According to Lemmy Users: Blockchain was a grift, AI is a grift, Quantum computing will be a future grift. So according to you what new and emergent technologies are not / will not be a grift?
There's quite a lot happening in 3d printing that is kind of life changing, and not getting any press coverage because no single obscenely wealthy person can use it to hype a pump and dump.
Weird specific stuff exists now, that never did before - like custom cases for weird sizes of batteries, and a pen-holder that looks exactly like the latest manga character to make a splash.
Yeah 3D printing has either allowed me to print out stuff that helps around the house that I don't necessarily want to spend money on (a basic flowerpot for example), or things that are obscenely overpriced that I can print at the fraction of the cost (a case for clarinet reeds, with some cases going for nearly 100$ for a basic plastic case with a space for a silica gel packet).
At first I picked up my printer thinking it would be useful for robotics and prototyping some cases for electronics projects. Turns out its playing a big role in me just not going out to buy stuff anymore.
There's all kinds of mechanical things that can be directly 3d printed, now - screws, and hinges and springs!
Someone invented a 3-way zipper that allows a structure to be rigid when zipped or flexible when unzipped. Supposedly we're going to get a bunch of cool new more convenient tents and field furniture with it, soon.
I got some parts for a very cheap keyboard that Logitech doesn't sell (for obvious reasons, it's Logitech lol). Just hit up a 3d webshop and they were delivered in less than a week.
Not to mention the high-end stuff that is being used for like, medical innovations.
+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes.
I mean we have two machines that together convert a basket of dirty laundry into clean clothes. And then by appeal to authority ("There's no law that says I have to fold my clean clothes."), voila! It's done.
Unacceptable. Pathetic. Is that the best humanity has to offer? Some brutish, crude machine that just agitates my clothes in soapy water? And a second machine that just blows hot air on it as it spins it?
No.
I should be able to put my dirty clothes in a receptacle, and say "Hey, Robot Overlord Google. Start clothes cleaning cycle" and when I return the clothes are separated, cleaned, and neatly folded. At a minimum. Really the clothes should also be put away in my dresser by the AI.
What if a robot came and gathered all your dirty clothes, made listings for them on craigslist (or whatever people use now), marked up above MSRP or whatever you paid (people will still buy them, even used, even at a higher price than new, if you include a note saying they were owned by a woman, whether they were or not), shipped them to the interested buyers, used the proceeds from those sales to purchase new, identical clothing to what you previously owned?
I'm sure at first I would love it because instead of having to purchase this robot it would be "free" to me.
But after everyone gets used to the clothes robots there would eventually be paid subscription tiers and the next time you open your drawers all your pants have DraftKings ads on the butt.
The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaceX, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human space exploration evolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. Grift
That's the thing. When you were browsing bitcoin subreddits during the "golden days" it was pretty bizzare to see people talking about how cool it is and thia is the future and all, and to make it viable, you have to use it, like you know... A currency. But then they also made fun of the guy who bought a pizza with his bitcoin. Haha what a loser, he bought. A pizza for 40k no now 100k dollars. We are all holding, right, no one is selling, right guys?? We're all in the same boat.
Motherfucker, it's so obvious that EVERYONE was treating it like a get rich quick scheme.
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I'm crazy! 😀
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it's on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn't want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
lol. That could end up being the one non-grift example, though.
There's going to be lots of grift claiming that something is somehow "better because quantum", as if how the thing was processed makes the outcomes artisanal. lol.
But defending against assholes who have access to a quantum computer is actually proving to be not too terribly expensive, so far. (Signal and Proton claim to be ready now, for example.)
But a big important open question is which kinda of assholes will have access to quantum computers, and what quality, and how soon.
I expect a slow stupid adotpion race between ignorance and laziness.
It's not unreasonably expensive to secure services against quantum computer attacks (so far), but until people understand it enough to want it, most vendors will probably ignore it.
So we will probably get something like HTTPS adoption, again - unreasonably slow due to lack of understanding or care about the risks, probably with a few infamous breach scenarios along the way to mark progress against.
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn't just for JPEGs it's used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain ledger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn't that the tech doesn't work or is a grift, it's getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale, environmental impact, and using it to kill little kids (anyone but jfc the kids killed wtf) is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like "can i hurt people with this? I totally can..."
None of them really, they were all novel technology ideas snd advancements that every company and their mom adopted because it became the next silicon valley investment money printer.
