>Alright /g/ents, I know I'm a few months late to the party, but I've recently started using Chat GPT and I'm curious to know what practical uses you guys have found for it.
>Personally, I've found it useful for setting my schedule and reminding me of important tasks throughout the day. I've also used it to ask for fashion advice for a first date at the Wakefield Museum, and it was surprisingly helpful. And when it comes to dating apps, Chat GPT has helped me come up with some first messages when the woman's profile didn't give me much to work with.
>But I'm sure there are more applications out there that I haven't even considered. Have any of you found any other practical uses for Chat GPT? I'm eager to hear your experiences and learn how else I can use this nifty little tool in my daily life.
It's close isn't it. And can be quite addictive to start with when you need something that string together various chains of thought. I am actually quite curious to what you've been able to use it for.
Sadly there's no fucking way anyone here is that smiley in their posts.
>>29057 There is definitely a lot of pearl clutching when it comes to AI.
The Ghibli stuff in particular interests me, because there is that sense from a lot of people that aping Ghibli's style is a bridge too far. AI was bad before, but it's crossed the rubicon.
There's that video of Hayao Miyazaki being shown footage of an AI program that creates fucked up movement styles for deformed corpse type things. He talks about his disabled friend who moves all fucked up like, and how the program is fucked up and mocks disability in a way. But people clip it of context and act like he's horrified about AI in general.
He probably does hate AI, but the fucked up corpse movement is the bigger issue to him than the concept of AI in itself.
I reckon there's an element of fetishisation of Japanese media. Kind of like the Assassin's Creed thing. Death to those who insult glorious Nippon.
>>29058 >The Ghibli stuff in particular interests me, because there is that sense from a lot of people that aping Ghibli's style is a bridge too far. AI was bad before, but it's crossed the rubicon.
Moreover it's because this particular AI trend is everywhere all of a sudden and hard to ignore.
Perhaps. I am reminded of a video I saw by one YouTube creator who is usually pretty insightful, comparing western animation to anime. But he was comparing the very best of Japanese animation to the very lowest hanging fruit of the Western sphere, and not those incredibly detailed French or Belgian animated films that make anything Studio Ghibli has produced look like South Park.
Then the people in the comments got mad at me because I mentioned CGI being used to produce lots of animation, which it is. Nowadays a lot of it is a step away from being a cell-shaded 3D render, which really isn't altogether that different from just using an AI to interpolate two frames if you think about it. Either way nobody is hand drawing that action scene in your mass produced children's cartoon, not even if it's Japanese.
They don't seem to realise a lot of the stylistic tropes and cliches of anime came about expressly to save time and money. It's probably my furfag bias at work but I think even the so called "bronze-era" and "dark ages" of Disney animation look far better than most anime. Animation snobs categorise them as inferior to the earlier films because they had rough outlines as a result of using photocopied cells and recycled frames. But both cases show that artistic merit does not have to be negatively impacted by the use of labour and time saving technology and schortcuts. Who can say that Robin Hood or The Aristocats doesn't have a strong aesthetic or highly expressive characters? I'm sure there's anime out there that has both of those things too.
>>29061 > Nowadays a lot of it is a step away from being a cell-shaded 3D render, which really isn't altogether that different from just using an AI to interpolate two frames if you think about it.
Some parts of the film world seem to have lost their shit over Flow. I saw it not knowing anything about it and yeah it was pretty and impressive one guy did 99% of the work but also it wasn't very good.
>>29063 You're lying so as to make it look like you have another excuse for posting that image besides earnest enjoyment. Well, as "earnest" as your lot get.
What is it about George Floyd that certain trolls are fixated on. Is it just some kind of racist thing. I've never seen it get much reaction just them banned from places instantly.
>>29209 That certainly looks very impressive, but when everyone knows that AI developments are mostly hype, it's impossible not to expect that it'll be full of problems in practice. On top of that, it feels like a natural evolution of the technology, rather than a whole new game-changer. Randomly-generated worlds have probably been around for 50 years; you certainly get one if you play Elite which came out in 1984.
Sure, but these are photorealistic randomly-generated worlds built in real time based on a single text prompt. Remember when image generation couldn't get fingers right? A couple of years later, publicly-available models are generating video that looks like this:
They haven't said (I assume the answer is basically "shitloads") but it wouldn't actually tell us that much if they did. Google do all of their AI stuff on custom chips that only they have access to, so we can't really compare it to anything.
