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Full Self-Driving: For sure next year… maybe.
“Artificial Intelligence”: CEO’s create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.
Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind “well we didn’t tell employees to break the law!” while demanding employees hit numbers that… aren’t… possibe… without… breaking… the… law.
If it’s from a corporation and the PR says its to “benefit consumers” it’s fucking Snake Oil, by default.
Tesla driver here.
When I first heard the announcement that they were going vision-only, I thought ah shit they’re boned.
I replied on maybe a Reddit thread (?) that there was no way it’ll work up north in any kind of snowy conditions, and people called me an idiot etc
Fast forward a few years later, when I got to experience it first hand. Anytime I drive the car at night, warnings pop up on the screen like “front left camera is blocked or blinded” Cue Surprised Pikachu. In the snow, sometimes it can’t even detect a road.
I tried the free trial of FSD and, while it’s a neat gimmick, I think I was able to make maybe one or two short trips (2km) without needing to disengage it.
It was really bad
Full Self-Driving
Any idea that comes out of that prick’s mouth is snake oil if we’re going to be truthful about it.
Vagina rocks.
Organic food versus GMOs. I think big farma is in on the organic food prices and put false narratives about the dangers of gmo foods.
VPNs for internet access, at least the way they are advertised
I’m shocked that no one has said Essential Oils yet.
Majority of the “AI inside” software and solutions. It’s in a bubble and everyone is throwing crap to a wall hoping it sticks.
notice how all of those crypto features were quietly removed from platforms after people realised they were paying millions for some numbers, i think that will happen with Ai
I am so over hearing about AI. It’s getting to the point that I can assume anyone dropping the term at work is an idiot that hasn’t actually used or utilised it.
It’s this LLM phase. It’s super cool and a big jump in AI, but it’s honestly not that good. It’s a handy tool and one you need to heavily scrutinise beyond basic tasks. Businesses that jumped on it are now seeing the negative effects of thinking it was magic from the future that does everything. The truth is, it’s stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective. It is a tool, not a solution—at least for now anyways.
There’s one good use case for me: produce a bigload of trialcontent in no time for load testing new stuff. “Make 2000 yada yada with column x and z …”. Keeps testing fun and varied while lots of testdata and that it’s all nonsense doesn’t matter.
I’ve found that testing code or formulas with LLM is a 50/50 now. Very often replying “use function blabla() and such snd so” very detailed instructions while this suggested function just doesn’t exist at all in certain language asked for… it’s still something I’ld try if I’m very stuck tho, never know.
The truth is, it’s stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective.
So, like a hammer. A very expensive, environment-destroying hammer.
Genuinely curious, how does it destroy the environment?
Massive energy consumption. Huge datacenters and not enough green energy. Now they want to build small nuclear plants. Without talking about the waste problem.
So AI uses energy, and it’s how we are choosing to provide that energy is destructive to the environment? So AI isn’t itself destructive.
Ah yeah, just choose a different energy souce. Simples.
Have you seen the growth in % of renewable (incl, nuc biofuel and waste) electricity generation over the past 30 years. (36% i in 1990 , dropped to about 33% in late 2000s up to 38% recently) this is global, IEA figures.
There have been two years since 1990 when renewable electricity output has grown faster than total electricity demand. 2008/9 recession and 2020 covid. The only way renewables will come close to meeting current electricity consumption is actually to start reducing those demands.
If we start transerffing gas( domestic heating), and petrol( low-capacity road transportation) onto the electricitry grid then the scale and speed of renewables needs to ramp up inconcievably quickly - it has grown fast over the past decade, but it hasn’t been cheap nor has it been fast enough to keep up with current demands.
TBH I don’t know where AI lines up next to EVs in scale of potential extra demand, probably lower but still an added demand (unless it can substitute for other stuff and improve efficiency somehow).
Electricity source is not really a choice, it is resource and tech constrained many sources are needed; the cheapest fuels will continue to be in the mix used so long as demand keeps increasing so fast.
Maybe, If you ran all AI in peooles houses in cold countries in winter, it’d substitute for heating - that’d be one way it could reduce its impact. Or maybe it can get its act together and spark widespread, frequent, deep, long lasting recessions in economic activity.
