Two main catalysts:

1. Seeing how dumb 99% of products are.

2. Seeing how dumb 99% of users are.

Call my naive, but I truly did not see it coming. I didn’t expect cognitive surrender. I didn’t expect the whole world to start continvoucly morging. I didn’t expect lawyers to submit fake case citations, again and again and again.

I didn’t expect society as a whole to just shrug their shoulders and decide that accuracy doesn’t matter.

I also didn’t expect how much or how rapidly the bubble would inflate. GPU prices were already crazy, but now RAM and even SSD prices have roughly doubled in the past year, with no end in sight, with all production toward data centers. This is a disaster. We’re seeing higher prices for downgraded machines, like Microsoft’s 8GB Surface.

Seeing as we’re all on Lemmy, I hope that I will not need to belabor the point that centralization is bad. The shift toward data centers and away from personal devices is a shift toward centralization. It’s a shift toward greater censorship and away from freedom.

It’s not coincidence that this is happening at the same time as fascism is rising all around the world, that online ID laws are passing all over the world, that privacy-protecting technology like VPNs and end-to-end encryption are under greater and greater attack, and that knowledge repositories like The Internet Archive and Wikipedia are under attack. The shift is toward governmental control of the Internet, of access to knowledge in general.

Now the US government gets the final say on who will have access to ChatGPT 5.6. Surprise, surprise.

I’m not anti-AI or anti-LLM per se. I am anti-corruption and anti-bullshit. I am pro-consumer, pro-privacy, pro-individuality. In practice, that means I am anti-AI. Or more generally (but less strongly), I am anti-cloud.

As for what I would do: well the real solutions are the same as the solutions to most of modern society’s problems. We need extensive economic reform. But barring that, we need to do whatever we can to shift the balance back toward personal, private computation. We don’t need more datacenters. We don’t need trillion-parameter models at all. The only thing they are good at is basic stuff you don’t need them for (unless you’re an idiot), and generating well-masked bullshit.

Edit: Oh, and I would also hold all the corporations accountable for their obviously-illegal behavior, like pirating all the copyrighted material in the world. We definitely need more transparency in terms of training data.

My experience, also in the US, has been the opposite: I get prescribed addictive painkillers “just in case”.

Last time I had surgery, they told me to take ibuprofen for pain, and they also gave me a prescription for vicodin if the pain was too great. I live in an area with a significant opioid abuse problem, and they’re handing it out like candy. They didn’t tell me “call back if it’s severe” or anything like that, they just gave me the prescription. I stuck with the ibuprofen, and realistically I could have done without even that.

I suspect your experience is largely due to sexism. I’ve heard so many stories like this, where doctors don’t even think of taking women seriously.

Now we’re getting into linguistics with the question of “what is a wave?”

In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don’t necessarily apply though.

For example, sound waves can’t propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.

People talk about the “particle/wave duality” of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.

Plain English wasn’t made to be that precise or objective. That’s why we use math. :)

I’m no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.

The coolest, and often most confusing thing about computer science, information theory, and perhaps reality in general, is how everything becomes more or less equivalent if you boil it down and twist it around a little.

Everything is sorting. Everything is compression. Everything is geometry. Everything is language. Everything is music. Everything is, like, waves, man. *puff*

Or more accurately, everything can be expressed in any of those other things’ terms.

These are not new ideas, but computers have made them provably and demonstrably true in many contexts, and I think that’s super cool.

MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, with 4GB/64GB

Uhhh. For $500? Sorry, no.

It’s just crazy how many Bluetooth devices have broken (or completely absent) authentication and pairing security.

It’s very difficult to tell when they’re encrypted, too. Your Bluetooth keyboard and mouse could be broadcasting everything keystroke and click unencrypted to anyone within 100m or so.

And that’s just the accessories. There have been tons of exploits of phone and computer firmware over the years as well. Security is an afterthought at best with Bluetooth.