Blockchain started out as a decentralized network concept that's still useful today.
AI started out as a tensor statistical concept that's still useful today.
People say QC is a grift because every silicon valley giant has invested heavily into it because they want to be the first if it becomes viable. It's just what they do. They throw money into everything and if they get something successful, they pump it as much as they can before it dumps.
Even FOSS software isn't invulnerable. Half of AWS's SaaS platforms are just automated FOSS software running on their cloud infrastructure without so much as a hint of donation or development into the project itself. They just want money, they don't care how they get it.
Artificial Intelligence is also a research topic. But when snake oil merchants figured out that they could use the term to take lots of money from the hands of unsuspecting people, it became a grift. As such I believe the inclusion of quantum computing in the group is on point
I am not against any of the tech i listed, i think they all are neat and quite interesting to study and use.
you have probably not been around the forums to realise why i put it there, QC discussion these days are leaning towards the it's a grift/ it will never be viable territory. This is mostly in large part due to M$ and their claims. there is also some subtle fear mongering going on with the recent push towards quantam resistant encryption standards.
So i am not calling QC a grift, I am calling out that whenever it becomes viable for the companies that are researching it to rent their computers to consumers, people will start calling it the next grift.
I agree from the standpoint of research for research sake is still worth doing but anyone telling you that they have a working quantum computer that is just around the corner from working is most likely grifting.
Quantum computers are more secure but could also be used to break that security. That's why the major customers of quantum computers are banks and governments. It is not really for wide mass consumption. Although I heard quantum chips are better and more environmentally friendly but i am not a tech guy so i could be wrong on that or the quantum chip itself.
Not really, unless really stupid encryption was used. The best quantum can do is the log of a problem space. It can do log(N) if the problem space is N.
I mean it's definitely something that companies are trying to sell. Even if it's just marketing BS right now, they're using this to sell their LLM products.
Post quantum encryption algorithms are the ones that any serious company should use right now.
Because one of the algorithms that it's stated to be far more efficient on a quantum computer than a binary one are number factorization, which is the bases of many public private enceyption algorithms like RSA.
Right now it's not possible, but listen now decrypt later means that anything encrypted now might be decrypted in not so many years by a quantum computer.
They are not selling you a quantum computer, they are "selling" the algorithm you should be using if you don't want your communications to be easily decrypted when a quantum computer with a higher number of stable qbits hits production.
Those algorithms are, anyway, public and well know, like parabolic curve algorithm or lattices. You could implement them yourself, any company can do so.
So they're not using it as an advertising buzzword, it just happens to be a buzzword they're using while advertising their feature. I stand corrected! 😌
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Anything where a trustless system is important. The "largest users can rewrite history at will" is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
As I understand, it's normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn't be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It's not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it's not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it's never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are "rewritable," which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.'
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That's because it's not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It's actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it's final. There's no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It's just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
I wouldn’t say all “AI” was a grift. Machine learning is a useful tool, like a hammer, it’s just not a magic genie for everything. Always has been, always will be.
Same with blockchain, albeit in a much narrower niche. I do think it’s a terrible system for a widely-used currency, though.
Same with quantum computing. It’s a niche.
The pattern is that Tech Bros inflate something narrowly interesting into a “it’s going to ascend the human race if you give us enough money” FOMO thing.
…And, currently, the next target seems to be space travel.
Again, I emphasize. Very useful in certain niches, like science. Stupendously impractical outside of them.
I hate how "AI" is abused in many ways. But it is a huge help for me transitioning to Linux. It's such a time saver, plus I actually learn from it as I always ask what the commands are for and to explain them to me. Often I can then detect if it's right or wrong and then come up with better alternatives. I'm a bit ashamed to admit this honestly.
I've been playing with LLMS since 2022 or so, and the transition from being able to talk about them as something neat to the (well deserved) hate was... surreal.
I'd point to trying to use local or open weights models first, but other than that you shouldn't be ashamed of reasonable use.
Nah they're not inherently grifts; they're pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.
I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don't understand he technology and it's limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it's about selling shares and inflating share prices.
Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it's slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it's not a quiet revolution but it's also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.
