105 points

I’m very happy to see that the industry has moved away from the blockchain hype. AI/ML hype at least useful even if it is a buzzword for most places

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36 points

So true.

With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.

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31 points
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Blockchain is a great solution to a almost nonexistent problem. If you need a small, public, slow, append only, hard to tamper with database, then it is perfect. 99.9% of the time you want a database that is read-write, fast and private.

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6 points

My thoughts exactly.

I was told that except for flying scams under regulatory radars, the thing it’s great at is low-trust business transactions. But like, there are so many application-level ways to reasonably guarantee trust of any kind of transaction for all kinds of business needs, into a private database. I guess it would be an amazing solution if those other simpler ways didn’t exist!

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1 point

While applying it where most shitcoins have applied Blockchain, I agree it’s all hype. But Blockchain doesn’t solve a non-existent problem.

Trusting humans is an inherent security flaw. Blockchain solves that problem. You don’t have to trust banks to not shortsell the housing market with your own money (causing a recession for the entire world) if you could cut humans out of the equation.

Forget money. Say the data that you want to be able to transact and operate on is health data instead of financial information. You could create a decentralized identity system based on people’s biometric information. From there, you could automate and decentralize governance in general.

Suggesting Blockchain solves a non-existent problem is like suggesting Lemmy solves a non-existent problem

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22 points
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Deleted by creator
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5 points

But does it though? A blockchain is the ultimate zero tolerance policy. Lost your password? Grandma gave the house to a scammer? Too fucking bad

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1 point

Honestly I never bought that cryptocurrencies could remain unregulated long, there was just no reason for governments to want it to stay that way. It probably took more time for the regulator to catch up than I initially thought, but the writing was on the wall from day 1.

For NFTs; yeah, I see what you mean. And digital asset management don’t feel to me like it particularly needed that kind of disruption. Like, there isn’t significant business upside or value to my house title’s ownership being stored in the blockchain, rather than in my county’s private database like it is today. And since there wasn’t a reason for people to assign any perceived business value to the NFT vs the private DB record, therefore the NFT had no value, by definition. I could just never see it.

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0 points
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Deleted by creator
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6 points

We’re currently adding AI support to our platform for email marketing and it’s crazy what can be done. Whole campaigns (including links to products or articles) made entirely by GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion. You just need to proofread it afterwards and it’s done. Takes 15 minutes tops (including the proofreading).

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12 points
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takes 15 minutes tops

Not including the hours dicking around with prompts.

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20 points

Only charlatans were recommending blockchain for everything. It was painfully obvious how inefficiently it solved a non-existent problem.

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14 points
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You could always tell because no one could ever really explain it in simple terms what it does or why it was useful, other than trying to defend NFTs existing and enjoying the volatility of the crypto market (not currency).

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-4 points

I mean it has it’s uses. You can consider it as a tower made up building blocks. We can write things into the blocks as we build the tower, and every block is inspected by people worldwide to make sure no one’s messing with it’s contents and they can’t be changed after the block has been placed.

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77 points
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The biggest problem is that even OP is unaware of what is really being skipped: math, stats, optimization & control. And like at a grad level.

But hey, import AI from HuggingFace, and let’s go!

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45 points

The worst part of ML is Python package management

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5 points

Yeah, I feel like Python is partly responsible for most of this meme. It’s easy for very simple scripts and it has lots of ML libraries. But all the stuff in between is made more difficult by the whole ecosystem being focused on scripting…

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4 points

The worst part of ML is Python package management

Do you have some time to talk about our Lord and Savior, venv?

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2 points

Had to use wsl and manually set environment variables to get accelerate and bitsandbytes to work the other day, why can’t pip install just work? Venv is just another layer that conda should be solving, and even that isn’t enough to overcome Python’s craptastic nature

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1 point

At that point you may as well go full Vagrant or start using Docker images.

And no matter how quirky or obtuse venv/conda/pip can be, they will never be as bad as Node. Ever. Node will hold that King Shit crown forever, or at least to God I hope it does.

Something worse than Node coming around and getting popular might just make me quit IT altogether.

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3 points

Poetry gang

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2 points

Underrated comment!!!

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2 points

Nah, it’s pushing inference to prod. Any idiot can make an ipynb to train a model, but packaging everything into an app ecosystem is where you actually need a lot of non-ML software engineering know-how.

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3 points

So true. I’m on an AI product team. None of the engineers know that much about learning/ai — our expertise is in high availability/scalability/distributed systems.

The AI part it when a data scientist hands us a notebook and says: implement this algorithm.

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36 points

Why walk when you can learn to run!?

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36 points

Where’s discrete mathematics?

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28 points

Math? I write code, that’s words bro. Why would I ever need math?

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21 points

This is sadly how a lot of Computer Science students think nowadays.

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1 point

I think the problem is that they are trying to teach math to generalists where in front of them are students formed to understand programmatical problems.

Where the problems be restructured to a programatical problem, then it would work far far better.

Mathematical exercises aim to solve 1 problem with 1 given set of parameters, programatical exercises aim to solve 1 problem with ANY given sets of parameters.

And that’s what made me loose interest in math during my CS years.

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8 points

Shhh, they’re trying to be discreet about discrete mathematics

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5 points

On the first floor

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