aaronbaugher

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.

aaronbaugher

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?

The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.

aaronbaugher

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

Ditto. Being broke has always been existential, and pretty damn scary even if you had family and other resources you could lean on. Nothing's changed about that, though particular industries/regions may get better or worse.

aaronbaugher

letztes Jahrdiscuss

It kind of surprises me that they never confuse "it's" and "its" and common mistakes like that, when it seems like most human writers today swap them randomly. I suppose that's thanks to a lot of the text in the training data predating the collapse of English education.

I'm not sure why em dashes are so popular, though. I don't think I've ever seen human writing that had as many em dashes as LLMs use.

aaronbaugher

letztes Jahrdiscuss

True. We've gotten used to searching the web being like this: Type in "how long to cook a frozen 20-pound turkey," scroll past a few ads, and then either spot the direct answer in the blurb of one of the results, or see a promising-looking one and click through.

There's a lot of skimming and scanning that we've come to expect as part of the process in locating a piece of information, and we do it quickly with practice, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.

aaronbaugher

letztes Jahrdiscuss

After smoking in bars was banned, my brother and I noted how run-down and dreary the places we hung out looked. We just hadn't been able to see it before through the haze.

I always hated the smoke and the way your hair and clothes would still reek of it the next morning. Now, on the rare occasions I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, it's nostalgic and almost smells good.

aaronbaugher

letztes Jahrdiscuss

True. The other day I was wondering whether I should buy a new PC, then realized I was only thinking that way out of old habit. It's 5+ years old, and that used to be when a PC would really start struggling to keep up with the software. Now there's kinda no point. If I did build a new one, it wouldn't be significantly more powerful than my current one, so I'd really just be trading older parts for newer ones from fear of parts wearing out.

aaronbaugher

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I've tinkered with LLMs, because I keep thinking it'd be cool to have an "assistant" that could research and boil down information for me. The problem is coming up with a question that is A) too complicated to be answered in a single web search that I can do myself as fast as asking the question, and B) not too complicated or important for me to accept the answer without redoing the research myself to verify the answers are correct.

For simple questions (How long does the moon take to orbit the earth), a search engine will give the answer right in the results; I don't even have to click through to a page. An LLM can't save me any time there, so I'd only be using it to be using "AI" (which is what I see people around me doing).

For difficult or currently controversial questions (What's the best hosting service for my new subscription site, taking into account price, reliability, location, and hardware support?) there's no way I could trust it not to be making shit up. By the time I checked all its work, I might as well have done it myself.

So I'd like to usefully use it, but I can't figure out how to use it as more than a curious toy.

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