I am so sick and tired of "AI"

[liam_on_linux]

Spent much of today getting a Live AROS USB key working, which wasn't trivial... it needed a USB 3 key, which I had to go and buy specially.

 

But after that... I am so tired. I want to write about new stuff in software, but there feels to be no area not contaminated with "AI".

I get the depressing feeling that computing is just being eaten up by bloody "AI". Virtually every press release I've seen this week has been AI. Mozilla adopts new AI search engine. Red Hat releases RHEL 10 with built in AI chat bot to help clueless PFYs admin the thing. Windows bloody Notepad has AI built in. AI in Google Docs. AI boosters in my mentions telling me and my friends that AI is helping them read antique books or whatever. 

 

Is there anywhere outside of retrocomputing that doesn't have AI in it?

 

The emperor has no clothes. LLM bots are not artificial and they are not intelligent. Not at all, not even a little bit, not even if you redefine the words "artificial" or "intelligent".  

"AI" is not "AI". The liars and the shills redefined what people used to mean by "AI" as "AGI", artificial _general_ intelligence, so they could market their stupid plagiarism bots as AI. 

AGI is not real. It doesn't exist. It will probably never exist. Hell, at the rate humanity is going, we won't be able to build new computers any more by 2050 and the survivors at the poles will be nostalgic for electricity.

AI is a scam. It's a hoax. It's fake news. There is no AI, and what is being sold as AI is such an incredibly poor fake that it is profoundly disheartening that so many people are so stupid to be deceived into thinking it is AI.

The blockchain is a scam. Everything to do with it is a scam. 

Alternative medicine is a scam. All of it. There is no such thing. If it's called "alternative" that means it's been proved not to work.

All religions are scams. No exceptions. 

People have made billions from selling scams for my whole lifetime.

Meanwhile, other scams, like plastics being recyclable -- they aren't, it's a lie -- or biofuels -- also a lie -- mean our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. We are killing the planetary ecosphere that keeps us alive with plastic and pollution from burning stuff. We have to stop burning everything, stop cutting down trees, and stop making all forms of single-use products. No more jet planes. No more private cars. No more foreign holidays. We can't afford it.

And with all that we are almost certainly still doomed.

But I kind of want to see my industry go first, if all it's got now is AI.

Snag is, I need a job. I have Ada to pay for.

Comments

[autopope]

Preach it, brother!

(Doing my bit corner: I just had to check the copy-edits on a novel this past week. Tor Production insists authors use Microsoft Word. But Word now includes an LLM. And my contract with Tor warrants that the novel is entirely my own work; use of an LLM would arguably put me in breach of contract. So that's my excuse for going against their express orders and using LibreOffice … which is finally mature enough to digest a change-tracked book, with comments, and not screw everything up.

And I was up-front about it and they're treating me as a semi-official guinea pig, so it might gain traction. As my editor is an editorial director there, and also uses LibreOffice because -- hello -- he doesn't like LLMs either, it's probably going to be all the rage by next year. And meanwhile, I'm getting close to cancelling my Office365 subscription next month because the only use I have for it is checking copy edits on one book a year reliably.

[hilarita]

Thank you for the good news on LibreOffice! The ability to handle change tracking and comments was one of the things that has kept me using Word for a very, very few use cases. (The formatting still sometimes goes screwy when working in Word and LibreOffice, but since Word can manage that all by itself it's been less of a deal-breaker for me.)

[liam_on_linux]

LibreOffice is still improving in quite interesting new directions.

I really think that just maybe it may be about to see a renaissance.

It's smaller, cleaner and faster than it's been in about 30 years.

One team has it running inside a web server, presenting a Google Docs-style UI inside a browser. So, trendy in-browser productivity, but all-FOSS. I don't care and don't really need that, but some do.

Another team has it running locally by by compiling it to WASM and embedding the result in a web page. I think WASM is a terrible idea in general and a one gigabyte applet in a web page is, er, suboptimal, but modern computers could handle that, and it can do impressive things.

Now it works they're trying to modularise it.

Those two companies just merged, incidentally.

Another team is working on implementing live collaborative editing, again Google Docs style.

Put the three together and a whole bunch more possibilities open up.

Now your browser can just handle any MS Office format, in browser. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever, you can display it, or if you want edit it, or you can output to it. Run locally or remotely, as you prefer. Standalone or collaborative.

All this has been doable with proprietary stuff for years, and now it works on Macs and Chromebooks and Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and on your phone...

There have to be ways to use that, right?

As for Word -- I mean, as you know, professor, I'm a heretic and like Word -- but could you not just run an old version without the AI bollocks?

I still occasionally use Word 97. It's hilarious to me that just under 30Y ago it was a bloated mess, and now the same binary probably runs inside the L2 cache of one of my CPU cores.

Word 2003 works quite nicely under WINE, too...