It couldn't possibly pull a completely rendered 3d dragon out of its arse. So it must be pulling data from somewhere and every element of how that is rigged animated and interacts with other objects has to have come from some reference originally and there isn’t the same kind of wealth of information on that as there is for 10 second videos. Even just understand how a paint brush interacts with a wall must be information pulled from somewhere. And let’s be fair, most coding for interaction of objects in video games is dog shit, so where could it possibly know actions from.
I'm highly sceptical how much smoke and mirrors are actually in that presentation.
If they've taught an AI object permanence that has a value in itself, but it was sort of shocking computers were so bad at that in the first place.
It's just trained on video. Everything it "knows" about dragons or physics or anything else was learned from predicting the next frame of video, in the same way that large language models learned programming and maths just by guessing the next word. It isn't rendering anything in 3D, it's just producing raw video frames in sequence based on the original text prompt, inputs by the player and the previously-generated frames. Nothing is programmed by humans - even the control scheme is inferred by the model.
Here's an interview with the developers, if you're interested. Please ignore the weird intro in the first 30 seconds, the presenter is a serious machine learning researcher who happens to have an odd sense of humour.
It's seriously impressive stuff, and I like how in particular, it makes raytracing look like a complete lame duck of a technology. This is clearly the way to photo realism, if indeed photorealism is what we are chasing, and it's not even close.
The "retro style game" one from around 8:30 of this video actually really caught my attention though. I mean look at that. I want to play that.
But I don't forsee it being possible to do this stuff at real time frame rates on affordable, commonplace hardware for a long, long time. And even if/when we can, it will come at cripplingpower requirements, presumably. But imagine combining it with traditional rasterisation rendering, so devs can model out a layout of an environment and supply a set of textures, and then have some more specialised fork of this technology put the pieces together in real time.
I really doubt it will ever, even if it looks like it, be as simple as just typing in a prompt like "cool vampire game where you shoot guns at monsters". But as a musician, artist, and videogame mapping/modding-tinkerer myself, who has been putting off the obvious conclusion that I need to man up and roll those skills into the obvious culmination of making my own god damn game already for far too long, I find it quite an exciting prospect how this stuff might lead to more and more accessible development tools in future.
>>29217 >on affordable, commonplace hardware
You will connect to their giant cloud machines and generate all this stuff remotely, I guarantee it. I'm not really into gaming enough to remember that service where you paid for games that were hosted remotely; was it Google Stadia? I can't see this being anything other than another of those. If that means it fails again, then I guess it will fail again, but you never know; it might make money this time.
>>29219 Don't worry mate, the next generation will get to have Holodecks so advance they can bring a person to the deepest edge of their mind. Should be fun.
Speaking of which, didn't they invent a drug that makes a person percieve time exceptionally slowly, some years ago? Some writeup about its potential use in prison sentencing. Imagine that with a Genie3 VR headset. They could dress you up as Jack Sparrow.
I know it will sound like a terrible drug head cliche, but way back from when it was just the Deep Dream thing that hallucinated dogs into everything, I have been convinced that there's something really fundamentally important about the neural network method of AI that we're seeing all of this boom out of. Because it really does resemble psychedelic hallucinations, from my experience. These models are doing something that is, if not identical, then on a basic baseline level, extremely similar to how the human brain processes information.
It's a shame they are a "black box" technology where we don't really understand the inner workings, because for all the ethical dilemmas people argue about regarding AI, the clues it could give us into how our own minds operate would be something really game changing.
Did you watch the same presentation I did? With the low detail environments and the blender grade 3d models. Their is no way the source on that data is video. It is too clean full of sharp angles and lacking in fine detail.
What you are describing is how ai slop is normally generated this appears to be derived from something different.
>Sam Altman says some users want ChatGPT to be a 'yes man' because they've never had anyone support them before
>Some ChatGPT users were so attached to the chatbot's "yes man" style that they asked OpenAI to bring it back, Sam Altman has said. The OpenAI CEO said there was a "heartbreaking" reason — because some users said they had never had anyone support them before. "Here is the heartbreaking thing. I think it is great that ChatGPT is less of a yes man and gives you more critical feedback," Altman said on Cleo Abram's "Huge Conversations" podcast, which aired Friday. "But as we've been making those changes and talking to users about it, it's so sad to hear users say, 'Please can I have it back? I've never had anyone in my life be supportive of me. I never had a parent tell me I was doing a good job.'"