We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we're in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
I really disagree about fusion. It will have nearly zero impact on the electricity and power market. It's dead on arrival economically. There's no way a fusion plant is going to be cheaper than a fission plant. And it's already far cheaper to provide base load power with solar and batteries than it is to do so via fission. And this is the state today. Imagine how cheap these will be when commercial fusion finally happens. Realistically, even for constant 24/7 power output, fusion will probably cost 3-5x what solar does. Fusion plants would have a smaller physical footprint, but no but no one really cares about that. There's no shortage of space to put panels.
Fusion will have a lot of utility in the very far future. As humanity ventures ever further outward, it will be invaluable for true deep space colonization. Fusion provides the power necessary to expand to the Outer Solar System and beyond. 500 years from now, fusion will be a really big deal to folks trying to make it out there. Fusion allows you to turn any random ice ball in the Kuiper belt into a colony capable of supporting millions. And it would probably be a necessary prerequisite for interstellar colonization.
But for anyone living closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, fusion will be of little use beyond perhaps niche isotope synthesis or as a neutron source.
The other two are are only "grifts" because capitalism has shoved them into things that have no business involving them and breeds opportunistic get rich quick mindsets around the technologies. So any time you hear them mentioned it's more than likely to be a grift. They are fine in certain niches and very stupid everywhere else, like every other technology.
people will say QC is a grift when it eventually becomes commercially viable
Specifically, QC will be a grift when the media tells us all it is now, finally, commercially viable.
Then it will remain a grift until it either dies off or reaches actual commercial vaibility.
No, I didn't say anything about AI. Who brought up AI? I'm pretty sure I didn't. Really? Nah. Doesn't sound like AI. Oh...yeah, I guess. Maybe it does.
There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.
Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
Would you like to have a big dick that put a horse to shame? Sign up for our premium gene argumentation stem treatment for monthly subscription of $67. Fine print: if you canceled, dick felt off.
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole's money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I'm open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I'm an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you're not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of """voluntary""" employment contracts? Then yes, you're hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I'm a bit surprised that you're reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it's bog standard socialist analysis. Like I'm not saying anything controversial there unless you're just not a socialist.
I'm hoping repairable tech is going to become more and more common. So far neither Framework nor Fairphone seem like grifters while some that came before didn't end up fulfilling their promises.
I think it is only partly dependant on the technology. Each of the listed technologies CAN have useful applications, but the current capitalist system is expecting unattainable growth so ot creates bubbles and in the bubbles there are grifters.
The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I'm going to assume you're just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
You're condescending so I don't trust your opinion and you're also the first person to ever say that to me. Also with nothing to back that take up, good job.
I didn't mean it to be condescending, you said you'd never seen it, so I said it. It was kind of a joking, cheeky way. I didn't mean it like you're stupid or incapable of understanding it. It was a failed attempt at a joke, and once I saw the down votes I realized the joke didn't land.
No I didn't back it up but that ship has sailed. I dont really care to prove to you my position now, I'd rather just apologize for how my comment came off.
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift.
Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it's a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they're implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too.
thats why I think there should be a fsf led effort to make some version of FOSS agentic AI(i know its just a marketing term).
I hate that the ability to just sit at the computer and go
Hey, can you go through the hundreds of images i have in my Downloads folder, and transfer the images in which i appear in the center to this directory, also make it so in the future any pdf with a specific header goes into this directory will M$ exclusive feature.
Yeah, if you can get over a knee-jerk hate of "ai" systems, it's pretty evident at least some of them are here to stay. So it is necessary for there to be fully free alternatives for those.
The assertion that lemmy users call Blockchain and AI a grift is not without evidence(just browse around on any thread related to the topic) people calling QC a grift is more nuanced and something I have picked up on, you could make the case when 'it happens' lemmites would call QC a grift.
I think we are in a key moment for change to happen at a big societal level. As others have said the problem isn't any of the technologies listed, it's how they are being exploited and the perception of them maligned by said exploitation.
Capitalism is a big part of this problem. As is the messy elastic way that human society implements change over time. tl;dr - some people will pull society forward, others pull it back a bit. That's the "elasticity" at a macro level.
For most of my life I've witnessed a gradual degradation, a reduction, entropy and resignation. Balance requires that we now leap forward again. I remain hopeful that a great correction is not just inevitable, it's coming in my lifetime.
(I'm leaving this up for transparency, but I totally misread the comment I responded to. Sorry! I have attacked a strawman, and fought valiantly against ghosts lol.)
You're several decades out of date with that opinion.
Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.
China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don't manufacture Apple devices in China because it's cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.
China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.
Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous...
