AI is here to stay but I can’t wait to see it get past the point where every app has to have their own AI shoehorned in regardless of what the app is. Sick of it.
I think they’ll be on this for a while, since unlike NFTs this is actually useful tech. (Though not in every field yet, certainly.)
There are going to be some sub-fads related to GPUs and AI that the tech industry will jump on next. All this is speculation:
- Floating point operations will be replaced by highly-quantized integer math, which is much faster and more efficient, and almost as accurate. There will be some buzzword like “quantization” that will be thrown out to the general public. Recall “blast processing” for the Sega. It will be the downfall of NVIDIA, and for a few months the reduced power consumption will cause AI companies to clamor over being green.
- (The marketing of) personal AI assistants (to help with everyday tasks, rather than just queries and media generation) will become huge; this scenario predicts 2026 or so.
- You can bet that tech will find ways to deprive us of ownership over our devices and software; hard drives will get smaller to force users to use the cloud more. (This will have another buzzword.)
I genuinely find LLMs to be helpful with a wide variety of tasks. I have never once found an NFT to be useful.
Here’s a random little example: I took a photo of my bookcase, with about 200 books on it, and had my LLM make a spreadsheet of all the books with their title, author, date of publication, cover art image, and estimated price. I then used this spreadsheet to mass upload them to Facebook Marketplace in bulk. In about 20 minutes I had over 200 facebook ads posted for every one of my books; I only had to do a quick review of the spreadsheet to fix any glaring issues. I also had it use some marketing psychology to write attractive descriptions for the ads.
In this thread: people doing the exact opposite of what they do seemingly everywhere else and ignoring the title to respond to the post.
Figuring out what the next big thing will be is obviously hard or investing would be so easy as to be cheap.
I feel like a lot of what has been exploding has been ideas someone had a long time ago that are just becoming easier and given more PR. 3D printing was invented in the '80s but had to wait for computation and cost reduction. The idea that would become neural network for AI is from the '50s, and was toyed with repeatedly over the years but ultimately the big breakthrough was just that computing became cheap enough to run massive server farms. AR stems back to the 60s and gets trotted out slightly better each generation or so, but it was just tech getting smaller that made it more viable. What other theoretical ideas from the last century could now be done for a much lower price?
I’m waiting for the cheap graphic cards
I remember trying to investigate using crypto as a replacement for international bank transfers. The gas fees were much larger than the greatly inflated fee my bank was charging. Another time, I used crypto to donate to a hacker I liked the work of. I realized the crypto transfer was actually more traceable when accounting for know your customer laws and the public ledger. That was when I realized crypto was truly useless. AI is mildly useful when coding, to point me to packages I wouldn’t have heard of, provide straightforward examples. That’s the only time I use it. The tech industry and investor class are desperate for it to be the next world-changing thing which is leading them to slap it on everything. That will eventually wear off.
The AI hype will pass but AI is here to stay. Current models already allow us to automate processes which were impossible to automate just a few years ago. Here are some examples:
- Detecting anomalies in roentgen and CT-scans
- Normalizing unstructured information
- Information distribution in organizations
- Learning platforms
- Stock photos
- Modelling
- Animation
Note, these are obvious applications.
AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.
That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.
What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.
Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they ‘think’ like us.
Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.
Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.
What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.
Guesses at next tech bro stuff (some already in the wild) unfortunately, we’re not done with AI yet
AI Teachers and Tutors
Full AI video commercials.
3D AI experiences in VR.
AI medical diagnosis for both consumer and insurance
AI pricing for insurance
AI shopping assistants, clothes, styling, decorating
AI mid-level management to rat out on people not working 60hrs a week.
Fascism. Apparently.
You know what pisses me off?
My so-called creative peers generating AI slop images to go with the music that they are producing.
I’m pretty sure they’d be up in arms if they found out that an AI produced tune got to the top 10 on Beatport.
One of the more popular AI movements right now is DJs creating themselves as action figures.
The hypocrisy is hilarious.
AND the huge AR/metaverse wave!
OP here to clarify: With AI Hype Train I meant the fact that so many people are slapping AI onto anything just to make it sound cool like at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if a bidet company slapped AI into one of their bidets…
I’m not saying AI is gonna go anywhere or doesn’t have legitimate uses but currently there is money in AI and everybody wants to get AI into their things to be cool & capitalize on the hype:
Same thing with NFT’s and blockchains. The technology behind it has it’s legitimate uses but not everyone is slapping it onto things like a few years ago just to make fast bank.
