redwattlebird

Oh, true. Those bots were not clutter though, IMO.

Haha this thread is bringing back memories.

Nope. I was a kid around the 80s/90s and we had no dedicated computer teachers; although universities probably had access to those types of publications. That information was pretty niche in Australia for regular people, especially kids, and we were always at least 2 years behind the US on everything.

I don’t know what to tell you. It certainly wasn’t a word I or any one I spoke to used to describe programs.

No… Things literally were simpler back then as information moved a lot slower and the internet was far less privatised, if at all.

Your chat logs were saved to your own local drive, not a cloud, and you could delete them. Social media was just your web page you made for free on Geocities or Angelfire. Email spam was mostly chain mail. There were no bots whatsoever cluttering the internet. And so on.

And, FWIW, there were no such things as apps. Just programs. Apps started with the smart phone.

Mumble and Pigdin won’t be banned right? Also, swapping mobile numbers and getting on conference calls… Writing letters and all that. There’s still other ways to communicate.

I’m almost thinking of making a quick phone app to give them options and ideas on how to communicate outside of the big tech bubble.

I wonder if making your own personal website on Neocities/Geocities will come back in vogue again.

I wonder if Roblox squeezed through the cracks.

They gave root permission and proceeded to get rooted in return.

Does that phrase work?

Ok. We’re deviating off the point of LLM profitability here and have driven this conversation off into the weeds. So I’ll make this one last comment, and then I’m done. This debate has been interesting but exhausting.

Final counterpoints:

• $3.5mil is the cost of the connection footed by the energy provider and tax payer, and provides no ROI to investors like NVIDIA, hence no profit to LLM and “AI” in general.
• As far as I can tell, the biggest method of external income for LLM companies are subscriptions and there is simply not enough uptake in subscriptions to get ROI, so they try to force consumers to use it which ends up pushing away your customer base since you’re taking away their power of choice.
• For them to obtain ROI, literally the entire planet needs to use it which isn’t feasible because, as a consumer, you need income to consume and the larger driver of investment into LLMs is to reduce the cost of labour.

LLMs have long since gone beyond the scope of interesting science project to something driven by pure parasitic greed.

And how, pray tell, will doing all of that return a profit?

I’m from Australia, so I can only speak to the Australian climate and industry. I can confidently say that the model shown in Vienna is not feasible in our country. We simply don’t have much use for excess heat and we are highly susceptible to droughts. DCs use a lot of water to cool down and having these all over the country for private enterprise is bonkers. So, that’s instantly a market that isn’t profitable. Furthermore, it’s not feasible to build a pipe and re-route the heat across large distances with minimal heat loss.

However, even when or if they implement this throughout all of Austria, it won’t return a profit (which is what I thought your attachment was here, not the feasibility. We are talking about profitability, right?). This project cost $3.5m Euro and partially funded by tax. It’s not a great example of profitability but a good example of sustainability measures.

Also, reading comprehension assistance: not feasible != Impossible.

These companies have BILLIONS in revenue and millions of customers, and you’re saying very few want to pay…

Yep, I am. Just follow the money. Here’s an example:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1_26_openai_loss/

not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but you’re making it sound no one wants it and they can never do it.

… That’s all in your head, mate. I never said that nor did I imply it.

What I am implying is that the uptake is so small compared to the investment that it is unlikely to turn a profit.

If OpenAI can build a datacenter that re-uses all it’s heat for example to heat a hospital nearby, that’s another step towards reaching profitability.

😐

I’ve worked in the building industry for over 20 years. This is simply not feasible both from a material standpoint and physics standpoint.

I know it’s an example, but this kind of rhetoric is exactly the kind of wishful thinking that I see in so many people who want LLMs to be a main staple of our everyday lives. Scratch the surface and it’s all just fantasy.

You reckon they’ll embalm him? Chuck him in a glass coffin and charge money to see him, and all that?

It is unlikely to turn a profit because the returns need to be greater than the investment for there to be any profit. The trends show that very few want to pay for this service. I mean, why would you pay for something that’s the equivalent of asking someone online or in person for free or very little cost by comparison?

Furthermore, it’s a corporation that steals from you and doesn’t want to be held accountable for anything. For example, the chat bot suicides and the fact that their business model would fall over if they actually had to pay for the data that they use to train their models.

The whole thing is extremely inefficient and makes us more dumb via atrophy. Why would anyone want to third party their thinking process? It’s like thinking everyone wants mobility scooters.

Coincidentally, i was just thinking about this site the other day because i was so sick of video walkthroughs!

I’m torn.

I love the googly eyes. Everything is better with googly eyes but I do know the pain of going through the council process to get stuff like this installed to make the area more interesting and engaging local artists.

I suppose getting the teen’s family to cough up the repair money is fair. I hope they got lots of photos of it with the eyes before it was taken down.

Money buys power and influence and politicians react more to that than their own constituents. When money can bend reality and get people to vote against their own interests just to keep the status quo, there’ll be no change.

I mean, for all the things we do right we get stuff like the Bezos wedding where everyone arrives via private jet or COP25 where everyone also arrives by private jet to discuss the climate.

We have Greta Thunberg who addressed the world leaders and voiced our discontent at their lack of action. Her views are not unique and are a reflection of many but yet, despite laying the truth bare and shaming leaders for their inaction, power and influence labels her as whatever they want to discredit her words and influence.

So, if we want to reverse things and change, we need to target the rich and tax them, shame them, eat them… Whatever it takes and only then will we be able to do something net positive. Doing ‘our part’ is not enough when the top 1% literally offsets all of our efforts everyday.

Nope; the average person wants to only customise/personalise, not tinker.

I’m suggesting this distro to friends and family moving off of windows and wanting to save money. They think using command line is too “extra”.

Absolutely! I brought it into another group for corporate stuff and it was great. We also used it over COVID lockdown for games with another group of friends.

I’ll do more research on Matrix and see if i can set something up for a truly seamless transition. Thanks for the suggestion!

I tried getting my friends to move to any other chat client but the thing that keeps them on discord is the screen share. Like it or not, this feature is what’s locking people in as a one stop shop game streaming chat.

I’m almost inclined to believe that he just wants an excuse to holiday in NZ. Because if it’s for spying… Good grief. Have they bungled it up badly.

…I mean, OPSEC IS CLEAN!

Doesn’t the FBI look into issues within USA borders? And doesn’t the CIA look into issues outside these borders? I’m confused as to why an FBI office needs to be in Wellington, especially since NZ is a sovereign country. Unless somehow the NZ government is somehow now a state of the US.