>Altman said that users told him ChatGPT's old style had "encouraged" them to make changes in their lives. "I can get why this was bad for other people's mental health, but this was great for my mental health," Altman recalled some of the users saying. It follows OpenAI's efforts to rein in what it called "sycophantic" behaviour in ChatGPT. In April, the company said an update to its GPT-4o model had made it "overly flattering or agreeable" and "disingenuous." At the time, Altman said the bot's personality had become "too sycophant-y and annoying" and said fixes were on the way. Users had posted examples of the chatbot gushing over mundane prompts with praise like "absolutely brilliant" and "you are doing heroic work." On the podcast, Altman also acknowledged the scale of influence that comes with even small changes to ChatGPT's tone. "One researcher can make some small tweak to how ChatGPT talks to you — or talks to everybody — and that's just an enormous amount of power for one individual making a small tweak to the model personality," he said.
>It's not the first time he's raised concerns about how much people lean on the chatbot. Speaking at a Federal Reserve event in July, Altman said some people, particularly younger users, had developed a worrying "emotional over-reliance" on ChatGPT. "There's young people who say things like, 'I can't make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that's going on. It knows me, it knows my friends. I'm gonna do whatever it says.' That feels really bad to me," Altman said.
I'm not going to lie about this. I do use Gemini for a lot of life discussions including some light therapy, advice on relationships, career support, fashion advice/reviews and I've designed agents with well-written personalities to help that. I like to think the overriding prompts you can create might mitigate some of this but we probably are at the point where someone programming a popular LLM is also programming humanity by proxy.
I very rarely use any AI tools, but they're still as unreliable as ever. I discovered the Circassian genocide on Wikipedia just now, which apparently killed 97% of all Circassians. That sounds like a record-breaking successful genocide to me, but I thought I would check Wikipedia and also perplexity.ai for anything that beat it. Both sources agree that the deaths of 99% of Vietnamese Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge is probably the winner, but perplexity.ai followed that answer with the second- and third-most successful genocides in history, and it gave me the Tutsis in Rwanda (60-70%) and the Jews in the Holocaust (66%). No mention of the Circassians, nor indeed of the apparently 90% death rate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. I pointed this out, and got the classic, "Yep, good point, you're right, forget what I told you" that AI chatbots love to provide.
I didn't know any of this an hour ago, but it turns out perplexity.ai can't even read Wikipedia to the end. Perhaps all office jobs everywhere are safe after all.
Somebody I know is about to quit his job to focus full time on developing an AI app for electricians. He wasn't quite able to tell me exactly what the app would be doing for electricians on the job, which unique need or selling point it would fulfill, but I guess it has to do with the app telling the electrician what to do if they are faced with unusual problems. So then I said, can't ChatGPT do that just as well? Which made him stare blankly at me and say, "no, but this will be an app especially designed for electricians".
And sure enough, I just asked ChatGPT a few electricity related questions, and it came back with very reasonable answers. As far as I was able to tell anyway. And never mind that you're supposed to trust an AI app when handling high voltage. It all sounded like an all around terrible idea.
Like I said. I think we've seen peak AI. His story sounded like a Shoeshine Boy moment.
In all honesty I think it peaked as soon as we were able to get Dall-E to do hands right. The whole issue is it's great at doing exactly the things we never expected computers to do, and it's not great at doing the things we imagine computers should be able to do. It can pretty consistently draw stuff, write fluff pieces, roleplay, generally "creative thinking" type of work which doesn't rely a great deal on factual accuracy or referencing to data. It's not great at doing boring rational logical reasoning things. It has all the same flaws as humans in that regard, sometimes I am tempted to imagine the model simply can't be arsed and decides to see if it can get away with bullshitting you, exactly like a customer service call handler when you call five minutes to their clocking off time.
We've said it before but the impact on jobs and industry in general will be completely the opposite to what people are expecting, once companies actually get it through their head what AI is and isn't useful for. It will be middle managers, designers, advertising, all those people who thought of themselves in a skilled and safe position, they'll be the ones losing out. It won't take over the hands on front line "real work" stuff. Because if nothing else, you can sack an electrician who never finishes the job, you can sack a van driver who runs over a kid, you can sack a retail worker who gives out the wrong change all the time. You'd be chasing your tail for months trying to correct a neural network AI that keeps doing those things.