AI, in some form, is here to stay, but the bubble of tech companies shoving it into everything will pop at some point. As for what that would look like, it would probably be like the dot-com bubble.
NFT was the worst “tech” crap I have ever even heard about, like pure 100% total full scam. Kind of impressed that anyone could be so stupid they’d fall for it.
The whole NFT/crypto currency thing is so incredibly frustrating. Like, being able to verify that a given file is unique could be very useful. Instead, we simply used the technology for scamming people.
I don’t think NFTs can do that either. Collections are copied to another contract address all the time. There isn’t a way to verify if there isn’t another copy of an NFT on the blockchain.
I didn’t know this and it’s absolutely hilarious. Literally totally undermines the use of Blockchain to begin with.
No, it doesn’t, it just means that Non-Fungible Tokens are…
Fungible…
So, they’re FNFT? Or just T?
wouldn’t it be just FTs?
NFTs if anything are basically CryptoCurrency-based DRMs & we should always oppose DRMs
Good, now read it
NFTs are a row in a database.
They are not, in any way, DRM.
Copying the info on another contract doesn’t mean it’s fungible, to verify ownership you would need the NFT and to check that it’s associated to the right contract.
Let’s say digital game ownership was confirmed via NFT, the launcher wouldn’t recognize the “same” NFT if it wasn’t linked to the right contract.
But you would need a centralized authority to say which one is the “right contract”. If a centralized authority is necessary in this case, then there is less benefit of using NFTs. It’s no longer a decentralized.
Yes and no, with the whole blockchain being public it’s pretty easy to figure out which contract is the original one.
Lets say you don’t have a central authority declaring one is official. How would you search the entire blockchain to verify you have the original NFT?
The NFT is useful with a central authority though, it’s used to confirm the ownership of digital goods ex: if it’s associated to digital games then the distributor knows which contract is the original since they created it in the first place…
Sure for bored apes pictures you copy the code and you go on a random websites and it can tell you the result of the mix of features based on the code, but on the original website it wouldn’t work.
There isn’t a way to verify if there isn’t another copy of an NFT on the blockchain.
Incorrect. An NFT is tied to a particular token number at a particular address.
The URI the NFT points to may not be unique but NFT is unique.
The NFT is only unique within the contract address. The whole contract can be trivially copied to another contract address and the whole collection can be cloned. It’s why opensea has checkmarks for “verified” collections. There are a unofficial BoredApe collections which are copies of the original one.
Yes, the URI can point to the same monkey jpg. But a different contract address means it is a different NFT.
Completely agree, but the guy I responding to thinks the monkey jpeg is unique across the whole blockchain, when that isn’t true. The monkey jpeg can be copied. There’s no uniqueness enforced in a blockchain.
The key point is that the jpeg is not the NFT
It’s crazy that people could see NFTs were a scam but can’t see the same concept in virtual coins.
I’m not defending other cryptocoins or anything, they might be a ponzy scheme or some other form. But in the end they at least only pretended to be that, a valuta. Which they are, even though they aren’t really used much like that. NFT’s on the otherhand promised things that were always just pure technical bullshit. And you had to be a complete idiot not to see it. So call it a double scam.
A large majority of “real” money is digital, like 80% non-m1 m2. The only real difference between crypto and USD is that the crypto is a public multiple ledger system that allows you to be your own bank.
I’ve heard the sales pitch, it’s a ponzi scheme with receipts. An open pyramid, so to speak. At best a volatile store of wealth.
You’re not sold on the concept of money? I guess that fits right in on Lemmy.
Potentially volatile right, since who knows if/when various stablecoins might depeg
So is fiat.
What do you mean with being your own bank? Can you receive deposits from customers? Are you allowed to lend a portion of the deposists onwards for business loans/mortgages? If not, you are not your “own bank”.
I think you mean that you can use it as a deposit for money, similar to, say, an old sock.
Banks have multiple ledgers to keep track of who owns what and where it all came from. They also use ancient fortran/cobol written IBM owned software to manage all bank to bank transactions, which is the barrier for entry.
Blockchain is literally a multiple ledger system. That is all it is. The protocol to send and recieve funds is open for all.
Locally stored BTC is when you’re the bank. For all the good and bad that comes with it.