Maybe renewables is not the solution to our energy needs if it can’t scale up like we thought it could. Conservation of energy is not the answer. We as a society must find new, cleaner, sources of energy. Maybe AI can help us do it.
Their waste is less destructive than coal plant though. Perhaps this could be a silver lining to finally get nuclear back in action and get closer to dropping coal once and for all.
That’s actually a pretty good analogy.
I think more like discovering making fire or something. 90% of all the energy burnt is people worshipping it as it blazes away, never actually fulfilling any practical use except being marvelous to be around.
But once the forest is all chopped down, people are forced to understand fire and realise a couple small logs in a contained place was all they needed to have it be incredibly effective.
Oh, but that’s too hard. It’s magic right now. All hail the AI bonfire!
I equate an AI to an intern. It’s useful for some stuff but if I’m going to attach my name to it I’m going to review it and probably change a lot about it.
Watched a bit of a video of a guy that went to Computex and asked any vendor with AI plastered somewhere what they were doing with it. Most spouted some meaningless word salad and a few literally shrugged.
“AI” is the new “blockchain”. It’s a solution looking for a solid problem to tackle, with some niche applications
I mean, at least Ai has SOME useful applications, the blockchain was just wasting energy for some numbers.
Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.
It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.
In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.
I just wish people had long enough memories to see the cycle for terms like these. Some new word catches vogue, companies fall over themselves trying to find ways to implement them for shareholders and consumers who have no idea what they actually represent. As that fades, a new term arises… it’s sad.
And virtual reality gets a free revival every other technology, while we’re at it.
I’m predicting VR coming back into the limelight, try again, shortly after everyone loses interest in AI.
Also, I’m still pissed that flying cars aren’t in the limelight more. I was promised daily updates, and I’m not seeing them. That’s the biggest proof that the media is completely disconnected.
We have flying cars. They’re called helicopters, and they suck for most activities
Good point.
I’m willing to accept a reality where the science magazines are constantly excited about every development in helicopter technology.
Blockchain also has problems its solving I recon the whole not bullshit was a psyop by thr us government cos finances that they couldn’t have absolute control over would allow the people to bs free. I recon monero is the best as of present especially since its actually anonymous payments.
I can’t wait to get a Smart AI refrigerator that tells me I have a bunch of food that isn’t really in there even when I didn’t ask it to.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Do these companies realize that literally no one is asking for this shit? I also saw an ad for a computer mouse that had AI inside it. Whatever that means.
Oddly enough, that’s one of the few functions I’ve found the LLMs useful for. Looking through big pdfs for specific information, lots of times “ctrl+f” doesn’t do the trick because the exact term I’m looking for doesn’t appear. Worse sometimes it’s a phrase that could be in there under many synonyms. Using the LLM to find the actual info is pretty nice, it just isn’t “AI”.
Don’t knock it too quickly. I thought like you but one evening I was a little tipsy and started chatting with a PDF document. Let’s just say things got a heated and not we’re engaged.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents
I belive you got that notification but I honestly have no idea what it even means.
It’s from the Adobe Acrobat app. Basically you can ask it to give you a summary of whatever document you’re reading.
My research was literally on AI back in college. Most AI solutions are just basic algorithms and don’t use real AI solutions. There’s a huge difference.
It’s even better than that. A lot of companies are taking NVIDIA’s pre-built workflows, running their data through them and selling the results as their own AI. “We build proprietary RAG AI!”
MS Windows
VPNs like NordVPN for almost everyone.
“Almost everyone” seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don’t want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the “protect against hackers” bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
A VPN sure. I’m not sure about Nord.
Who do you trust more? Your isp, or a random vpn Company that not only own one vpn-service, but surprisingly many. (Nord security owns NordVPN and Surfshark, Kape owns ExpressVPN and Cyberghost). And wouldn’t it be need if you, as NSA, would have a direct connection to the data people concerned with there privacy? It’s not like their “no log” policy really exists if the have to write logs by law.
That’s the point of VPNs, isn’t it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?
Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country’s laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn’t mean ISPs can’t track you anymore, they’re just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it’s not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.
Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don’t want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don’t trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.
Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can’t trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.
With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.
Your ISP selling your browsing data is the hacker.