I did put an asterisk there to be clear. As well china has had a history of not marketing it's products, like ai, as the future of everything. So by putting to and to together I am assuming that china will probably continue to do the same in the future.
I agree about block chain, but AI and quantum have real life practical purposes. The current models are not good but they will improve eventually.
For me, I would say that a grift is not a technology, but the housing market itself. There is no reason for the house prices and rent to go up to extortionate level. Some will say "oh but it's the market". Buddy, tell me what do you do and do you own a property and how much is it when you bought it and if you sell it now? I know of someone who was happy enough to get 100k profit from when he initially bought his house and sold it. But bidders kept asking for more until he profited 300k. He didn't say anything because that's how the bidding went. He admitted that the housing market is a scam essentially-- a grift.
I don't know about you guys but where I live, there is always a news of residents opposing the building of social housing nearby for whatever frivolous reasons. These are usually in affluent areas, which used to be middle or working class in which their very own houses were built by the government. But if social housing is built, it is in the middle of nowhere with no opportunities leading to ghost estates. The houses are left rotting but allowed to stand to artificially inflate the house prices. And the rich and middle class wonder why the working class are revolting. I mean, as a middle class, the middle class knows the problem but doesn't care because we benefit from economic privileges. We are repeating the gilded age.
Blockchain was an incredibly transparent grift. AI is a fascinating technology that's being used and abused by the worst people on the planet and will probably cause society as we know it to collapse. Quantum computers are a very niche, very specific tool that are super cool but get talked about weirdly by the media.
Virtual reality is neat and I think it hasn't really been used as a grift yet. I don't think we've really solved its UX nor explored all its possibilities. It seems like as a consumer device it will be a niche product, but the applications for companies and organizations are very untapped.
didn't meta and apple try turning VR into the 'Next big thing' very recently, i mean they got distracted with LLMs but they could always try again.
I still dont think blockchain; the tech itself is a grift, it does what it promised to do(not BTC, other coins that improved on it, BTC itself has turned into a big game of chicken), has uses beyond its initial purpose. Its just that the tech attracted grifters like flies, and their actions were transparent(yet people still fell for it)
There's quite a lot happening in 3d printing that is kind of life changing, and not getting any press coverage because no single obscenely wealthy person can use it to hype a pump and dump.
Weird specific stuff exists now, that never did before - like custom cases for weird sizes of batteries, and a pen-holder that looks exactly like the latest manga character to make a splash.
Yeah 3D printing has either allowed me to print out stuff that helps around the house that I don't necessarily want to spend money on (a basic flowerpot for example), or things that are obscenely overpriced that I can print at the fraction of the cost (a case for clarinet reeds, with some cases going for nearly 100$ for a basic plastic case with a space for a silica gel packet).
At first I picked up my printer thinking it would be useful for robotics and prototyping some cases for electronics projects. Turns out its playing a big role in me just not going out to buy stuff anymore.
Do elaborate more on the 3D printing stuff
There's all kinds of mechanical things that can be directly 3d printed, now - screws, and hinges and springs!
Someone invented a 3-way zipper that allows a structure to be rigid when zipped or flexible when unzipped. Supposedly we're going to get a bunch of cool new more convenient tents and field furniture with it, soon.
I got some parts for a very cheap keyboard that Logitech doesn't sell (for obvious reasons, it's Logitech lol). Just hit up a 3d webshop and they were delivered in less than a week.
Not to mention the high-end stuff that is being used for like, medical innovations.
+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
I mean we have two machines that together convert a basket of dirty laundry into clean clothes. And then by appeal to authority ("There's no law that says I have to fold my clean clothes."), voila! It's done.
Unacceptable. Pathetic. Is that the best humanity has to offer? Some brutish, crude machine that just agitates my clothes in soapy water? And a second machine that just blows hot air on it as it spins it?
No.
I should be able to put my dirty clothes in a receptacle, and say "Hey,
Robot OverlordGoogle. Start clothes cleaning cycle" and when I return the clothes are separated, cleaned, and neatly folded. At a minimum. Really the clothes should also be put away in my dresser by the AI.What if a robot came and gathered all your dirty clothes, made listings for them on craigslist (or whatever people use now), marked up above MSRP or whatever you paid (people will still buy them, even used, even at a higher price than new, if you include a note saying they were owned by a woman, whether they were or not), shipped them to the interested buyers, used the proceeds from those sales to purchase new, identical clothing to what you previously owned?
