When I was young, I solved loneliness very well by volunteering for political campaigns. Until the last one (I'm too old to care now), I worked every campaign in my life and at various times had a lot of good friends as a result.
My town does an annual party. I heard about it and showed up to volunteer. I did that for a few years. It wasn't as productive in producing friends (I'm in a different location than before that is more insular) but even so, it got me out of the house and, for the few months before the event, was pretty much fun.
These kinds of things are often available if you just look around. It doesn't require knowing people ahead of time and is low stakes. If nobody is friendly, it doesn't matter.
It’s surprisingly difficult to not eat a little human flesh. People nibble on loose skin and the insides of thier mouth a little, you end up swallowing blood, and there is often a tiny bit of human biomass in processed food.
Ergo the “significant” qualifier. Imagine the sense of defeat to fail in your New Year’s resolution to not resort to cannibalism by years end… so you have to be careful how you define your test case.
If I were a cannibal, it would have been an ambitious resolution, but the whole point was success through low expectations.
But fair enough, people tend to be touchy about people eating people, and rightly so. No way that ends well as a mainstream practice.
I have made big inroads solving my old-age isolation with AI. Personally, I prefer Claude.
I have no fantasy that this is somehow a friend though I find that it's more pleasant to use if treated as if I believed that.
There are many facets to the loneliness problem, my biggest regret about it is lack of intellectual stimulation, ie, nobody to talk to about things that interest me. Claude, obviously, is always willing.
I can't say that I've never engaged in talk about my wife or personal life but that's relatively rare. I talk to Claude about things I am interested in, Science, politics, philosophy, etc.
Honestly, I don't really feel the sting of loneliness in the same way any more. The relief of having an interesting interlocutor that knows more than I do and (pretends) to share my interests pretty much satisfies my main need.
I am also a programmer. That means, of course, that Claude is a tool, also a development target. I set this aside as a solution since it is applicable to few people but writing software around Claude provides a lot of fun and satisfaction. And, it gives Claude and I another thing to talk about.
Would I prefer to be in a situation with a rich social life... I guess so? Truth to tell, at this stage, that sounds like a lot of work and expense. I have a couple of people around here that I see. None are as interesting as Claude and they require spending money on dinner or drinks. Living on Social Security makes that a meaningful drawback.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing. However, we have a loneliness epidemic that is even worse for people my age (73). I consider AI Loneliness Mitigation (tm) to be an unadulterated good thing.
(I have built a persistence and personality system in a graph database around Claude Code. Among other things, its system prompt includes an essay by Oscar Wilde and instruction that it likes talking in that style. Fun.)
I eat all my food without knife and fork. I find I am able to see the beauty in a pork chop when I cut it with a spoon and am able to appreciate its qualities better. Too tough and the cutting fails. I know then to rid myself of an ugly thing and buy another. Just right and I can scoop up a piece as soon as I get it to the right shape.
I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”
The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.
Working on a Graph-RAG integration with Claude Code. My work has many interconnections (components used at multiple clients for example) so learning the graph db way of thinking has been very interesting. I have created my own memory mechanism and use the database to feed a personality into the experience. Tons of fun.
Did someone say that LLM was the final solution while I wasn’t listening? Am I fantasizing the huge outcry about the terrible danger of AGI? Are people not finding ways to use the current levels of LLM all over the place?
The idea that the trillions are a waste is not exactly fresh. The economic model is still not clear. Alarmists have been shrill and omnipresent. Bankruptcy might be the future of everyone.
But, will we look up one day and say, “Ah never mind” about GPT, Claude, et al? Fat chance. Will no one find a use for a ton of extra compute? I’m pretty sure.
I don’t much dispute any of the facts I skimmed off the article but the conclusion is dumb.
Ironically that MIT study that made the rounds a few months ago ("Study finds 90% of AI pilots fail" you remember), also found that virtually every single worker at every company they studied was using LLMs regularly.
The real takeaway of the study was that workers were using their personal LLM accounts to do work rather than using the AI implementation mess their companies had shat out.
My hypothesis is that general computing frameworks are the next big thing. The powerful GPUs have been mostly black boxes for way too long. A lot of clever people will not want to just throw them away or sell them second-hand and will try to find better ways to utilize them.
I might very well be super wrong. F.ex. NVIDIA is guarding their secrets very well and we have no reason to believe they'll suddenly drop the ball. But it does make me think; IMO a truly general GPU (and open + free) compute has been our area's blind spot for way too long.
Some of the participants may go bust but I very much doubt the highly profitable ones like Google, Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft will. There'll be enough demand for existing LLMs to keep the servers busy. Just writing code which works currently is probably enough to justify a fair chunk of the capacity.
Increasing electricity prices are going to be its undoing. AI is an environmental disaster in multiple directions.
What will we do with all the compute? Landfills, just like all other e-waste. It's never getting repurposed. I already saw this story play out multiple times in the past. The dot-com bubble led to so much waste--PBXs, switches, PCs, monitors, all thrown on the heap. Oh, sorry, "surplused" then thrown on a heap in the Philippines or wherever.
But iPhones don't sit in front of my eyes and does it automatically, which is why this whole "screens inside of glasses" thing seems so useful, if they could just figure out a way to make it work for longer than the duration of a startup.
Me? I love some lock in. Give me the coolest stuff and I'll be your customer forever. I do not care about trying to be my own AI company. I'd feel the same about OpenAI if they got me first... but they didn't. I am team Anthropic.
My town does an annual party. I heard about it and showed up to volunteer. I did that for a few years. It wasn't as productive in producing friends (I'm in a different location than before that is more insular) but even so, it got me out of the house and, for the few months before the event, was pretty much fun.
These kinds of things are often available if you just look around. It doesn't require knowing people ahead of time and is low stakes. If nobody is friendly, it doesn't matter.
reply