I hated it when everything became ‘smart’.
Now everything has ‘AI’.
Nothing was smart. And that’s not AI.
Everything costs more, everything has a stupid app that gets abandoned, IoT backend that’s on life support the moment it was turned on. Subscriptions everywhere! Everything is built with lower quality, lower standards.
they don’t care. you’re not the audience. the tech industry lives on hype. now it’s ai because before that they did it with nft and that failed. and crypto failed. tech needs a grift going to keep investors investing. when the bubble bursts again they’ll come up with some other bullshit grift because making useful things is hard work.
It’s the fucking touch screens again.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is greedy, clueless management pushing half baked products of dubious value on consumers.
So… the AI?
Natural unintelligence
If only it were just AI…
And dubious ethical origin.
Yes but now they have a tool…
Was shopping for a laundry machine for my parents and LG, I shit you not, has an AI laundry machine now. I just can’t even
It’s probably just a sticker they put over the word “smart”
The reassuring thing is that AI actually makes sense in a washing machine. Generative AI doesn’t, but that’s not what they use. AI includes learning models of different sorts. Rolling the drum a few times to get a feel for weight, and using a light sensor to check water clarity after the first time water is added lets it go “that’s a decent amount of not super dirty clothes, so I need to add more water, a little less soap, and a longer spin cycle”.
They’re definitely jumping on the marketing train, but problems like that do fall under AI.
The thing is, we’ve had that sort of capability for a long time now, we called them algorithms. Rebranding it as ai is pure marketing bullshit
Well that’s sort of my point. It’s an algorithm, or set of techniques for making one, that’s been around since the 50s. Being around for a long time doesn’t make it not part of the field of AI.
The field of AI has a long history of the fruits of their research being called “not AI” as soon as it finds practical applications.
The system is taking measurements of its problem area. It’s then altering its behavior to produce a more optimal result given those measurements. That’s what intelligence is. It’s far from the most clever intelligence, and it doesn’t engage in reason or have the ability to learn.
In the last iteration of the AI marketing cycle companies explicitly stopped calling things AI even when it was. Much like how in the next 5-10 years or so we won’t label anything from this generation “AI”, even if something is explicitly using the techniques in a manner that makes sense.
Respectfully, there’s no universe in which any type of AI could possibly benefit a load of laundry in any way. I genuinely pity anyone who falls for such a ridiculous and obvious scam
You can’t see a benefit to a washing machine that can wash clothes without you needing to figure out how much soap to add or how many rinse cycles it needs?
I genuinely pity anyone so influenced by marketing that they can’t look at what a feature actually does before deciding they hate it.
Those features are literally unrelated to AI, just so you know. It’s comparing sensor outputs to a table. Like all modern laundry machines. The inclusion of “AI” on the label is purely to take advantage of people like you who instantly believe whatever they’re told, even of it’s as outlandish as “your laundry has been optimized” lol
Yeah, I know how it works, and I also know how different types of AI work.
It’s a field from the 50s concerned with making systems that perceive their environment and change how they execute their tasks based on those perceptions to maximize the fulfillment of their task.
Yes, all modern laundry machines utilize AI techniques involving interpolation of sensor readings into a lookup table to pick wash parameters more intelligently.
You’ve let sci-fi notions of what AI is get you mad at a marketing department for realizing that we’re back to being able to label AI stuff correctly.
The fact that you’ve been reduced to blabbering about such mundane things in the style of “the ghosts in pac-man technically had AI” tells us everything we need to know here. Have fun arguing with me in the shower about whether or not current trends are just a result of marketing executives finally being liberated to appropriately label the AI they’ve been using for 70 years
Cool story bro. Keep being angry about the meaning of words I guess, if it makes you happy.
I mean, they have Alexa connected refrigerators with a camera inside the fridge that sees what you put in it and how much, to either let you know when you’re running low on something or ask to put in an order for more of that item before you run out, or tell you if something in there is about to spoil, or if the fridge needs cleaned, so I imagine a washer would do something similar?
AI is one of the most powerful tools available today, and as a heavy user, I’ve seen firsthand how transformative it can be. However, there’s a trend right now where companies are trying to force AI into everything, assuming they know the best way for you to use it. They’re focused on marketing to those who either aren’t using AI at all or are using it ineffectively, promising solutions that often fall short in practice.
Here’s the truth: the real magic of AI doesn’t come from adopting prepackaged solutions. It comes when you take the time to develop your own use cases, tailored to the unique problems you want to solve. AI isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool; its strength lies in its adaptability. When you shift your mindset from waiting for a product to deliver results to creatively using AI to tackle your specific challenges, it stops being just another tool and becomes genuinely life-changing.
So, don’t get caught up in the hype or promises of marketing tags. Start experimenting, learning, and building solutions that work for you. That’s when AI truly reaches its full potential.
I think of AI like I do apps: every company thinks they need an app now instead of just a website. They don’t, but they’ll sure as hell pay someone to develop an app that serves as a walled garden front end for their website. Most companies don’t need AI for anything, and as you said: they are shoehorning it in anywhere they can without regard to whether it is effective or not.
At this point, I’m full on ready to make “though shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” global international law and a religious commandment. At least that way, we can burn all AI grifters as witches!
I think we’re running out of advancements that make life better, now all technology does is make production cheaper/increase shareholder value.
Containerize everything!
Crypto everything!
NFT everything!
Metaverse everything!
This too shall pass.
Docker: 😢
Docker is only useful in that many scenarios. Nowadays people make basic binaries like
tarinto a container, stating that it’s a platform agnostic solution. Sometimes some people are just incompetent and only knowdocker pullas the only solution.LXC – natively containerize an application (or multiple)
systemd-run – can natively limit CPU shares and RAM usage
Put a curved screen on everything, microwave your thanksgiving turkey, put EVERYTHING including hot dogs, ham, and olives in gelatin. Only useful things will have AI in them in the future and I have a hard time convincing the hardcore anti-ai crowd of that.
Don’t forget microservices!
I saw an advert on the side of a truck the other day for an AI enhanced mattress, of all things!
10 years ago everything was “smart” now it’s “AI”.
Goddamn marketing people.
You forgot the phase immediately preceding AI: 3d prints.
I mean, in this decade, I’ve heard of car and airplanes being marketed as having 3d printed parts.
Cars and airplanes do have 3D printed parts. They’re much more common in the prototyping phase, but they are used in production and are making their way to space.
I completely agree with your general sentiment though. Any time a new piece of technology shows promise there are a ton of people who will loudly proclame that it will completely replace <old and busted technology> in <a massive amount of areas> while turning a blind eye to things like scaling and/or practical limitations.
See also: low/no code, which has roots going back to the 1980s at least.
But the companies must posture that their on the cutting edge! Even if they only put the letters “AI” on the box of a rice cooker without changing the rice cooker
According to some meme I saw, it’s gonna fuck your wife in 2025.
I mean, it opens the door to new kinks
You mean that?
Absolutely. More spice
One of the leading sources of enshitification.
The Imperium of Man got this right.
I like this typography, but I don’t like somebody pretending they represent everybody.