I'm sure at first I would love it because instead of having to purchase this robot it would be "free" to me.
But after everyone gets used to the clothes robots there would eventually be paid subscription tiers and the next time you open your drawers all your pants have DraftKings ads on the butt.
what if you could bypass that with a draftkings tattoo directly on your butt?
The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaceX, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human
space explorationevolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. GriftAI is not a grift but it is very much a dangerous rudderless ship right now.
Quantum computing is also not a grift.
Hell I feel dirty saying this but you could argue blockchain is not a grift either.
The problem in all these things is the people not the technology.
That's the thing. When you were browsing bitcoin subreddits during the "golden days" it was pretty bizzare to see people talking about how cool it is and thia is the future and all, and to make it viable, you have to use it, like you know... A currency. But then they also made fun of the guy who bought a pizza with his bitcoin. Haha what a loser, he bought. A pizza for 40k no now 100k dollars. We are all holding, right, no one is selling, right guys?? We're all in the same boat.
Motherfucker, it's so obvious that EVERYONE was treating it like a get rich quick scheme.
It's worth remembering the hype cycle when it comes to these things.
The honest question is where are we with AI in its current state?
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I'm crazy! 😀
Stuff made open source/without a profit motive.
If there's a profit motive, it's not looking to solve a problem or make things better. It's looking to make profit.
capitalism
These technologies are not grifts.
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it's on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
The picture wasn’t even on the blockchain. It was a url which links to a picture of a cat sitting on someone else’s server
Was it even that or just a hash of the url (or whatever text/data was being "confirmed")?
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn't want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
Why do folks think quantum computing is a grift? I haven't heard that yet.
The technology itself isn't, but companies will probably abuse the word 'quantum' until it loses all meaning, like they have with AI.
Is your cloud Quantum Safe™?
lol. That could end up being the one non-grift example, though.
There's going to be lots of grift claiming that something is somehow "better because quantum", as if how the thing was processed makes the outcomes artisanal. lol.
But defending against assholes who have access to a quantum computer is actually proving to be not too terribly expensive, so far. (Signal and Proton claim to be ready now, for example.)
But a big important open question is which kinda of assholes will have access to quantum computers, and what quality, and how soon.
I expect a slow stupid adotpion race between ignorance and laziness.
It's not unreasonably expensive to secure services against quantum computer attacks (so far), but until people understand it enough to want it, most vendors will probably ignore it.
So we will probably get something like HTTPS adoption, again - unreasonably slow due to lack of understanding or care about the risks, probably with a few infamous breach scenarios along the way to mark progress against.
He’s from the future where we call it a grift
Yes. There's certainly plenty of possible future timelines where most quantum computers mainly sit in museums as curiousities.
There's lots of cool possibilities, but there's no guarantee that they'll be practical for wide scale use.
All technology from this point on will be a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
Seriously
I think Fire and Stick have a long future ahead of them still. Also a big fan of Wheel and Stardew Valley.
Uh...one of these is not like the others.
Are we sure
Wheelhas the long term practical staying power of the others in this list?It's not great in bogs and up hills I'll admit
The four great innovations
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn't just for JPEGs it's used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain ledger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn't that the tech doesn't work or is a grift, it's getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale, environmental impact, and using it to kill little kids (anyone but jfc the kids killed wtf) is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like "can i hurt people with this? I totally can..."
None of them really, they were all novel technology ideas snd advancements that every company and their mom adopted because it became the next silicon valley investment money printer.
Blockchain started out as a decentralized network concept that's still useful today.
AI started out as a tensor statistical concept that's still useful today.
People say QC is a grift because every silicon valley giant has invested heavily into it because they want to be the first if it becomes viable. It's just what they do. They throw money into everything and if they get something successful, they pump it as much as they can before it dumps.
Even FOSS software isn't invulnerable. Half of AWS's SaaS platforms are just automated FOSS software running on their cloud infrastructure without so much as a hint of donation or development into the project itself. They just want money, they don't care how they get it.
I don't see why put quantum computer in that group.
It's a scientific research topic. It is know what it does and what it doesn't do. And they are not selling you it's going to be the future.
It's just a developing technology which have potential to make some algorithms more efficient than binary computation.
They don't sell you quantum computation, they don't tell you to invest in it. It's just something being researched by computer scientists.
Let's not be that much anti-any-kind-of-progress, shall we?
