Oh! I know something that can mess you up even more!
For those who don’t know what this book’s about:
The textbook “Principles of Mathematical Analysis”, by Walter Rudin, is considered a “classic” text on real analysis, the subject that uses rigorous deductive logic to put calculus on a firm foundation.
This book is lovingly called “Baby Rudin”, because it’s considered an entry-level book that undergraduates can take in their first 3 years, and Rudin also wrote 2 more books that are a large extension of the basic ideas in Baby Rudin, as in, more advanced, covering topics like Measure Theory (one way this is useful is as a framework to have more ways to deal with integrals) and Lesbesgue Integration (and this is an introductory example and application of Measure Theory) in “Papa Rudin”, and Functional Analysis in “Grandpa Rudin” (fancy phrase of the day: infinite-dimensional spaces!).
Please don’t ask further though. Many tears have been shed. Many trees were also harmed in the process (from all the papers that were used for sketching out ideas or proofs).
I know Lemmy hates AI with a fiery passion (and I too hate it for various reasons), but the ability to make this sort of prediction in a way far more stable than whatever else came before with natural language processing (fancy term of the day for those who havem’t heard of it), and however inefficiently built and ran it is, is useful if you can nudge it enough in a certain direction. It can’t do functional things reliably, but if you contain it to only parse human language and extract very specific information, show it in a machine-parsable way, and then use that as input for something you can program, you’ve essentially built something that feels like it can understand you in human language for a handful of tasks and carry out those tasks (even if the carrying out part isn’t actually done by an LLM). So pedantically, it’s not AI, but most people not in tech don’t know or care about the difference. It’s all magic all the way down like how computers should just magically do what they’re thinking of. That’s not changed.
My point though, and this isn’t targeting you specifically dear OC, is that we can circlejerk all we want here, but echoing this oversimplification of what LLMs can do is pretty irrelevant to the bigger discourse. Call these companies out on their practices! Their hypocrisy! Their indifference to the collapse of our biosphere, human suffering, letting the most vulnerable to hang high and dry!
Tech is a tool, and if our best argument is calling a tool useless when it’s demonstrably useful in specific ways, we’re only making a fool of ourselves, turning people away from us and discouraging others from listening to us.
But if your goal is to feel good by letting one out, please be my guest.
Peace