That sounds super cool and stuff, but it has nothing to do with the essence of banking. Banks are businesses that take deposits for safekeeping and that provide credit. Banks in fact outdate Fortran by a 1000 years or so.
Oh, my apologies for not taking note of your 0.18% savings account interest rate.
Because the pyramid scheme is still going strong with them, exactly because new victims are continually falling for them. NFTs lost their hype so quickly that the flow of new victims basically completely stopped, and so the bottom went out of them much faster.
It’s crazy that people see crypto as a scam but can’t see the same concept in fiat currencies.
Governments don’t accept cryptocurrencies for taxes. They’re not real currencies.
They don’t usually accept other nation’s currencies in general.
No, but for every real currency it’s accepted (and required) to pay taxes somewhere.
“Real currency” also gets created or destroyed by a government at whims. Anybody clutching their USD rn isn’t going to benefit in the long run.
because there are some buisness that accept some crypto, mostly grey or black market ones, but respectable companies none the less.
I think a big part of the problem with NFT is that they are so abstract people don’t understand what they can and cannot do. Effectively, with NFT, you have people that hold a copy of a Spiderman comic in hand and believe they own all forms of spiderman.
Essentially, when you boil it down, you can turn this into “it’s provable that individual X has possession of NFT identifier x,y,z”. It’s kind of like how you can have the deed to a piece of property in your desk, but that doesn’t prevent 15 people from squatting on it.
It’s so abstract you can use it to fleece people. Even after 2 years of hype, people STILL do not understand them properly.
Essentially, when you boil it down, you can turn this into “it’s provable that individual X has possession of NFT identifier x,y,z”. It’s kind of like how you can have the deed to a piece of property in your desk, but that doesn’t prevent 15 people from squatting on it.
It isn’t even that. It’s is identifying which drawer in your desk the deed is placed, but there is no guarantee that the drawer contains the deed.
Now imagine trying to explain all this to the unwashed masses… it’s no wonder the explanation they got was “buy this, it’s going to the mooooon!!!”
But it’s totally legit brah, it’s just like trading cards but on a computer bro, you can make jay pegs totally unique bro, nobody else in the world can have the same image as you brah, it proves you’re the only owner of it bro, trust me bro it’s super secure and technological bruh
You don’t need an NFT to see that a file is unique. All that requires is a hash function. Many download sites provide signed cryptographic hashes so that you know that the file you’ve downloaded is the one that they released. None of that requires blockchains or crypto.
We got to use the word fungible a lot though, so that was cool
But it has no relation to fungi, which is not cool
You know, I’m something of a fun guy, myself.
I always liked the response “go funge yourself.”
You know what? Fuck you!
Funges all your tokens
NFTs could have been great, if they had been used FOR the consumer, and not to scam them.
Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you’re done.
Do this with serious stuff like AAA Games or Professional Software (think like borrowing a copy of Photoshop from an online library for a few days while you work on a project!) instead of monkey pictures and you could have the best of both worlds for buying physical vs buying online.
However, that might make corporations less money and completely upend modern licencing models, so no one was willing to do it.
I think there’s a technical hurdle here. There’s no reliable way to enforce unique access to an NFT. Anyone with access to the wallet’s private key (or seed phrase) can use the NFT, meaning two or more people could easily share a game or software license just by sharing credentials. That kind of undermines the licensing control in a system like this.
two or more people could easily share a game or software license just by sharing credentials
So like disks? Before everything started checking hwids. Just like the comment said, it would make corporations less money so they wouldn’t do it.
Well, that’s the point. In order for that system to work as described, you would need some kind of centralized authority to validate and enforce it. Once you’ve introduced that piece, there’s no point using NFTs anymore - you can just use any kind of simpler and more efficient key/authentication mechanism.
So even if the corporations wanted to use such a system (which, to your point, they do not), it still wouldn’t make sense to use NFTs for it.
Blockchain with a central authority.
Yeah IDK…
Exactly. That’s why it’s so pointless.
I mean, the same goes for a login. People share Steam accounts too.
It’s easier to share on a blockchain. I can send the license to a new wallet then have the wallet sign a smart contract which could automatically drain it of any gas if anyone adds it.
Now I can give out the secret pass phrase and lots of people can play the game without having to give anyone my login credentials.
There is nothing you mentioned which couldn’t already be done, and is in fact already being done, faster and more reliably by existing technology.