Artificial Intelligence is also a research topic. But when snake oil merchants figured out that they could use the term to take lots of money from the hands of unsuspecting people, it became a grift. As such I believe the inclusion of quantum computing in the group is on point
I am not against any of the tech i listed, i think they all are neat and quite interesting to study and use.
you have probably not been around the forums to realise why i put it there, QC discussion these days are leaning towards the it's a grift/ it will never be viable territory. This is mostly in large part due to M$ and their claims. there is also some subtle fear mongering going on with the recent push towards quantam resistant encryption standards.
So i am not calling QC a grift, I am calling out that whenever it becomes viable for the companies that are researching it to rent their computers to consumers, people will start calling it the next grift.
Maybe you've mistaken criticisms of the MS claims for criticisms of quantum technology in general?
I agree from the standpoint of research for research sake is still worth doing but anyone telling you that they have a working quantum computer that is just around the corner from working is most likely grifting.
The actual data at this point.
Quantum computers are more secure but could also be used to break that security. That's why the major customers of quantum computers are banks and governments. It is not really for wide mass consumption. Although I heard quantum chips are better and more environmentally friendly but i am not a tech guy so i could be wrong on that or the quantum chip itself.
Not really, unless really stupid encryption was used. The best quantum can do is the log of a problem space. It can do log(N) if the problem space is N.
TIL RSA is a pretty stupid encryption algorithm.
I mean it's definitely something that companies are trying to sell. Even if it's just marketing BS right now, they're using this to sell their LLM products.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/majorana-2-microsoft-discovery-agentic-ai/
They are not selling that to end users or business.
That's a line of product for research purposes.
They sell that to people researching quantum computer.
How about Mullvad advertising quantum protection or whatever?
What?
Post quantum encryption algorithms are the ones that any serious company should use right now.
Because one of the algorithms that it's stated to be far more efficient on a quantum computer than a binary one are number factorization, which is the bases of many public private enceyption algorithms like RSA.
Right now it's not possible, but listen now decrypt later means that anything encrypted now might be decrypted in not so many years by a quantum computer.
They are not selling you a quantum computer, they are "selling" the algorithm you should be using if you don't want your communications to be easily decrypted when a quantum computer with a higher number of stable qbits hits production.
Those algorithms are, anyway, public and well know, like parabolic curve algorithm or lattices. You could implement them yourself, any company can do so.
So they're not using it as an advertising buzzword, it just happens to be a buzzword they're using while advertising their feature. I stand corrected! 😌
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Anything where a trustless system is important. The "largest users can rewrite history at will" is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
Well, you just don't know. In the real world there are private blockchains between equipotent participants that don't rely on burning the planet to function. Helpful reading: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/private-blockchain/
Blockchain is a concept, can't be owned or affected.
“You just don’t know” doesn’t answer my question. A private blockchain, by design, is already owned by its largest actors.
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
As I understand, it's normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn't be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It's not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it's not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it's never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are "rewritable," which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.'
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That's because it's not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It's actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it's final. There's no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It's just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
I wouldn’t say all “AI” was a grift. Machine learning is a useful tool, like a hammer, it’s just not a magic genie for everything. Always has been, always will be.
Same with blockchain, albeit in a much narrower niche. I do think it’s a terrible system for a widely-used currency, though.
Same with quantum computing. It’s a niche.
The pattern is that Tech Bros inflate something narrowly interesting into a “it’s going to ascend the human race if you give us enough money” FOMO thing.
…And, currently, the next target seems to be space travel.
Again, I emphasize. Very useful in certain niches, like science. Stupendously impractical outside of them.
I hate how "AI" is abused in many ways. But it is a huge help for me transitioning to Linux. It's such a time saver, plus I actually learn from it as I always ask what the commands are for and to explain them to me. Often I can then detect if it's right or wrong and then come up with better alternatives. I'm a bit ashamed to admit this honestly.
Yeah, the shame is weird.
I've been playing with LLMS since 2022 or so, and the transition from being able to talk about them as something neat to the (well deserved) hate was... surreal.
I'd point to trying to use local or open weights models first, but other than that you shouldn't be ashamed of reasonable use.
Nah they're not inherently grifts; they're pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.
I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don't understand he technology and it's limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it's about selling shares and inflating share prices.
Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it's slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it's not a quiet revolution but it's also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.