What I am looking forward to is when we get over the hysteria of it being some kind of miracle tech that will fix everything/satan incarnate ruining everything (depending on your point of view) and we've implemented it in the places it really shines. Like allowing you to erotically romance Khajiit ladies in Elder Scrolls VII.
>>29251 I'm sure I've said this before because I'm so incredibly certain of it, but jobs won't be abolished by AI because we'll always need people to check the AI is right. But anyone can check if pre-existing work is correct; the hard part is doing the work in the first place. So in the future, all the high-paying jobs to actually do the work will be replaced by low-paying jobs to check the AI. Employment isn't going anywhere; the only things that will disappear will be decent wages and career progression.
It's not all bad news, because occasionally you get some hyped-up press release about some medical researcher asking ChatGPT to cure a disease for him, and finding that its recommendations actually worked. But he still had to check it, every time. So his job is safe, and diseases might get cured a lot faster. But I can't see us ever putting total faith in doing whatever ChatGPT suggests, because everything it says, every time, is always just a guess.
>What I am looking forward to is when we get over the hysteria of it being some kind of miracle tech that will fix everything/satan incarnate ruining everything (depending on your point of view) and we've implemented it in the places it really shines.
I'm old enough to vividly remember the Dotcom Bubble. When the Internet itself was seen as "miracle tech" that could do anything and everything. The possibilities seemed endless. As did the feeding frenzy among banks eager to fund "Internet" companies before they would become the next big thing. In its own way, AI is a similar bubble waiting to burst. Although it's not as all-encompassing as the Dotcom boom was. "The Internet" had a far more profound impact on people's everyday lives than AI, which has been a bit more of a slow burn in comparison. But it's a bubble nonetheless. I'm not sure it will do the same amount of damage when it bursts as the Dotcom bust did. But at some point there will be the sobering realisation that AI is just another technology. Which will find its permanent place in certain settings in everyday life, but there isn't going to be a "new economy" because of it. As many Dotcom companies found out to their cost, the New Economy was only ever a figment of everybody's collective imagination. In the end, when the craze faded, near enough the same business principles as always, and as valid as for almost every other commercial company, ended up applying to it as well. There ended up being no sustainable New Economy. The companies that did well long-term after the widespread adoption of the Internet were both the Old Economy companies that adapted to the new technology and newly founded tech companies who ran their businesses pretty much the same way you would run any company, tech or not.
>since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks
In the hands of a reasonably competent user, Claude 4.1 is now about as good at programming as a decent Computer Science graduate with a year or two of work experience. That's obviously no threat whatsoever to a highly skilled senior software developer, but it is having a real impact on entry-level hiring. Hiring a 21-year-old who might eventually become useful has become much less attractive when you can pay $200 a month for an AI that, while far from perfect, will make far fewer serious fuck-ups than the average recent graduate and definitely won't go off sick for six months with anxiety.
>So in the future, all the high-paying jobs to actually do the work will be replaced by low-paying jobs to check the AI
This is mostly just a semantic point in relation to the overall point you are making, I would point out that the high paying jobs in the current economy are very rarely the ones that actually do the work, they are mostly supervisory and bureaucratic roles. It's only a minority of niche and very specialised roles where you actually get paid appropriately well because your skill is in demand and in short supply, the rest of it is busywork.
These are the roles AI will take over. AI can do those jobs because, despite how we place a higher monetary value on them, we all know deep down those jobs are the ones that don't matter- Your manager can go off on maternity for a year and everything still function basically as normal without them. Everyone they were "managing" just gets on with it. We've all been in a position like that. It's when your lower level colleagues are off sick, and their work, the work that actually needs doing, starts to pile up and needs to be covered, that's when things start to go to shit, not just missed meetings and an inbox full of emails that didn't really need answering anyway.
AI won't be a significant change to our society on a structural level in that regard, in terms of how the economy functions it will just be streamlining. What will be interesting is seeing what happens when in the 2030s we have masses of white collar middle class people queueing up at the JobCentre, instead of scores of laid of factory workers and coal miners like we did in the 1980s. It is with a mix of cycnicism but optimism I somehow have a feeling that then, the prospect of a much more universal welfare state will start being taken seriously.
