AI: The "pen that can write in zero gravity" when pencils exist.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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This pen / pencil thing has been corrected so many times for so many decades that it's ludicrous people are still bringing it up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/
Random bits of pencil lead floating around in a high tech environment is such a poor idea that even the Soviet's quit using pencils once Fisher's Space Pen was available. A pen which Fisher itself paid to develop and then sold to both NASA and the Soviet Space Program.
Yeah, I know it's not precisely correct, but it's a fable that's commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I'm open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!
Pen, pencil. Both are dangerous in the wrong hands.
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Artificial intelligence is really just a Swiss army, knife, version of a search engine. It serves the interest of the ruling elite and is a way the uber wealthy can make America stupid again or even dumber than dumb. Like we move forward fast but we always miss the point and we're always putting out fires that once were easily manageable. The code base is growing we're all saying a lot of nothing. It's really just drowning out voices and good ideas just to centralize everything. It's about power. It's about control. It's about the man behind the curtain in the wizard of Oz. I like technology a lot and I would like it to be in the hands of working people and not the uber wealthy. So I am no techno optimist at all, not until we fix that issue.
To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF's expenses. Much of WMF's budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.