I would kill (figuratively, anyway) to have no AI whatsoever. No slop machine threatening to replace my job, or turn my job into babysitting its stupidity, and hardware would be reasonably priced? That would be awesome. AI has brought me nothing but downside.

AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor.

Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting themselves.

People were Googling these things. Those who were good with words, didn’t do that before AI and won’t do it today. They don’t have to.

Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?

Was it a genuine birthday greeting when you bought a card? Or used an online card? I don’t really see the difference. The point is you thought of them, not the actual words

With AI you don't have to think about them.

Great business opportunity there. Make a free service that sends AI generated birthday notes to people. All the user has to provide is the other persons birthday.

People cannot be relied upon to provide accurate birthdays but nobody would suffer the social faux pas of an incorrect birthday congrats note. Nor would they send it to a spam catching email, but rather are guaranteed to send it to a regularly checked address. They know the persons birthday after all.

You can then sell high quality birthday information correlated to contact information to ad agencies.

Fuck this current internet. So dystopian.

Then the receiver AI can thank the sending AI before deleting.

I used to write birthday emails to my friends years ago. I quit when calendar systems started automatically promoting me when birthdays happened. Remembering someone's birthday no longer seemed like a significant effort on my part and so it wasn't worth the bother since it didn't say as much.

For 90% of birthday greetings, are they ever genuine?

Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?

that was their point

someone at work unironically said they use ai to compose "thoughtful responses" to people, and my immediate thought was that what they are doing is the literal opposite of thoughtful

Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.

It's a paraphrasing of the popular 2024 Joanna Maciejewska quote: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

I believe it was rhetorical. They were trying to illustrate that we've automated tasks that people might find to be fulfilling (drawing, writing) but are still a long way off from affordably automating drudgery.

> or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art

They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.

But we now have trillionaires, aren't you happy about that? It means you might be the one some day too /s

I immigrated wanting to become a millionaire. Never found time working my ass off. Now that I get pension and tokens from Musk and Zuck, I can finally try!

> I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.

Almost? ALMOST!?!?!

If you handed me a button that would make it like LLMs had never existed I'd be slamming that button so hard Sam Altman's clothes would spin around.

Return memory and storage prices to normal, undo the sloppification of ~everything, remove all these annoying "features" that are so useful they have to force them upon people, and make scammers actually have to put in a slight bit of effort, all at the "cost" of real human developers, artists, writers, etc. getting paid for their work....

If this is a hard decision for you, you are the problem.

Same. Every time I think about this, I come back to the fact that I was excellent at my job before AI, and even enjoyed aspects of it, so I would be fine if tomorrow it all blew up.

I don't really agree with the specifics but I can identify with the emotion. To me the problem with AI isn't AI, it's that investors are idiots and put hundreds of billions of dollars into AI companies that have near zero chance of being profitable enough to pay them back and those companies took that money and blew up computer parts supply chains that are vital to the rest of human existence. If we didn't have this massive build out that has no chance of repaying itself and instead had a build out that only doubled ram/gpu/nvme prices we would be far better off. As it stands, we're going to have a ton of gear that will be of questionable utility once any of the disruptors get their 100X+ per watt improved/different hardware going and to get that hardware we broke everything else. This ai stuff will also likely plateau and have the openweights models and opensource tooling catch up and at that point the companies are basically GPU REITS with diminishing demand as the stuff ages out and the disruptor's gear gets built for much better performance per watt. They've made it really ugly for us now and it will get really ugly for them in the midterm future imo. Not a good outcome for anyone.

Same, I'd smash it like it was offering me a million dollars. I cannot think of a single positive thing that has come out of the AI boom. It has been a net negative for all of society.

Oh come on! I'll take a few years of expensive RAM in order for humanity to get wide access to something near as makes no difference to the Star Trek Ship computer.

Which is 100% what this has felt like to work with, all spring and summer.

So we're in a slop phase, it'll pass. The first few years of youtube gave no hints that we'd get stuff like Veritasium.

Ignore the slop and use the tools to create something you never thought you could do. That's what it's for!

Same here, the usefulness of the slop machines is quite limited compared to the downsides.

That's quite uncharitable. What are you trying to achieve here?

They (probably) don't want to stop progress (especially unqualified like this) in general. They'd like a world where LLMs didn't come to exist.

And whether LLMs are progress at all remains to be proven.

There's a difference between standing in the rain and being hit by a tsunami, even if it's both just water.

Looking at current hd prices, I keep kicking myself for giving away several 3tb and couple of 4tb drives I had in my unraid server few years ago when I started upgrading my array to 8 and 12tb drives. At the time, a drive slot in my server was more valuable to me than a mere 3tb drive. i could have kept them for emergencies if any one of my array drives fail.

I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear?

I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic

Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.

I obtained a used Dell PowerEdge and just stuffed a bunch of drives in there. It's old enough that the RAM is not overly expensive (DDR3), so it has 192GB of RAM to effectively cache the data, and then 32TB of raw storage. (Of course I regret not spending the extra money to take it to 384GB now.)

The nice thing about the array being big is that I can just RAID 1 it instead of worrying about tinkering with RAID 5, and leave a drive as a hot spare.

PCIe 2.5G NIC for the uplink, and then it can serve over SMB or iSCSI. The main use case for this thing, incidentally, is it just is a caching proxy that holds Docker images, models off of Huggingface, and so on.

36 bay? Why so many?

The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.

I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.

Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.

What size discs are you using? This post is kind of hilarious, 24TB is achievable in literally a 2-bay NAS nowadays.

36 bays and only 24T of storage?

Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?

That will be a single point of failure, though. (Which you might not care about depending on the backup strategy.)

You're telling me.

I had a drive go bad in my 4 year old home-built NAS a few weeks ago, and it cost 2x what it originally did to buy the same capacity drive, and that was going to a grey-market importer on eBay, it was more on "reputable" sites.