bgun

Republicans have learned to weaponize attention far better than Democrats. Negative attention is still attention, and where Democrats shrink from "gaffes" or criticism, Republicans just recognize that public criticism is still a form of attention. Even among each other. Whoever gets the most eyeballs, top stories, and headlines for longest wins this game.

Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.

Over the last 40 years, China’s version of socialism with state-controlled markets have lifted more people out of poverty than ours. Democracy and capitalism have not benefited me in my lifetime. My taxes go to fund foreign wars and lining the pockets of American oligarchs.

“Radically increased wealth”, for who? Government has never solved my problems, only created more. My point is that I would have been doing better under China’s system than ours.

This feels like a shallow dismissal, and I’d love to understand what you’re trying to communicate in more depth.

“Fragile” trust? That trust has been beaten out of us at every turn for an entire generation. There is nothing fragile about American exceptionalism or the dream of achievement; we’ve just been shown repeatedly that we are becoming the third-world bully regime in the eyes of the world and, increasingly, in our own.

Every bad thing we’ve been taught to believe about China or Russia, it turns out we do too and often worse. So what loyalty should we have? What has democracy and capitalism done for us but bankrupt our seniors with medical debt and addict our children to iPads and amphetamines?

I’d love to be able to trust my government and the American ideal again, but don’t tell me I’m weak for second-guessing the whole con game this century is turning into.

This is basic "mind palace" theory, no? Human memory is linked to navigation; the more you associate memories with navigable places, the stronger your memories will remain.

This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of advertising-based journalism.

AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story, but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.

You realize that video slots, financial software, HR software, legal software, educational software and MANY more all have some amount of regulatory compliance, right? Do you think social media is special somehow and should just get a free pass when aspects of it have been shown to be potentially dangerous?

It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is a pointed analysis of why crawl-based search is insufficient for an Internet of our current scale. There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.

People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.

And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.

Humans can also spend an entire lifetime (or more, across multiple generations) being absolutely, inexorably and violently certain they are correct about something and still be 100% wrong.

I am not disagreeing that either people or LMMs are not extremely helpful in many or most instances. But if the best we can do with this technology is to make human-comparable mistakes WAY faster and more efficiently, I think as a species we’re in for a lot more bad times before we get to graduate to the good times.

We do, but it’s messy and usually involves a few years of courtship, followed by one to three decades of raising & educating the resulting human to anything resembling a useful model for comparison.

It seems to me that AI-based coding assistants are better at writing code for more established frameworks, which has led me to defaulting to vanilla or tried-and-true/"boring technology" because AI has trouble with newer or more frequently changing stuff. Curious if this has been the case for anyone else.

My point is that you could, given enough time and all the information available to you online about these well-documented buildings. You could learn CAD and figure out a reasonable way to output a 3D model, because you can think and reason spatially. The current batch of AI tools can regurgitate complex facts, but they can't actually think in 3D like an being that spends its life navigating physical spaces.

Maybe I'm wrong and we are well on our way to AI tools for this, but right now if I tell any of the current generation of image models to do something like "rotate object 70 degrees, tilt camera down 20 degrees and re-render" then what comes out is never even approximately close.

I agree. My example for something “AI” should be able to do is to create a CAD model for the Empire State Building or the Parthenon based on known facts and photos.

I don’t think these are “moving the goalposts” examples, they are things that an actual intelligence capable of passing a PhD physics exam should be able to do.

“Happy” here is hard to quantify - it’s a market. I’ve been to many of these conventions (DragonCon and NYCC for 15+ years) and while people certainly complain about the autograph & ticket prices, the lines snake around the block. The hotels are full. People brag and post on social about every celebrity interaction. I’ve made lifelong friends at these conventions and while I don’t personally stand in line for the latest Marvel stars, many of my friends do. It feels like a healthy market for parasocial relationships in which harm and deception are minimal. You know exactly what you’re getting for $80 and a few hours in line to see whoever is playing Spider-Man this year.

Arguing from the perspective of maximizing benefit to the producer/seller instead of the public at large speaks to a deep social epidemic. What would you do differently if you owned a cigarette factory? What if you owned Boeing?

I prefer this to whatever some intern found on a stock photo library by searching “Japanese woman smiling”.

The reason Google is uniquely bad at this is because Google poisoned its own well years and years ago. Google is SEO and SEO is Google. The whole company is inextricable from the concept of ranking based on "what generates the most advertising value and eyeballs", and not "what is actually verifiable, reasonable, evidence-based, or legitimate".

Google banked on those two things being similar enough in the early days of the internet to generate billions of dollars, but strayed so far from "don't be evil" that they no longer see that they were instrumental in pushing the two apart.

The "treatment" TikTok is receiving is a requirement that its US presence should be sold to a US company. Facebook is already a US company, so I'm not sure what you mean. TikTok is not actually getting banned, unless it fails to achieve that sale, which is highly unlikely.

I do agree that “exploitation” is a bit of an extreme take, but it isn’t an innocent business either. Hosting and profiting from a platform/marketplace for social content creation has, and will, trend toward preferences for viral, controversy-generating, and addictive content. Profit-sharing incentives to creators are meager but drive incredible lock-in behavior.

Children are wielding powerful content creation tools on TikTok and YouTube as well. And for every feel-good story about self-made young creators, there are thousands more telling of addiction, depression and anxiety for those caught in these spiraling for-profit walled gardens.

I’m all for teaching kids to be coders and makers, but I’m not sure Roblox is the poster child for it.

The article says nothing about the R1 being “scammy” - only that its functionality is overlapped by devices you likely already own. Also unsurprising for a $200 device, which is only even marketed to be a novel interface. Honestly if it’s less addictive than a smartphone due to being more limited, that could be reason enough to carry one.

I don’t disagree with the premise, but this would come off less self-serving if the author would provide examples of “calm companies” other than just their own.

This isn’t an article, it’s just the teaser of a 30 min podcast episode, which I found insightful.

Did you ever try getting groceries/food (other than pizza) delivered before the apps? Uber didn’t replace a better option, they made it literally possible to get these services in many places where it wasn’t an option at all. And in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive.

The value of convenience is significant. I happily pay to avoid the mental overhead of shitty restaurant websites or repeating a paragraph-long group order back and forth across a poor kitchen speakerphone call.

Yes the current system has many flaws but let’s not pretend it was utopia before.

Not sure if sarcasm but 'about as odd as "Nintendo Wii"' kind of makes my point:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130623080716/http://www.forbes...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4953650.stm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/why-wii-ask-nintendo-1...

I didn't point it out because it was funny-ha-ha, but because it's a teachable example of a linguistic mis-step that could be easily resolved by diversifying your reviewers - in this case, since you mention it, perhaps a native English speaker?

I'm not even suggesting that this project needs a new name - although I think if they were naming a consumer-facing product or company, someone in marketing would push back on the name almost immediately.

I know this is just an open source project but it’s a good example of why you might want to consult a woman before naming things.

To say nothing of the article itself, I absolutely love this website. Everything from the visual aesthetic & typefaces to the writer’s tone proclaims a deep, unwaveringly passionate nerd-dom that hearkens to the Internet I love and too rarely find in the wild anymore.

Information about using and maintaining woodworking tools, especially Japanese chisels, planes and handsaws

Find me an Instagram account this spellbinding and I will eat my hat.

Betting the copilot gets fired or jailed for what seems to be at least partially a systemic issue with ensuring rested crew. The fact that the pilots reflexively lied about what happened is telling.