Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Posted Jul 24, 2024 8:41 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)In reply to: Consider the web in 1994 by atnot
Parent article: Imitation, not artificial, intelligence
it isn't useless, people are using AI right now
in addition to the example of my son, my wife works in travel and uses AI to prep text and imagery for promotional campaigns. She is making money from it. Without AI, she would have to hire a photographer, graphics designer, writer, etc...there isn't enough money in what she does to pay all those people so the campaigns just wouldn't happen.
she isn't getting obsessed with some internal dialog about the innate "intelligence" or lack thereof in these tools, she is just turning them into revenue
Posted Jul 24, 2024 8:53 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (19 responses)
And then she'll make a Virgin Trains-style blunder (Virgin is a very big brand name in the UK) who used a castle in Kent to advertise a city in Yorkshire (imagine some PR agency using a famous New York attraction to advertise Florida - it was that big a cock-up).
Cheers,
Posted Jul 25, 2024 10:36 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (18 responses)
Does it matter, in the end, if people are buying it? Currently AI and LLMs are very bad at doing things where quality of the result matters, but it's surprising how many things where it doesn't matter all that much are happening in today's economy. One may ask whether all that activity is even needed at all, but as long as it's profitable… AI have a niche.
Posted Jul 25, 2024 11:21 UTC (Thu)
by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2024 11:41 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (16 responses)
Why should content be any different from many other things? If you compare modern knife or modern table to knife or table made 200 or 300 years ago then modern one loses on most fronts. But it could be about 10 or 100 times cheaper, which justifies all these defects. Why should industries that are creating content treated any differently? P.S. And, similarly to knives and tables, we have the “foundation layers” that are, unquestionably, better then what we had before. Steel and raw wood, today, are much better than what masters had 200 or 300 years before. That's how even low-quality knives or tables are still usable today. And ad networks are much better at delivering ads than newspapers of 200 or 300 years before — and that's how even low-quality ads work.
Posted Jul 25, 2024 16:03 UTC (Thu)
by JGR (subscriber, #93631)
[Link] (15 responses)
> If you compare modern knife or modern table to knife or table made 200 or 300 years ago then modern one loses on most fronts. But it could be about 10 or 100 times cheaper, which justifies all these defects.
This seems like survivorship bias? The poor quality knives, tables and so on of 200 - 300 years are unlikely to have survived or been worth preserving long enough to be compared to today's poor quality offerings.
Posted Jul 25, 2024 16:50 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (14 responses)
Sure, that bias also exist, but the fact is: if you would apply modern technologies to materials available 200-300 years ago then such knife or table would just crumble before you may even use it! We actually know these technologies that were used to make them usable with poor materials, we just don't use them, because they are expensive.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 12:18 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (13 responses)
Yes, if you look carefully, you can still find furniture makers who make things the older ways. And you'll pay a _tonne_ of money today for that. But 100+ years ago, that was just the /normal/ way stuff got made. That was just _ordinary_ furniture. In another 100 years, the modern bolted together stuff will be gone - the high tension in the bolts need with the large flat mating surfaces will have caused degradation that made them wobbly or flimsy, even with strong wood, and they'll have been thrown out. Fibreboard stuff definitely will be gone.
My great-granddad's stuff will still be here, barring woodworm.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 12:22 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
Today, it's a big flat contact area onto another, and just relying on a strong metal bolt to tension them together. Combined with a softer wood - pine.
And why, cause the latter is easy for a machine to cut, and takes a human a minute to bolt together. Whereas the former requires skill and time - and we don't want to pay for skilled labour. Cause that doesn't make money for large corporations.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 12:45 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
More importantly: it made it possible to use less-precisely cut pieces of wood. Human-made. Machines may cut wood much more precisely, but it's easier to make them cut large flat surfaces, rather than more complicated pieces used before. That also helps and, again, it's much harder to create something very precisely uniform from soft wood by hand. Thus to make the finishing part less expensive and produce less robust result we need much more stable and robust “foundational technology”. It's the same thing everywhere: ENIAC did 5000 operations per second and it's longest operational time between failures was 116 hours. That's about 3 billion operations. Not enough for any modern app to even reach the point where it would be ready to accept input from the user. Before we could start using “why write ten lines of code if we could plug framework with million lines of code and then only add one line on top of that mess” modern approach hardware designers had to design extremely robust hardware.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 12:47 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Jul 26, 2024 13:14 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Indigenous? Made in these developing countries locally? Hard to believe. All the indigenous furniture that I ever saw in developing countries were much more structurally sound and sophisticated, even if they were made from tufts of straw or gnarly pieces of wood. They have to made that way, if you would try to build something from these flimsy pieces using steel bolt and tension it would fall apart at the first attempt to use it! I assume the same only I know that these awful piles of Chineese-made plastic pieces haven't existed back then. They are very much also products of modern technology, just even cheaper and worse ones than what western people may afford. But these carefully crafted things made from straws and gnarly woods? They had to exist for centuries, for people that are making these usually are not advanced enough to invent something like this from scratch (and do that uniformly in different villages, to boot)!
