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Accept everything as moulded by the evolution. All the trends since the cave days to now. Believe that there is a purpose for the trend, even if the purpose is extinction.

Do not assume that you caused something or invented something. You are just a carrier of the change, with minimal resistance. If you can't carry the change (invent stuff) with minimal cost to the evolution, then it will pick the next least resisting guy to carry the change. And he will claim that he invented something. That's the carrot offered for being the carrier.


"Most great ideas are 'in the air,' and several scholars simultaneously wave their nets."

"Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed."

Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some effect on the climate, which may only slightly quicken the human extinction.

Puzzlingly, no animal species requires AI, which is a mystery that need to be solved by AI.


Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.

The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.

This is incorrect; the local model is a small dense neural network called BirdNET that would not have been referred to "AI" when it was published in 2021. The model outputs a bird species probability distribution and the web application displays an existing image file of the most probable bird on the screen. This is a lovely example of simple, offline, and fun project using a straightforward machine learning model.

Ok, so why didn't this small dense model come up, say, 10 years back? Oh it needed all the AI evolution and concepts that were powered and evolved inside the data centers. But we still want to claim that it has nothing to do with the Big AI.

> came out of the data-center-driven

should we tell them how hacker news gets onto their computer?


You assume that I assume that HN doesn't require data centers?

Incorrect. As others have pointed out, BirdNet is a “traditional” neural network. The amount of compute needed to train something like this is many orders of magnitude less than an LLM. Something like this could be trained on local hardware with enough juice, or by renting a handful of GPU’s

What a shame that we get a bird ckassifier by the samle technology we use to recognize cancer and other illnesses.

What a shame that you use that excuse to offset all other evils of AI, without even having a hint of how many patients were saved by AI. Just like how oil salesmen and nukes makers say that they solve some great problem of the world.

Amazingly unhinged response to the automated bird picture frame.

Do you not like AI?

Well, it's not a fruit or food that I can eat. It's not a shelter, It's not a fellow human or a pet. So, hard to say if I like it.

Nice idea. How does the provider receive the order from customer? Is it through phone call, or via some other app? If it is an app, won't that app have a status tracking feature?

The assumption is that there is no app. The target is mostly small businesses who receive the order via phone or face to face.

Finding patterns and information using machines, in a seemingly random noise should no longer be a surpise, much the same way as lifting tonnes of weight using a crane is no longer a surprise.

That's normal human behavior when they are in survival mode. Aren't the AI agents supposed to learn and act like humans?

It shows that the human quest has been in wrong direction since the industrial age began. Domains like math and other inter-connected or inter-dependent domains - all exist in modern times only to keep people employed outside of basic work such as farming and survival. All of these domains can be removed and humans can still continue with their lives taking care of what really is needed for their survival and sprawl. 99% of the "work" that happens today is froth, disconnected from basic needs.

A useful term here is “instrumental reason.” The Ethics of Authenticity is a good read on the topic:

https://jaredhenderson.substack.com/p/the-modern-malaise?r=5...


You can remove pretty much everything in the modern world, from cars to computers etc.. and humans would still continue with their lives. Such and argument is only anti-progress.

We also use technology to care for the people in medicine and it requires pretty advanced science and engineering. Doesn't that shred your argument?

Nope. The medical advances created the inverted pyramid of demographics in the western world, filled by old people.

Why draw the line at the industrial age? Humans subsisted for millenia before the ready preparation of fire.

>> You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.

As s child, I lived in a world where there were no supply chains, no marketing and no advertising. Profit-based business was seen a mean thing to do.

City living and desire for goods from far away lands - created supply chains which dictate how people should live, in a precariously dependent way such that they can't make their needed things on their own and they can't have them made them locally. What a progress.


Unless you lived thousands of years ago, there was a supply chain. For bread there was a farmer, a miller, and a baker. That's a supply chain. And they were even more profit hungry back then, adulterating the flour with fillers to save money.

You assume that everyone eats bread, like most westerners do.

The rural families a few decades ago in most Asian countries did not need millers, bakers or any other salesmen.


Are you being sarcastic?

They are not being sarcastic. My grandparents lived in a place like this - the old ways have been forgotten by most but in my family you only have to go back two generations before it's all pretty much living off the land...

Game engines, AI, robots and machines in general are establising a "goal horizon" for humans. This is unnecessary and counter productive way of using tools. Tools are supposed to work for us, not set goals or direction for us.

But as technology progresses and becomes more advanced, it does seem to set goals in all directions in that seems inevitable if we continue to 'collaborate' with modern technology. I mean, we no longer develop tools to help us out really, if you think about it. We develop tools to get ahead of other tools, to be faster than them, to protect ourselves from still other tools.

I'd argue that as we condition ourselves into a state of constant development, we shouldn't even call these things "tools" anymore, but pieces of an organism that spurn us to upgrade and complete it at every step.

Tools working for us only applies to local, simple tools that one person or a small communiity can basically understand and make, like a hammer. That's a tool. I wouldn't call a computer a tool any more just like I wouldn't say that our brain is merely a tool. It's more: it's an extension of us and even an integral part of us that modifies our very instincts and desires itself.


We shouldn't condition ourselves to keep transforming these tools unto our masters. That's the point I was making. We don't the "goal horizon" that is reachable to machines but too far away for humans. There is no point in having that. Goals should be reachable to humans. Humans never needed deal with numbers larger than a few thousand. Centralization is driving the demand for super-human capabilities.

I guess Apple is done. It had its time. Great company.

Light doesn't have a "speed" as in the usual meaning of the word "speed". Talking about speed requires defining spatial distances and time durations, which are in turn defined or created by the phenomenon of light.

Light doesn't "travel". It's just an exchange of entangled photons creating the concept of time duration and distance.


So how do you explain that light can be slowed down?

The same way as we talk about it's speed and travel etc - using higher level human perceptions.

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