We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we're in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
I really disagree about fusion. It will have nearly zero impact on the electricity and power market. It's dead on arrival economically. There's no way a fusion plant is going to be cheaper than a fission plant. And it's already far cheaper to provide base load power with solar and batteries than it is to do so via fission. And this is the state today. Imagine how cheap these will be when commercial fusion finally happens. Realistically, even for constant 24/7 power output, fusion will probably cost 3-5x what solar does. Fusion plants would have a smaller physical footprint, but no but no one really cares about that. There's no shortage of space to put panels.
Fusion will have a lot of utility in the very far future. As humanity ventures ever further outward, it will be invaluable for true deep space colonization. Fusion provides the power necessary to expand to the Outer Solar System and beyond. 500 years from now, fusion will be a really big deal to folks trying to make it out there. Fusion allows you to turn any random ice ball in the Kuiper belt into a colony capable of supporting millions. And it would probably be a necessary prerequisite for interstellar colonization.
But for anyone living closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, fusion will be of little use beyond perhaps niche isotope synthesis or as a neutron source.
People say quantum computing is a grift?
The other two are are only "grifts" because capitalism has shoved them into things that have no business involving them and breeds opportunistic get rich quick mindsets around the technologies. So any time you hear them mentioned it's more than likely to be a grift. They are fine in certain niches and very stupid everywhere else, like every other technology.
people will say QC is a grift when it eventually becomes commercially viable(Just look at the second level comments here)
Specifically, QC will be a grift when the media tells us all it is now, finally, commercially viable.
Then it will remain a grift until it either dies off or reaches actual commercial vaibility.
No, I didn't say anything about AI. Who brought up AI? I'm pretty sure I didn't. Really? Nah. Doesn't sound like AI. Oh...yeah, I guess. Maybe it does.
Really without major social or political change all commercial technology will serve incumbent power.
The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.
Quantum non-fungible tokens won't be a grift. Trust me.
(Hopefully this obvious sarcasm is obvious.)
Gene therapy and stem cells.
There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.
Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
Would you like to have a big dick that put a horse to shame? Sign up for our premium gene argumentation stem treatment for monthly subscription of $67. Fine print: if you canceled, dick felt off.
Vibe.
My dick always feels off 😐 cocky want boingboing
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole's money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I'm open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I'm an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you're not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of """voluntary""" employment contracts? Then yes, you're hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I'm a bit surprised that you're reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it's bog standard socialist analysis. Like I'm not saying anything controversial there unless you're just not a socialist.
I'm hoping repairable tech is going to become more and more common. So far neither Framework nor Fairphone seem like grifters while some that came before didn't end up fulfilling their promises.
I think it is only partly dependant on the technology. Each of the listed technologies CAN have useful applications, but the current capitalist system is expecting unattainable growth so ot creates bubbles and in the bubbles there are grifters.
The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I'm going to assume you're just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
Hi, read the next sentence:
quantum computing is also a grift
Hi, read the next sentence:
You're condescending so I don't trust your opinion and you're also the first person to ever say that to me. Also with nothing to back that take up, good job.
I didn't mean it to be condescending, you said you'd never seen it, so I said it. It was kind of a joking, cheeky way. I didn't mean it like you're stupid or incapable of understanding it. It was a failed attempt at a joke, and once I saw the down votes I realized the joke didn't land.
No I didn't back it up but that ship has sailed. I dont really care to prove to you my position now, I'd rather just apologize for how my comment came off.
You know what? That's ok. I've flubbed jokes before. All is forgiven and better luck next time!
Thanks!
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift.
Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it's a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they're implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too.
I'd also like to see how the Hyppocratic License shapes software over time.
Would also love to see more developments in Farm Hack, Appropriate Technology, and Open Source Ecology.
thats why I think there should be a fsf led effort to make some version of FOSS agentic AI(i know its just a marketing term).
I hate that the ability to just sit at the computer and go
Hey, can you go through the hundreds of images i have in my Downloads folder, and transfer the images in which i appear in the center to this directory, also make it so in the future any pdf with a specific header goes into this directorywill M$ exclusive feature.Yeah, if you can get over a knee-jerk hate of "ai" systems, it's pretty evident at least some of them are here to stay. So it is necessary for there to be fully free alternatives for those.
Ping me when this becomes reality and let's check then if there are any FOSS alternatives.
Holy loaded question batman! Yeah I'm not gonna take this seriously with you just making these sweeping assertions with no evidence.
