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Friend of the show & tech journalist Ed Zitron stops by to check in on the state of the internet. Have they cracked AI video yet? Does the VisionPro herald an en-goggled future? Just how stupid is Elon Musk, actually? We explore the end of the era of techno optimism and as our most advanced internet tech seems to aid less and abuse more.

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Anonymous

Great guest but it really feels the boys have been phoning it in for months now.

Nolan

Umm wowwwwww I could totally be an NFL GM. You’re not even American you don’t know the NFL salary doesn’t mean shit.

Uriah Wilson

Is Ed the first guy to do Chapo and Trashfuture guest spots within a week?

David Cox

AI generated Jason Statham in bio

Will

Honestly ready for the internet to be over. If we went back to 1994 levels of technology…where computers are just another useful tool rather than the very core of life, culture, entertainment and politics…I think I’d be happy.

Bobby

Just shows how out of touch these guys are. They seem dumbfounded by what Elon is doing. Musk has said his goal is to help free speech, not for any financial goals.

S

I worked with generative ai models at my last job. I'm not a crazy supportive of it, it has limitations, tech-bros are blowing it up out of proportions and the monetary/environmental cost is ridiculous. I really think the AI craze is bonkers. But the whole "database" part was pretty reductive and underplays the few aspects that are cool about it. They're called vector stores which maps things onto an essentially a 3d graph and builds associations. So some neat applications is say like, you have a library, you feed the database the titles, publication date, and the back of the book synopsis. Then the vector store will build association trees for you, and we can leverage it by say making a chatbot that can give you book recommendations based on a criteria. I want to read non-tolkein fantasy books written in the last 10 years. Or I want to read sci-fi novels written in the 1700s. Shit like that is pretty neat. There are other applications of generative ai models that are genuinely neat like the hugging face model whisper which is just a really neat audio transcriber. It hallucinates, but if you get it tuned right it is genuinely pretty cool how well it preforms. Is there some bite to the AI craze, yes, but is it overhyped, yes. Can it be creative, hell fucking no. Should it take people's jobs, hell fucking no.