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I've seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is "useless". I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people's jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it's not. It's subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It's going to make mistakes and while everybody's been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it's just never gonna be "smart" enough to not have a human reviewing its' behavior. Then you've got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn't need it. I'd say that AI is useless.

But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they're much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They're also good idea generators - I've used them in creative writing just to explore things like "how might this story go?" or "what are interesting ways to describe this?". I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it's a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would've thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.

Lastly, I don't know if it's just because there's an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like "how would a native speaker express X?" And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I've tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn't the same, but as far as Japanese goes it's like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that's exactly how I've been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could've been said more naturally.

All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?

I have an Ubuntu server with two network interfaces - an ethernet and a WiFi network let's call eth0 and wlan0. So far I've been able to set it up as a router by enabling packet forwarding and then doing some iptables trickery. These are my iptable commands:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

If I'm understanding correctly, the first command says "if you receive packets from a device, do NAT and then forward them with your IP", the second one says to forward packets from eth0 to eth0, and the last line says "if you get packets back, only accept them if a connection has already been previously established". This Ubuntu server is connected to a router which is connected to a modem that actually has internet access. I've set it up so that my router uses my Ubuntu server as the default gateway during DHCP requests. This works fine, I'm able to use devices to connect to the internet, and if I do a trace route, it first goes to the Ubuntu server, then to the router, then out into the great beyond.

Now, I've run:

iptables -D FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

Which, if I'm understanding correctly, should forward packets through to the WiFi interface instead, but it isn't working. I'm still able to access other devices on the network but not the open internet. I also tried doing iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE which as far as I can tell is unnecessary, but that didn't do anything. When I do trace route this time, it is able to get to the Ubuntu server but no further. I've also tried doing iptables -L -v but neither the wlan0 -> eth0 rule or the reverse have any packet count. I also tried doing iptables -A FORWARD -i lan0 -o wlan0 -j LOG --log-prefix "FORWARD: " to just log it first, but nothing shows up in /var/log/syslog even if I try to connect to the internet from a device.

I'm at a loss here so any help even debugging or if I'm going about this wrong would be greatly appreciated. My ultimate goal is to set up a failover so that if the LAN interface doesn't have a connection, it'll start sending packets through the WiFi interface which will be connected to a different internet connection.

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