Indeed. But societies at large are behemoths. It takes years if not decades to reorient and adjust. Steel hadn’t overtook wood overnight either.
8,494 karma · joined August 16, 2010
This is a personal account that I have for myself, not for someone else. So, the views expressed herein-blah-blah-blah - the usual disclaimer applies. I may refer to something as "we had this or that," with "we" referring to my past or present employers, relatives, acquaintances, imaginary friends, or anyone else. This does not mean I speak for anyone else but myself, unless otherwise stated very explicitly.
All comment texts (save for quotes) are verbalized and authored by a human. However, a machine could have proofread them, or been used as a thesaurus or a rubber ducky while writing. All the natural stupidity is my own.
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I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
Some modern recording laws are not made with a machine component in mind, even if that machine is a local first-party system and does not actually store anything long-term or propagate information any further. A cyborg-identifying person with a wearable speech processor may rightfully argue such laws are unfairly preventing their functioning, as they’re lacking an important distinction.
There are such markets, in every national budget. It’s been less than a full electoral cycle in many places since “AI” improved from a questionable typing-saving gimmick into something that can deliver arguably passable results autonomously, in some areas.
> It is time we remove this intermediary who does this.
Academia got tax grants because we have already figured out pure market forces don’t exactly nurture it so well. It got its slice of pie through gaining mindshare of people who thought paying for that is a good idea.
Now there’s this dilemma over what’s exactly is this “that” - that we believe in paying for.
But given that we collectively believe it is a good thing our taxes go to academics, I fail to see how removing that would be a good idea. Some say there are bad apples, and we cut off the whole tree that gave us plenty of good fruit as we nurtured it?
Something like a direct democracy over R&D appropriations might make more sense than a market… but then it’s not unprecedented (and quite likely) that such system would get dominated by all sorts of quackery. The feedback loop here is really long and convoluted - it’s not a Kickstarter.
So we’re probably best with old slow bureaucracy, steered by politicians, figuring out how to navigate it minimizing risks of any major setbacks. Surely, some possible budget leeches (if we look from our plumber’s viewpoint) are lesser of possible evils here?
LiteLLM is frequently used in roughly the same scenario - trading virtual LAN-only keys for real ones as it relays requests to the inference providers.
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
Maybe I did something wrong or unaware about the tricks to make it fast, but last time I tried to play with exo and distribute processing over a few home LAN computers to see if I can run models that don’t fit my 3090, the penalties were brutal.
When Crimea was annexed the writing on the wall was clear, so I made The Grind a priority, got fairly close to the top 10% (the real gap is corruption and having connections; net worth is something you have one day and lose the next one), and was able to leave with enough cash to keep me more than just afloat. And almost everyone I knew who was able to outsource their skills and wasn’t blind to what was happening, did the same thing: grind, save, move, settle down, live.
And then, when the war escalated into a whole different phase, I know some folks left Russia with a lot less than what I had - not piss poor but nowhere close to the top 10%. They had it a lot rougher, but the danger to their wellbeing and lives was more immediate. So I know you’re wrong about wealth being a requirement for leaving - it’s a huge boon that makes it a lot easier, but it’s certainly not a hard requirement.
- Google. The canonical “don’t be evil” meme origin.
- Meta. Adjacent “they trust me, dumb fucks” meme origin.
- Apple. Least of all, but still fits: PR pushes double on privacy, but their interests are not their end-users, they just happen to align on some points as they’re not in adtech business.
- Microsoft. The classic case for getting slaps on the wrist, Gates said one thing he’d do differently is sending lobbyists earlier, or something to that effect, didn’t he?
- Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and many more are still all variants of the same story. It’s not a lie that everyone nowadays expects most megacorps to fuck people over if there’s money in that.
That’s the Order of “Feel for It Again”, with oak leaf clusters already, no? Something’s cursed in this industry, every company that sells software to individual people ends up the same when they become gigantic and endowed by wealth and power, even if they were decent in their early days. They all become those blind heralds of paperclip^W shareholder value(tm) maximizers, and I’m finding myself struggling looking for an exception.
Am I to believe this time it’s going to be any different, to set those - not baseless, I’d say - cynical expectations aside? Any signs there’s a change?
So, I disagree - it’s obvious, given the ad-adjacent end-user-facing megacorp context, OpenAI is right there. Cynical - sadly so, yes. But I’m sure it’s obvious: the idea of such a possible direction comes up pretty quickly and reliably so.