Also that was not even what NFTs was about, because you didn’t even buy the digital artwork and NFTs would never be able to include it. So it would be supremely useless for the thing you are talking about.
Existing solutions are always centralized.
The issue is this doesn’t solve a problem that isn’t already solved. One of the big arguments I always heard was an example using skins from games that can be transfered to other games. We can already do that! Just look at the Steam marketplace for an example. You just need the server infrastructure to do it. Sure, NFTs could make it so the company doesn’t control the market, but what benefit do they get for using NFTs and distributing the software then?
99.9% of the use cases were solutions looking for a problem. I could see a use for something like deeds or other documents, but that’s about it.
Yeah, Sort of.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of NFTs and do think there’s easier ways, but I would agree that taking market control away from the companies owning it would kind of be the point (but I do think you can probably still do this concept without any NFTs).
Sure, steam could allow game trading right now with no need for NFTs whatsoever, but the point would be that I can trade a game I bought through Xbox, to someone on Steam, and then go buy something on the Epic store with the money.
And all of it without some crazy fee from the involved platforms.
But that also would probably still require government intervention to force companies to accept this. Because, again, none of the companies would actually want this. NTF or not that doesn’t change.
Yeah, it only works if they agree to honor it, which they have no obligation to do. If the government wants to step in and force them to, there’s still no need for NFTs. There could just be a central authority that the government controls that handles it. Why would NFTs need to be involved? NFTs are only as useful as the weakest point in the chain. As soon as whatever authority (the government, Steam, whatever) stops working or stops honoring it then it’s useless.
Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you’re done.
You could do that today without NFTs or anything blockchainish if the game companies wanted it. The hurdle isn’t technological, it’s monetary. There’s no reason that a game company would want to allow you to resell your game.
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If said Photoshop had a nft licensing service, it could’ve stayed online for longer. Legit old versions of Adobe software that had one-time purchase licenses can’t be activated anymore due to servers being brought down. And that’s how they want it while pushing subscriptions for 10+ years.
The exact same thing would have happened with an NFT licensing service. They would still link to obsolete servers. The problem is not a problem which NFT would solve, the problem is the problem of obsolete servers, which are very easy for adobe to fix without any useless NFT technology, if they really wanted to (but of course they don’t)
Trying to find any application for NFT, I came to the conclusion that it would work IF you and me could be the servers there, having a copy of blockchain and verifying validity of keys until we get bored and quit that. It would target one particular issue - cantralized validation on Adobe side. It’d be inefficient and all, but it may deny them some power over usage of their legitly purchased product.
Sure, but what do they get for using that system and giving up control? If they don’t agree to use it then it’s an illegal copy and you might as well pirate it.
I know people TODAY that collect limited release, hard to get into, exclusive NFTs. The grift is still grifting, but it’s hidden in the corners of the Internet.
Non-technical people believing in magic that can make them rich.
The technology is not a scam. The tech was used to make scam products.
NFTs can be useful as tickets, vouchers, certificates of authenticity, proof of ownership of something that is actually real (not a jpeg), etc.
But where specifically does it help to not have approved central servers?
Wouldn’t entertainment venues rather retain full control? How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly? If the government can just seize property, then why would we ask anyone else who owns a plot of land?
Wouldn’t entertainment venues rather retain full control?
Pretty sure ticketmaster has all the control.
How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly?
Using a decentralized and open network (aka NFTs).
If the government can just seize property, then why would we ask anyone else who owns a plot of land?
It’s not about using NFTs to seize land. It’s more that governments are terrible at keeping records. Moving proof of ownership to an open and decentralized network could be an improvement.
FWIW I think capitalism with destroy the planet with or without NFTs. But it’s fairly obtuse to deny that NFTs could disintermediate a variety of centralized cartels.
How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly?
Using a decentralized and open network (aka NFTs).
Sorry to be obtuse, but could you break this down some more? How does the replacement being decentralized and open help against TM’s anti-competitive practices?
NFT’s are a scam. Blockchain less so but still has no use.
NFTs were nothing but an URL saved in a decentralized database, linking to a centralized server.
That implementation of NFTs was a total scam, yes. There are some cool potential applications for NFTs … but mostly it was a solution looking for a problem. Even situations where it could be useful - like tracking ownership of things like concert tickets - weren’t going to fly, because the companies don’t want to relinquish control of the second-hand marketplace. They don’t get their cut that way.
