this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Okay, but, devils advocate:
What if I'm a billionaire trying to crush the working class and accelerate climate change and political division so the class war doesn't pop off before i can get to my climate bunker?
Or a billionaire fascist who wants to sloppify everyone's brains and increase alienation while annihilating interiority so people will become docile and the class war won't pop off and we get the 1984 timeline?
Or a billionaire asshole who wanted to murder a concept and settled on 'truth'?
Or a really big 'infinite jest' fan?
So "ai" has a lot of use cases. Maybe dont be such a reflexive reactionary fucking Luddite piece of shit about it.
That’s the thing, AI is an exceptional propaganda machine. Blockchain isn’t really exceptional at anything - it’s just a reinvention of the wheel.
Blockchain is an adequate solution to a problem that already has other, cheaper solutions.
AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information). Unfortunately, all the money is in that solution being applied to problems where it's not adequate (content generation, user interaction).
Sentiment analysis machines and such have been around before LLMs and eat much less electricity.
LLMs taken over the "AI" label so much that any success from a machine learning context is attributed to it, while it actually defunds and kills research out of ML all into LLMs.
It's true that LLMs (and GANs) are taking over a term that contains a lot of other stuff, from fuzzy logic to a fair chunk of computer linguistics.
If you look at what AI does, however, it's mostly classification. Whether it's fitting imprecise measurements into categories or analyzing waveform to figure out which word it represents regardless of diction and dialect; a lot of AI is just the attempt at classifying hard to classify stuff.
And then someone figure out how to hook that up to a Markov chain generator (LLMs) or run it repeatedly to "recognize" an image in pure noise (GANs). And those are cool little tricks but not really ones that solve a problem that needed solving. Okay, I'll grant that GANs make a few things in image retouching more convenient but they're also subject to a distressingly large number of failure modes and consume a monstrous amount of resources.
Plus the whole thing where they're destroying the concept of photographic and videographic evidence. I dislike that as well.
I really like AI when used for what it's good at: Taking messy input data and classifying it. We're getting some really cool things done that way and some even justify the resources we're spending. But I do agree with you that the vast majority of funding and resources gets spent on the next glorified chatbot in the vague hope that this one will actually generate some kind of profit. (I don't think that any of the companies who are invested in AI still actually believe their products will generate a real benefit for the end user.)
Not necessarily, a huge use case is regulation and control in the engineering, not the political sense. Like driverless cars, independently flying drones and such. And yeah, they need classification subsystems under the hood to work, but their ultimate outputs are complex control signals, not simple classes.
And don't get me wrong, I also like ML and AI as a field, I just don't like how OpenAI fucked the field with text generators that they got Silicon Valley to worship like gods. I even like LLMs, just not the grotesquely outsized cult around them.
Right. We've tried to slay 'truth' before and nothing else has worked. Weve tried to end consciousness before, and we came up with a solution in the 40s but everyone was too chicken shit to use it, so we had to build something nastier.
There is no other solution for creating a shared, permissionless database.
Blockchain is good if you want everyone to know who you send your money to.
Which sounds stupid, but if we used it more for things that aren't stupid money, perhaps we could find something where transparency and permanent immutable logs are a good thing. For currency those may even be bad things because privacy. Which Monero solves and that's actually another useful thing - ability to make untraceable payments remotely. Used to have to use cash for that.
My understanding of current blockchain technology is that it's only permanent so long as someone is online maintaining the block integrity. If enough machines go down, or if enough machines come up that refute it, then anyone can push an alternate history.
A Bitcoin heist where you install a false ledger using a botnet.
False.
How do you modify a transaction that occurred 100 blocks ago? You'd have to also modify the 99 other blocks since that modification. But for those new blocks to be valid you need to find the new magic number that brings the hash below a certain threshold, 99 times. But there aren't enough machines.
It assumes that the stakes are high enough for there to be a significant network online, yes. You could of course still compare your local history to the online one but by then the technology has failed its purpose.
The stakes may not be high for me but if it has value to someone, all I have to do is build my bot net and then hold their ledger ransom.
There are a couple of good uses of blockchain, not only currency, but yea
Bitcoin would be fantastic to force businesses to be taxed under a clear ledger.
Snap, Atomic, whatever...
Well yeah, but as a private citizen, I don't want MY spending transparent to everyone like that
Now businesses? Yeah would be nice
No, I get it. You can see where I'm from here.
Ah right, I was on mobile and Voyager doesn't show instance addresses by default lol
What's the original invention you're thinking of?
I struggle to think of anything where it's the best system, that's true. Even crypto works better other ways.
Blockchain is primarily touted as a replacement for currency.
Ah. Well, it has the advantage over cash that you can't counterfeit it, and the advantage (or "advantage" depending on who you ask) over wire transactions that no central authority controls it.
I've also heard people mention Merkle trees, which are an old concept of which blockchains are a special case, but nobody thought to use them for Byzantine-fault-tolerant networks until Bitcoin.
Every decade has at least one of these buzzwords (multimedia, internet/ online, social media, mobile app, blockchain, cryptocoins, micropayment, delivery, ai,...).. They can be used to attract dumb investor's money but they have their useful sides too.
Ok. They are just buzzwords which outline a set of tools. They are worthless without a realizable concept with a benefit for the end-user. And the use of the right tool for the job. So, I'm not sure about useful cryptocoins and blockchain use cases (I wouldn't count financial speculation as particularly useful).
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Every time somebody starts raving about some tech, it'll turn out to be a classic hype cycle.
This isnt productive, and the hype is the largest I have ever seen. Ireland–a wealthy developed tech savvy nation–isnt building new homes to address their housing crisis because this shit is taking all the energy and water.
That's true. The tech bros are playing the market by blowing bubble after bubble and raising the stakes each time.
Gotta ask what the supervillain-ass end game is.
Some think they can crash everything, burn it to the ground, to then rebuild it according to their designs.
That graph is peak bullshit.
Just because you believe the hype, it doesn't mean there's a milder use case for your application.
Unfortunately LLM do have one profitable application: generating spam and astroturfing
"According to this chart we made up without any explanation, blockchain and nfts and metaverse are going to be pretty useful tools in the future. Just because they were trendy once."
Excuse me the Segway never came back up
The tech itself though is still used in hoverboards, robots and some other self balancing micro mobility devices.
Just to point but...
Nothing is stopping that first billionaire to run to their climate bunker right now. It's currently way better than it will be during the disaster.
And making people dumber is an almost certain way to make them more violent too.
The odds are good some of them are thinking exactly like you pointed. But that would be because they are dumb.
Violent but not united against them.
We can dig up a bunker right now.
They're all some mixture of stupid and insane.