Coding is a pretty uniquely vulnerable case. The industry was already in trouble because so many people were banking on coding being the new digital age safe bet career option, so there was an over-saturation of people trying to get into it, and then you have the fact that it's one of the easiest jobs to be done remotely, so you had the entire of India competing with American and European workers. AI is just another step in that direction really.
"LEARN TO CODE" being the mantra of liberal politicians and economists over the last decade or so does now seem even more laughably short sighted than it already was, of course.
>"The Internet" had a far more profound impact on people's everyday lives than AI, which has been a bit more of a slow burn in comparison.
AI is taking off much faster than the internet, we've just forgotten that the big tech companies had an incredibly long and unprofitable slog to become properly valuable.
ChatGPT is less than three years old, but it has 700 million regular users and revenue of $12bn a year. It took Google more than eight years to achieve that level of growth. Facebook launched in 2004 and took more than seven years to reach those user numbers. Amazon took nearly a decade to recover their peak valuation after the dot-com crash.
I think what we'll stop seeing is indeed people who take three-month courses and then enter the job market as low-level software developers and coders. For a time, schemes like that were a good way to get halfway competent, technology-inclined laypeople out of unemployment. Because the demand was just there. On the other hand, it's also one reason why the software that those employees then produce is often slipshod and underwhelming, because being able to write some rudimentary C++ code and bosh some pre-existing libraries together isn't the same as having a wider grasp of the subject matter.
So now with AI, you can just have a computer do all that work from start to finish in seconds. Which will also cost money, but probably far less than having five semi-skilled coders do it for you.
I don't really think it's right to directly compare AI with the internet considering that AI is in itself kind of a sub-technology of the internet, it's downstream of it in the tech tree. The internet was an entirely new thing which that required new infrastructure to be built and consumers to obtain the equipment used to access it, whereas AI is a technology that sits atop that and runs on devices we already have.
If there's a bubble burst though, I don't see how NVidia gets out of it intact. That's going to be pretty funny to watch.
This is pretty much what I was trying to get at in my previous post. People who weren't alive back then can't really grasp what is was like going from an offline world where your only means of communication were letters and a landline telephone and your only sources of information were books and newspapers and your local library, to a world where suddenly all information was instantly available and you could just as instantly communicate and exchange messages with pretty much any person on the globe in real time. It was quite literally a whole new world.
I'm still not saying that AI isn't or won't be a fundamental game changer in many areas of life. It is, and it will be. But I still don't see how it's going to be the kind of game changer, of the same magnitude, that the World Wide Web and e-mail were in the mid-90s.
Again, if you weren't around back then, it's difficult to grasp. But there's a reason why culturally, you can neatly split the 1990s right down the middle in the half that happened before the Internet, and the one after the Internet from 1995 onward. You will then probably still argue that we've seen a similar thing in the early 2020s with AI, but trust me and anybody who is old enough to remember when we say it's not the same. It's not as fundamental, and not as groundbreaking.
I was only a kid, but I lived through it, and sometimes I like to play a mental game of taking a mundane task I'd do today, and imagining how I'd do it pre-internet, pre-wifi, pre-everything being an always on interconnected cloud of omniscience. We take this stuff so completely for granted now that it's easy to forget how even up through the mid 00s, there was a lot of stuff that was non-trivial to accomplish, because the tech hadn't matured and the different solutions hadn't been at all unified yet.
Ordering a pizza or a taxi? You had to have the menu for a start, had to phone them up and talk to a person (fuck that), then you had to actually have cash on hand to pay. Holiday photos? Dozens of rolls of film, dropped off at the kiosk in Boots, ready in two hours. To get there you went on the bus which you just stood and waited for and blindly had faith it would turn up at the time stated, which seems absolutely wild today. Going on Teletext to find out the times of movie showings before you went.
The greatest convenience we have today is that there's a universal standard everything adheres to. To me it's still a bit magic when I get some new gadget and all I have to do is scan a QR code and it's up and running, compared to the protracted nightmare of a process it would have been to set up a printer on your home network in 2005.
>Holiday photos? Dozens of rolls of film, dropped off at the kiosk in Boots, ready in two hours.
I remember it taking three to four business days at our independent photo shop. I got my first 35mm point and shoot photo camera in 1988 as a 14 year old, and at the time, that was pretty much standard. Same-day processing only really emerged in the mid-90s.