The assertion that lemmy users call Blockchain and AI a grift is not without evidence(just browse around on any thread related to the topic) people calling QC a grift is more nuanced and something I have picked up on, you could make the case when 'it happens' lemmites would call QC a grift.
they will all be enshittified so whats the point
uhm well how about anti-enshittification/corruption technology, wheres that
The technologies themselves aren’t grifts, but grifters are notoriously “first-adopters” of new technologies.
Surveillance capitalism is sadly not a grift, it works very well and makes billions of moneys worldwide.
Arch Linux
btw
This is the grift economy baby! Everything is a gotcha.
Fire.
Fire: bad!
A great time to be on the Internet. Felt like anything was possible.
Fediverse
Fusion... ya'know, in 5 years
I think we are in a key moment for change to happen at a big societal level. As others have said the problem isn't any of the technologies listed, it's how they are being exploited and the perception of them maligned by said exploitation.
Capitalism is a big part of this problem. As is the messy elastic way that human society implements change over time. tl;dr - some people will pull society forward, others pull it back a bit. That's the "elasticity" at a macro level.
For most of my life I've witnessed a gradual degradation, a reduction, entropy and resignation. Balance requires that we now leap forward again. I remain hopeful that a great correction is not just inevitable, it's coming in my lifetime.
At this point, the only thing that wouldn't be a grift is a proof that P=NP, so that we can break all DRM effortlessly.
Most of Lemmy are idiots and poor people that hate everything. Don't listen to most the idiots here.
I'm learning more and more that blaspheming against predominant gospel on lemmy isn't worth the effort.
Yet you are doing it right now. Curious.
I said learning not learned.
amen
Anything china makes*
(I'm leaving this up for transparency, but I totally misread the comment I responded to. Sorry! I have attacked a strawman, and fought valiantly against ghosts lol.)
You're several decades out of date with that opinion.
Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.
China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don't manufacture Apple devices in China because it's cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.
China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.
Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous...
Yep buckykat already backed me up. I was saying that in support of china not against. I agree I think chinese technology is cool.
You're right, sorry haha. I flipped that 180 degrees in my head.
Look, I'm not one of those people who will call out "tankies" or say that China is evil, but that's a level of uncritical thinking bordering MAGA.
I did put an asterisk there to be clear. As well china has had a history of not marketing it's products, like ai, as the future of everything. So by putting to and to together I am assuming that china will probably continue to do the same in the future.
I agree about block chain, but AI and quantum have real life practical purposes. The current models are not good but they will improve eventually.
For me, I would say that a grift is not a technology, but the housing market itself. There is no reason for the house prices and rent to go up to extortionate level. Some will say "oh but it's the market". Buddy, tell me what do you do and do you own a property and how much is it when you bought it and if you sell it now? I know of someone who was happy enough to get 100k profit from when he initially bought his house and sold it. But bidders kept asking for more until he profited 300k. He didn't say anything because that's how the bidding went. He admitted that the housing market is a scam essentially-- a grift.
I don't know about you guys but where I live, there is always a news of residents opposing the building of social housing nearby for whatever frivolous reasons. These are usually in affluent areas, which used to be middle or working class in which their very own houses were built by the government. But if social housing is built, it is in the middle of nowhere with no opportunities leading to ghost estates. The houses are left rotting but allowed to stand to artificially inflate the house prices. And the rich and middle class wonder why the working class are revolting. I mean, as a middle class, the middle class knows the problem but doesn't care because we benefit from economic privileges. We are repeating the gilded age.
Blockchain was an incredibly transparent grift. AI is a fascinating technology that's being used and abused by the worst people on the planet and will probably cause society as we know it to collapse. Quantum computers are a very niche, very specific tool that are super cool but get talked about weirdly by the media.
Virtual reality is neat and I think it hasn't really been used as a grift yet. I don't think we've really solved its UX nor explored all its possibilities. It seems like as a consumer device it will be a niche product, but the applications for companies and organizations are very untapped.
didn't meta and apple try turning VR into the 'Next big thing' very recently, i mean they got distracted with LLMs but they could always try again.
I still dont think blockchain; the tech itself is a grift, it does what it promised to do(not BTC, other coins that improved on it, BTC itself has turned into a big game of chicken), has uses beyond its initial purpose. Its just that the tech attracted grifters like flies, and their actions were transparent(yet people still fell for it)