Considering Nord (and most VPNs, especially the ones that advertise themselves) are all owned by one company, who has a huge conflict of interest (they’re an ad company) with VPNs to begin with.
But if you don’t use a VPN with military grade encryption hackers can steal your money from the banking website that only uses military grade encryption!
So your saying I should keep an eye on the War Thunder forums?
Any weight loss pill drink, or food. It’s all scams built in top of scams.
Those new ones based on diabetes medicine seem nice, but as soon as you stop taking them their effects wear off. They’re a medically induced crash diet. The real hard work, fixing your bad habits long-term, still needs to take place.
Any [emphasis added] weight loss pill
Nope. There’s one that actually works really well. It’s called 2,4-dinitrophenol. It works by fucking up the way that your body makes/uses ATP; instead of being available for cellular respiration, it gets wasted as heat. It’s like constantly doing cardio; you’re burning tons of calories without doing anything. Users have reported losing up to seven pounds of fat–not water–in a week. The downside is that this heat can lead to hyperthermia if you take too much, and since the half-life is quite long, by the time you start seeing the negative side effects from OD’ing–about a week after you OD–it’s way to late, and your brain cooks. Oh, and you’re gonna sweat like a watermelon at a Baptist barbecue the whole time.
It was thought that it also caused cataracts, but that seems to have been incorrect.
It’s been banned since the 40s, I think, as a diet pill, because people had a tendency to take too much and die. If you know where to look, you can still find it. I wouldn’t recommend it for the overwhelming majority of people though.
Now that’s interesting! I can see why they took it off the market because of hyperthermia risks, but that would kind of be the perfect weight loss pill for me in the winter months…
Honestly, the only people I know that use 2, 4-dinitrophenol (DNP) regularly are body builders, and they use incredibly dangerous drugs on the reg anyways, so a diet pill that can kill you if you fuck up is just par for the course. There ain’t many old bodybuilders…
Here’s just a brief overview of people that have died from it. Since dose is dependent on weight–2-10mg/kg of bodyweight per day, depending on a lot of factors–you can’t safely buy pills as a one-dose-fits-all; you would have make your own capsules, and probably have a pretty solid understanding of geometric dilution.
So, yeah. It works. But it’s Russian roulette.
Oh, I definitely wouldn’t go near that stuff, too easy to mess up and die. Every dose is a dance with death (unless you’re an experienced doctor and/or pharmacist, maybe). I do like the concept, though, just boosting passive energy consumption during times when it’s easy to get rid of the excess heat. Seems less addictive and long-term-death-y than the ones messing with the already-messed-up glucose regulation systems.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Weight loss by pill is only possible in a few ways. Diuretics temporarily cause weight loss. The only real options are drugs that decrease your food intake (like the new diabetes drugs), presumably drugs that could interfere with nutrient absorption (not sure if any of those are out there, but it seems like it would be sketchy), or drugs that increase what you burn.
People think that last category could be magic, but burning calories is called burning calories for a reason; it’s an oxidation reaction, and it generates heat. There are a few others that also seem to really work, basically all stimulants: nicotine, caffeine, and methamphetamine (which is available by prescription).
Amphetamines both reduce appetite and increase how much energy you expend. Oh, and they’re also super addictive. So, yeah, don’t use those. I was definitely thinner when I was a smoker, but I had much worse health.
I tried one if those weight loss food systems once. I’ll say it’s not really a scam, but if you knew what you were doing, you could do better.
They basically controlled what you could eat so that you ultimately consumed less calories so you could lose weight without having to count calories, or manage macronutrients. But it was also expensive and the food was terrible, and as you said, as soon as you get off of it, you go back to the way you were. ****
However, I do have to thank it for opening my eyes and helping me understand calories and macros a whole lot better. Not to mention proving to me that I could in fact lose weight, back when I thought it was just the way I’d be forever. Because then I started looking into why it worked and what I needed to do to stop buying that crap and eat real food again.
Oh, that’s not what I meant. Weight loss programs, especially the ones designed to help you maintain weight for the long term, work well. I’d say they’re probably the best way to lose weight if you can’t do it alone (and very few people that really need it can). There are some bullshit ones, but there are also great alternatives.
