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Yes.

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It is absolutely predefined - if you make the same moves it will give you the same results, every time. Same as playing ChessMaster 2000 from 1986.

It may narrowly fit into the broad definition of 'AI' (like, since the 70s) but that's not what's being discussed in this thread.

Believe what you like though.

I agree it's great at writing and frame-working parts of code and selecting libraries - it definitely has value for coding. $1500 bil value though, I doubt.

My main concern there lies in the next gen of programmers. The work that ChatGPT (and Claude etc) outputs requires some significant programming prior-experience to allow them to make sense of the output and adjust (or correct) it to suit their scope and requirements of the project - it will be much harder for junior devs to learn that skill with LLMs doing all the groundwork - essentially the same problem in wider education now with kids/teens just using LLMs to write their homework and essays. The consequences will be long term, and significant. In addition (for coding) it's taking away the entry-level work that junior devs would usually do and then have cleaned up for prod by senior devs - and that's not theory, the job market for junior programmers is dying already.

When people say "I fucking hate AI", 99% of the time they mean "I fucking hate AI™©®". They don't mean the technology behind it.

To add to your good points, I'm a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like "this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we're on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence" or "90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years" it annoys me because its not real, and it's always someone selling something. Today's AI is the same tech they've been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore's Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.

The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it's the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.

What a fucking waste of resources.

What's real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it's not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).

I know you're meming, but in Civilization (as in most games), you're playing against predefined scripts and algorithmic rules that the computer opponent has, as well as having cheaper costs for resources than the user at higher difficulty levels - because it cannot compete with a skilled human player at that level (it literally cheats).

No LLM, no neural network, no deep learning.. not 'AI' in the modern sense that's being discussed here.

.. And NVMe SSDs, and large HDDs.

I bought a Crucial P310 MVMe 2TB card barely three weeks ago for the already-inflated price of $132.58 (not on sale).

The exact same card from the exact same retailer is now $225.13.

70% increase in 21 days.

That's the average amount of inflation we'd have in eighteen years.

I can see how that would be very helpful to some people. Thanks for explaining

Well now I'm not sure what you're after. If it turns into brigading that's a separate issue, and blocking one or two users from seeing your post won't fix that, right?

I mean.. I guess that's not ideal? On the other hand, they keep wasting their time, and I get on with my life. So I'm OK with it this way.

I'm not advocating political assassination - but it does amaze me that there are ~400,000,000 guns in the USA and nobody has even taken a shot at Musk yet.

LNP increasing.. Greens and ALP both decreasing.

Fuck Aussie's are poorly-informed voters. We'll be back to LNP and right-wing coalition govt in no time, with the last 15 years of problems blamed on the 4 years of Labor rule because 'they touched it last'.