Posted Jul 26, 2024 13:41 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
> Indigenous? Made in these developing countries locally? Hard to believe.
Locally made furniture, for local people - the economics are against crappy stuff. Get a bad reputation, you've lost your job, you go hungry. The incentive is to make things as GOOD as you can, for the cheapest materials and least time. But the sweet spot is not the crap spot. And if the customer can source it cheaply he'll make sure you have the best available materials.
Crap is only possible when market economics have destroyed the local craft industry, and all the brand names are competing to get to the bottom as fast as possible.
Cheers,
Posted Jul 26, 2024 13:52 UTC (Fri)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2024 14:57 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2024 13:56 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't doubt there was crap back then. For sure, people were also doing things like using old tea boxes for furniture. But the middle-class market for furniture, the quality between then and now, the difference is huge. My mother still has a lot of furniture from her mother (other side of the family), and I fully expect my children will have some of it. We bought a book case ourselves ten years ago. The best quality one - and best value *by far* - we found was from a second-hand shop. The book case looks to be circa 1930s / 1940s (by comparison to my gran's furniture of that era).
There's a cottage industry of second hand furniture from pre-WWII (60s latest) cause the quality and value of that furniture is far above what is made now.
And it stands to reason: How many people in the last 40 years became expert carpenters and furniture makers, compared to 100 years ago?
Posted Jul 26, 2024 20:59 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2024 12:54 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (3 responses)
There's also the matter of pricing and inflation. Inflation-adjusting prices suggests (assuming your great-grandfather is comparable to mine in working era) that £1 in your great-grandfather's day is equivalent to £100 today. If he charged £20 for a cabinet, then the equivalent day item should be expected to cost £2,000 - and yet you're probably comparing to mass-market items from places like Ikea that cost 1/10th of that.
And if you look into history, what you find is that the market for furniture back then was limited to the people who today are happy to pay a tonne of money for furniture - it was sufficiently expensive to buy anything that most people got by with far less than we have today.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 13:16 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Look no further than the word "cupboard". Today it refers to an enclosed cabinet with a door, but its origin is literally a "cup board", ie a flat piece of wood you store your cups on.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 14:01 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
The supply of expert labour has diminished to near 0, along with the demand for their well made furniture having been destroyed by cheap, hastily bolted together, (mostly fibreboard, a minority in pine, smaller amount again in better wood) stuff.
Posted Jul 26, 2024 20:07 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
But is it? Carpenters can be much more productive today with modern power tools, and even computer-controlled tools. Look at CNC routers, they are downright magic.
I commissioned several custom wooden products (fireplace holder and custom cabinets), I fully expect them to outlast the house. And the amount of money I paid for them is probably still less than 100 years ago.
On the other hand, there's another dimension: practicality. I grew up in a house where we had an actual solid oak wooden table and chairs. They got left behind when this house got demolished because they were completely impractical. It took several people to move the table, and the chairs were uncomfortable and also heavy. I _can_ buy solid oak wood chairs, but I much prefer IKEA chairs made of lightweight pine and birch tree. They won't last, but then they are so cheap, I can replace them without even thinking about it.
It's always about trade-offs.
Consider the web in 1994
Wol
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
> The poor quality knives, tables and so on of 200 - 300 years are unlikely to have survived or been worth preserving long enough to be compared to today's poor quality offerings.
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
> The old furniture had mating surfaces with many more angles, distributing loads over more surface area, in more directions.
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
> There exists a large amount of furniture today that are of far worse quality than the cheapest stuff you can buy in the west.
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Wol
I think we're getting pretty far afield here ... again. Can we try to keep the focus on Linux and free software, please?
Meanwhile, back in Linuxland
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Consider the web in 1994
Surviving old furniture and inflation
Surviving old furniture and inflation
Surviving old furniture and inflation
Surviving old furniture and inflation