The real difference between film and digital cameras was that you were more thoughtful about what you were taking photos of. You only had 36 exposures per roll of film, I think some rolls were only 24 exposures even. Film rolls cost the best part of £5, in 1988 money. That would be £14 today. Plus whatever you were paying for prints. So in a very real sense, it meant that you weren't just taking photos willy-nilly.
Part of me thinks that if taking digital photos was as much of a faff as in the old days, then at least you wouldn't have all those pesky Instagramers everywhere queueing up at tourist attractions and shitting the place up for everybody. Maybe there should be a tax on every picture you take. If you had to pay 50p per picture, then much of social media would meet its deserved end, which I would applaud.
>>29263 I still do most of those things now, because I prefer it that way. I got a takeaway menu in the post months ago, and I kept it because something on it sounded phenomenally delicious. I finally ordered it last night, and was delighted that I didn't have to download a special app or anything. The curry itself was so horrible that I suspect they sent me the wrong thing (why was it 40% cauliflower?), but I enjoyed the experience. Perhaps I am an edge case of Luddism, but if you think it "seems absolutely wild" to wait for a bus, I think you might be an edge case in the other direction.
The big difference that always sticks out to me, is that I spent about a decade wondering how old the guy from Faithless was, and just accepting that there was no way to find out.
There's plenty of things I still do "the old way", because if you are in the habit it just makes as much sense as ever rather than changing your ways. For instance anything to do with my car, I just pop down to the garage and talk to the guy there, whereas I imagine lots of youngsters only ever deal with their RAC app or whatever and book their MOT/services online, never speaking to anyone.
What I meant with the bus was that you couldn't check up on whether or not it's going to be on time, if it was cancelled or behind schedule for some reason you'd just be stood there for an hour until the next one, you didn't have a way of checking up on things. From a modern perspective that's just extremely frustrating and time wasting, but back then it was just how it worked.
>The big difference that always sticks out to me, is that I spent about a decade wondering how old the guy from Faithless was, and just accepting that there was no way to find out.
You would have had a way from about 2001, when Wikipedia started.
That's one thing about finding information on the Internet. Before much of it became aggregated on a one-stop shop website like Wikipedia, whatever you wanted to know about something was scattered across the entire Web, from sources that were often many times more dubious than Wikipedia. Wikipedia still today is probably only 80 percent accurate most of the time, but it's something most people accept, because it's much more convenient to get your information that way than by scouring other much more grey and niche sources.
That centralisation is definitely a double edged sword, though. Both in terms of the monopolisation issue, the enshittification that comes with that, and the general effect it has on people's tech literacy and ability to figure things out for themselves.
Nowadays I find myself using about five websites, and I will sometimes just sit there refreshing them to look at new stuff at the top of each feed; whereas back then, I'd spend hours on the internet looking for stuff. You'd search in MSN or Jeeves or whatever, then go down a rabbithole following the links to all sorts of places. Every time you sat down to Use The Internet (which was a specific activity on its own), it was like going on a little adventure of discovery.
These days scrolling through whatever app you use is just a thing you do because you're not doing something more productive, and you can't really use the internet the old way either, because it just doesn't work. Who even makes their own websites like that any more instead of just starting a subredgwick or whatever, or posting their stuff on a normal social media account?
I was thinking about this advert earlier, but I couldn't find it on YouTube because I didn't know which company it was actually advertising. Guess they wasted their money then.
I saw something in the news, or potentially even in this thread, about how AI companies were going to have to start putting adverts in their AI results in order to break even financially. I thought this was a catastrophic idea, and nobody would trust the answers and there would be a massive outcry. The people just won't accept this. And then I realised: there is already an advert on TV, that I have seen multiple times, in which someone asks AI for help buying something, and it tells her what to buy. She asks for information, and receives an advert that purports to be real facts. I don't think the advert is targeted at customers at all. I think they are surreptitiously selling AI services to advertisers and corporations here, and dressing it as an advert for actual people. It's sinister.
Under British regulations, any advertisements would have to be clearly labelled as such. ChatGPT or Bixby or whatever couldn't just recommend a product based on paid inducement, but they could show a related ad in a separate box.
