embellishing my elegance and eloquence

I was almost holding back tears from trying not to laugh as I told her yes that's great you nailed it honey. Thank you very much I am feeling the love.

[ID: anonymous question reading: helicopter deadass said gluten tag ///end ID]

So the professor comes in and I cannot express enough how much this man was actually round, not tall, greying, balding, and literally wearing a three-piece tweed suit with a little red bow tie. He was the most perfect human being I've ever met.

Anyway the look on his face when he saw an actually packed lecture theatre was one of sheer unbridled glee. Natural, right? His dinky little subject is suddenly unbelievably popular.

Which gave him the perfect opportunity to talk about pissing for a solid hour. Because that was his specialist subject. Comparative urination etiquette.

This man who was the Platonic ideal of a humanities professor stood there and talked enthusiastically about piss to a packed to the rafters lecture theatre full of bright-eyed first years, and as this was a Monday morning it was almost certainly many people's first ever university lecture of their whole life. His eyes were glittering with joy the whole hour. He was having the time of his life.

There were absolutely no questions at the end of the lecture. He, apparently having fully understood what he was doing, clearly expected this and instructed us to have a lovely day and wished us good luck on our higher education journey.

You could sit anywhere you wanted in the lecture theatre the next week and the lecture was intro to methods in anthropology.

What's it for?

What's it for?

Why would anyone want this?

I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?

like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.

and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.

A metaphor I've been using lately is that being a tech-interested person and watching the AI hype is like if you had followed the development of blenders for years. You watched them go from prototypes that were basically just a spinning open blade all the way to a design that has the potential to be a consumer Vitamix! It's really cool! Blenders have come such a long way, and they're ready for prime time!

And then you turn on the news and see otherwise rational, intelligent people saying "gosh, imagine, soon we'll replace all of our chefs, and our surgeons, and our high school teachers with blenders!" and your friends and family all nod and agree and say things like "wow, blenders can basically do everything now!" And when you ask people "are you HIGH?!" they show you the new blender they bought, and how well it makes a smoothie, and then they act like that's evidence for a statement like "blenders will replace 90% of the workforce" not being utterly nonsensical and deranged.

"Scientists just have to fix the hallucination problem!" they say. When you ask what the hallucination problem is, they say "I'll show you" and then they put their unfinished math homework into the blender and hit pulse. "You see, I wanted it to solve those math problems, but it just shredded the paper. It must have hallucinated a world where the answer to 2+2 was puree." When you point out that it did exactly what it was designed to do, because a blender cannot do math and it will never do math and expecting it to be able to do math just because it can make both smoothies and soup is ludicrous and bizarre, they tell you that they're sure that blenders will be able to do math any day now, just you wait, "I mean, look how far they've come! A year ago I would have said that blenders could never be strong enough to blend ice into sorbet, but now they can. So who are you to say they'll never do math???"

The thing is, there are plenty of things that LLMs and generative AI are good for. OCR is still a vital need, and AI is excellent at it. Facial recognition is an area where AI has a lot of potential. It can be used as a screening step for the analysis of all sorts of large datasets. Better autocomplete on your phone is a real thing that real people want. There are a ton of problems that these tools genuinely do solve!

...But none of them are trillion dollar problems, and that's an issue, because no one wanted to pour a trillion dollars into "improved OCR" and "somewhat better autocomplete".