What doesn’t work is the “drink a bag of this powder every day and you’ll lose weight automatically” bullshit. Sometimes this bullshit is also sold as berries, sometimes it’s some foreign kind of nut, but new “magical weight loss food” bullshit pops up a few times per year and desperate people will fall for it over and over again.
In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.
There’s a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.
There’s another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.
And just as in any more standard “snake oil” dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.
Too cynical a take to be real.
The above happens sometimes, and is maybe more common among older entrenched politicians (that we have in spades right now with the aging out of one of the largest generations ever). But most of the time it’s real people with real beliefs who want to change things. Governments are usually set up to change slowly, if at all, so often little seems to happen, but those gears do grind slowly based on how they’re pushed.
So, your take is definitely a way to make it so the political class can continue to exploit people - you need more people upset and willing to change if you want to make a difference, not lots of powerless apathy.
The Mayers Briggs Type Indicator test. It was developed with the same rigor as horoscopes, yet I still hear people I know are smart proudly tell me their four letter personality code.
Tylenol (paracetamol).
Literally never does anything but make me feel slightly poisoned, and there is still no clear explanation of how it “works”.
Really? It helps me with pain relief, even if no one knows why.
Hey, I heard (but have no proof so you will have to find them) that it is less effective on some ethnicities than others. If you are in that case, you may want to take a look ?
No.
Paracetamol/Acetaminophen is well understood, and an effective drug when used where applicable.
You are right in that nausea and abdominal pain are common side effects for some people, and simply means you should be trying something else. I’ve personally never suffered this.
Its ability to reduce fever is unclear, and even in high doses the difference it appears to make is minor. But for pain-relief there is no doubt as to its efficacy, though its effect is inferior to most other drugs available.
However, when taken together with ibuprofen, it provides pain-relief even more powerful than either drug alone.
If your problem is with the brand Tylenol advertising it like snake oil, then you likely have a point.
It can’t relieve cold symptoms except for a stuffy nose or significantly reduce fever. It’s basically just a very weak painkiller. I only ever take it if ibuprofen isn’t doing enough.
https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/how-does-acetaminophen-work
Has there been progress since 2022 on figuring out its pain killing mechanism? If it just didn’t work for headaches I would understand, mine are migraine and no painkillers work for those, but it has not worked on anything I tried it for, I gave up years ago. It’s not even that safe, I don’t understand why it’s still around.
Lots of drugs and foodstuffs have biological effects we don’t understand.
Medicine doesn’t always work by looking at exactly how a molecule interacts with every other molecule in a living organism, but rather by simply observing the effects.
It doesn’t kill, and it works for most people. Ok, it doesn’t for you, that happens. But I can tell you for a fact it does for me.
That we don’t understand how it works doesn’t stop it from working, and that it doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it’s useless for everyone else.
I for one am happy I was able to buy paracetamol in addition to ibuprofen when I needed it to sleep during an extremely painful ear infection, because no over the counter drug on its own was enough.
If anything, public knowledge on what exactly it can and cannot do should be improved, as well as what side effects mean you need to look for something else.
I live in a country where there are strict laws regarding advertising of medical devices and drugs, so there’s very little “snake oil” bs around medicines here. If you let them brands try to claim every mild effect an effective ingredient might have makes their product a cure-all for a litany of symptoms.
Asking a pharmacist for a recommendation is always a good idea, that’s how I found out I could “stack” the painkilling effect of paracetamol and ibuprofen, and it worked extremely well.
Obviously, it would have been less ideal if like you I experienced side effects when taking paracetamol.
You might be slightly allergic or something, paracetamol in my experience has always helped.
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I’ve seen this sentiment before, but I’m waiting to switch until I learn how to add the microphone and camera quick toggles included in GrapheneOS to LineageOS. Is there a project for that?
So if I understand you correctly, Graphene OS does everything it says it does but overhypes its differences with other forks. That doesn’t sound like snakeoil, only effective marketing.
Why shouldn’t I use it over the other forks then, particularly because useful features like hardened_malloc are only avalible on Graphene despite being widely ported to linux distros?
They also do not shill for Big Tech or Google/Apple.
What’s the story behind this? I’m genuinely curious.
I will say I strongly dislike how the developer has handled criticism, but that seems to be more a failing of the dev then a problem with the OS.
Credit card insurance. If stolen you’re only liable for the first 50 bucks
Trickle down economics