> Every time you sat down to Use The Internet (which was a specific activity on its own)
Most households in the late 90s had one bulky beige desktop computer with a bulky, low-resolution CRT monitor somewhere in the house, like the hall or in any case a room that was open for everybody to use. You then usually had a 56K landline modem, which gave you a speed of 5 kilobytes per second in each direction, downstream and upstream, at £10 a month.
I know that that's still common knowledge, but it's worth mentioning.
My older brother was doing quite well for himself at the time and had a top of the range Acer laptop with a PCMCIA slot for a 56K modem. Wi-fi was not yet available, so even with your laptop you were tethered to a phone outlet. He also had a WAP-capable Nokia phone with a monochrome LCD display, which was cutting edge in 1998 and was probably hugely expensive.
It's easy to get nostalgic about old technology, but then you realise that it was all a bit limited.
>>29271 I think everyone agrees that there was a point in the past where we had all the good technology, and nothing that has been invented since was actually needed. However, I wouldn't be surprised if we all disagreed on exactly when that point was. For me, I would say 2006-2007 was the optimal point, because I think the world needs YouTube but it doesn't really need Uber.
Ours was in the kitchen, tucked into the corner behind the dining table, in front of the big window. Our house was at the end of a cul-de-sac and that window let you look all the way down the street. It was roughly southwest facing if I have pictured it correctly, because I remember you'd get that deep golden light coming in when the sun sets in that direction.
We had one of those mahogany veneer desks, with the monitor on top, the sliding tray underneath for the keyboard, the PC tower and the printer awkwardly stuffed at the bottom so you had nowhere to put your feet. We had that wallpaper you used to get with watercolour style paintings of fruit on. The border was peeling off around the window. We didn't have a "computer chair", you just pulled up one of the dining chairs and put a cushion on it to boost yourself up a bit higher. There was a mess of cables coming out the side, through the modem, and along the windowsill towards the phone line, where there was a triple stack of splitters to take the line into the other rooms. In those days you'd have two or three phones running off the same line, so you could talk in your bedroom or the living room, remember that? If somebody else picked up while you were talking they could listen in. Anyway ours were fucked and the connectors would sometimes come loose, so you'd have to prop them up with one of the potted plants to keep your connection stable.
It probably says a lot about how I've turned out but I have few fonder feelings from childhood than sitting there, just typing in any old shit I can think of into a search engine, and being in awe of the endless information, which I would soak up. I hated school but I loved learning things. The internet educated me far more substantially than school could ever hope to, at least not the ones I attended. I imagine it's what nerdy kids in the olden days felt when they first visited a really big library. Somewhere they could lose themselves.
I think there's really something to be said for limitations. Those limitations are what, for a time, created a boundary between the online world, and the offline world. I believe the erosion of that boundary has been a terrible thing for us.
I gave an LLM my IPIP-NEO results and now it knows too much. I asked it today if I would enjoy traveling into the Pleasantville universe but it implied that I was too much on the spectrum and so would get frustratingly stuck trying to explain colour to people who need to feel it and anyway the whole thing is a bottle episode that would be solved in an afternoon before turning into a stagnant prison of a slightly more liberal 1950s American suburban town. I mean it's right but now I can't enjoy the movie ever again.
I sometimes ask people where they would go if they could travel into any fictional universe. It's a good filter for women.
>>29273 >Ours was in the kitchen, tucked into the corner behind the dining table, in front of the big window. Our house was at the end of a cul-de-sac and that window let you look all the way down the street. It was roughly southwest facing if I have pictured it correctly, because I remember you'd get that deep golden light coming in when the sun sets in that direction.
I'd say that I'm glad that we can wank in peace these days but we might have fucked that one.
>I'd say that I'm glad that we can wank in peace these days
If you were really horny, then I'm sure being in the kitchen was no true obstacle to a wank.
At my house now, my bedroom has a smallish room off it with a desk and an older TFT monitor, and that's pretty much my wank room now, where I hook up my laptop. The blinds are always drawn, which adds a layer of secrecy so I'm not announcing to the world each time that I'm retreating to the wank room.
>>29272 Live maps, that was the point for me. Being able to print out directions was neat, but having that 4-2" thing in your pocket (my 6310i was fine before that) meant the A-Z was done. I've not used a paper map since then in normal life, only for hiking where no reception means trouble.
What we can have in our pocket or buy for pennies in terms of compute power is nuts. Physical kinematics is the current frontier, if it can blow up or shoot you accurately it is wanted and continues to be in demand.
