often, even in the search results. I also see plenty of other channels in the main feed. Interestingly, there are a few channels I watch every now and then, but they never asked me to subscribe, so I didn’t. Somehow, those channels still show up in my feed as if I had subscribed, which makes me wonder what the role of subscribing even is these days.

However, this experiment needs to continue much longer. I wonder if it continues like this for several weeks. I’m really curious to see what happens to the channels I subscribed to. Will they all show up in the feed consistently, or will some of them disappear completely. Time will tell.