Which case is 100% FOSS and which one is a proprietary obfuscationware? Which case has been heared by you just because it is good and which case has been heared by you just because some adware? Which case is from human to human and which one is from alien for hunter (or from hunters for aliens)? Which case has been made to make the humanship rich and which one has been made to make the maker rich?
Sad you can even compare one of our culture's cornerstones and one of the last sources of freedom with something harmful on multiple levels made with manufacturing user's (used's?) consent to be your supervisor. I have nothing to say for those who are OK with their watchers in their panopticum.
There is nothing inherently bad about LLMs, and there is nothing inherently good about blockchains. What matters is how the technology ends up being used. I thought it would be obvious to someone who loves one of these modern technologies enough as to think that it's a "cultural cornerstone" (what, like music or something?). There are local, non-megacorp LLMs, ones that are put to niche, but acceptable uses, just like there are blockchains that are created solely for hosting useless cryptocurrencies whose sole purpose is shuffling around money and hosting a pump-and-dump.
What the parent comment is ridiculing isn't the "best case use scenarios" that proponents see with sparkles in their eyes. It's the myopic focus of the tech industry on the big new thing, and the insane obsession with stuffing the big new thing into absolutely everything. It doesn't even matter if you use the big new thing, you just need to seem relevant enough to it for investors to start buying in. If today we're getting "AI-powered" vacuum cleaners, 8 years ago you'd have a blockchain-powered vacuum cleaner. (Maybe to a lesser extent, because the hype on that never reached the heights that AI is reaching today - but the point is clear either way).
There are some inherently good things, the best possible example is Lisp. It is not even matter how it is being used.
Cultural cornerstone is not just like music, it is like Mathematics or like sedentary way of life. They change too many in too many crucial ways. Bitcoin changes how we get forbiddensies therefore it changes how people are waging trade, how tsars are waging war, inevitably it interfere with government's aggressive coertion and eventually it is the only real anti-fascist technology existing.
Your vacuum cleaner example is ignorant, blockchain is humanity's last way to resist censourship. Bittorrent, the main part of Blockchain, exists a quorter of the century and this is the only technology which makes a PITA to any counter-freedom actors. Where the hell vacuum cleaners involved in the anti-censourship research?
Local LLM is not a thing yet, they are too niche, something as poweruful as "AI" solutions which are enough good to put into UAV for the sake of make it hunting people with no pilot - but existing realization which your mom uses regularly are coming from megacorps.
> Your vacuum cleaner example is ignorant, blockchain is humanity's last way to resist censorship.
You're missing the same point. I was pointing out that the conversation was about hype, not best-case scenarios. The point is that if the tech industry latches onto some new thing, it will be shoved into absolutely everything regardless of its relevance or usefulness to a particular problem. For every open-source project that's driven by smart, passionate developers with a clear goal in mind, you will have ten vacuum cleaners. The new thing that is the object of the hype doesn't matter in this context. That's why they called AI the "new blockchain" - it's not an assessment of how good or bad one is against the other, it's pointing out that both have attained the status of a VC buzzword after being popularized enough.
Local LLMs are actually pretty good, and I've used some in the past when I was more interested in them. Certainly there's a gap between them and the hyper-centralized corporate offerings that can afford to throw endless free compute at you just to retain you as a customer, but it's not like they are inadequate or something. Once the hype dies down, local will probably be the choice of any sane, security-conscious company and open-source devs.
I don't like the conception of buzzwords to be honest. I understood all what you have said from the beginning but I do not see how using the buzzword word enriches the conversation. It is seems for me that the "buzzword" word has some characteristics of the buzzword conception. Why using buzzwords, why not using some real words?
The worst in the buzzword conception is that it leads to using good things as the buzzwords because the bad things get forgotten quickly. Before blockchain the popular buzzword was "webvan" but there are too few people who rememberes what the webvan was for really using this word as a meme.
Using the blockchain word as a synonym for buzzword word is like using a good word meaning some good thing for describing some bad concept and it makes me crazy. Name it the "new webvan" for adding some flavor of failure, or the "new iphone" for adding some flavor of popularity. What flavor do you add by using my favorite technology as an example?