Not really relevant though. They sure should be serious about GitHub, npm, and plenty of other things they run, too.
Vaping analogy is not perfect, as it doesn’t hold true in some aspects, but... Nobody makes vapes that go unpleasantly sour for a while after a fourth puff. But if they do we’d better not ban them from adding flavors, when the flavoring here does the right thing.
We’d still want to regulate vaping on other aspects (such as harm to health, which - unlike speech - doesn’t get protections), but that’s another, different story.
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/design-for-continuous-e... - look for the slide 32.
Etsy ran A/B tests with and without endless scrolling. Same content source. Infinite scroll haven't produced any increased engagement: surprisingly, it decreased it - people searched less. Potential reason: it was a store, not a social media feed, the feed wasn't addictive in its nature (decreased relevancy, lower chances of finding something good buried down further and further) and the whole alternative pagination design didn't help at all. This is my interpretation, but c'mon - if you're appealing to the telemetry: here's the telemetry, how'd you explain it?
In the neighboring comment, I was mistaken in that it would still increase length of browsing a bit, turns out it was off-putting.
(Sigh) And what exactly does it show? What makes you think you interpret the statistics correctly?
It shows a correlation that suggests - at best - that certain design patterns decrease friction and increases duration of engagement, making system more captive. It does NOT show that those design patterns are captive (= are a problem) by themselves.
Have those mountains of telemetry ever included an experiment where the addictive component was intentionally not present or maybe even designed to be anti-addictive (next element becomes increasingly less likely to be interesting/relevant past some threshold, frustrating the viewer) but the endless scrolling remains, so we test on its presence alone? Ideally, with an engagement-optimized feed as a separate control.
I don't know of such experiments, so I cannot counter your point with a definitive proof. But your interpretation isn't a proof either - there are multiple factors and no control to tell them apart. Those mountains of telemetry didn't have a goal of isolating factors to determine their actual effect, they just had to optimize engagement, find the best combo that works.
If someone ran something like that - I'd love to hear about it, and what they show. I'm utterly confident (as someone who had dealt with various addictions) that it'll show endless scrolling would have mild effects at best (maybe just a bit longer engagement compared to classic pagination as telemetry suggests, but I expect it to pale in comparison to an actual addictive/engagement-increasing feed source logic).
Endless scrolling aids, but isn’t what makes a system addictive. Continuous relevance gamble “maybe the next one is good, or the one after” is the actual driver, and “I stop at this page” is a weak stopper condition. Not negligible (as proven by testing) but not the fundamental piece.
I'm going to reiterate for the third time, to break it down even further in a hope it clicks.
We have: 1. Predatory/addictive algorithms (A_bad). We don’t like those. 2. Old good user preferences-based algorithms (A_good). Those are fine. 3. Probably some other algorithms but let’s go with just two alternatives for simplicity’s sake, as extra (A_more) won’t affect the argument here.
Definition from the law (A_law) covers both (A_bad)+(A_good). As I already said twice, it’s overbroad.
You said “if (A_law) wouldn’t be bad there wouldn’t be an issue”. That is obviously true, because (A_law) contains (A_bad). What you said is true, and it doesn’t contradict what I said - that (A_law) containing (A_good) in addition to (A_bad) isn’t great and lawmakers should’ve done better.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not arguing that A_law = A_good (that’s not true, they’re not the same! but neither A_law = A_bad either, it's the fact that it's A+bad+A_good[+A_more] is the issue), or that A_bad isn’t bad, or that A_bad isn’t covered by the law, or anything like that. Your knowledge that A_bad is bad, is my knowledge too.
As for the second point, I provided a counterexample of how endless scroll can be a non-issue. If endless scroll can be a problem (no argument against that from me - yes, there are clear examples we all have seen) and endless scroll can be non-problematic too (my counterexample design), that, says endless scroll is not what’s problematic per se. That’s just simple propositional logic.
Endless scrolling can be a proxy/substitute for the actual issue if nothing better could be named, but I think a better target can be identified and pointed out.
In other words, all I’m unhappy about is that laws are poorly worded and loosely defined so they can potentially cause unnecessary collateral damage. All I’m saying is that lawmakers are missing the point and just vibe-legislate in the vicinity. They’re banning the thing they (and you, and I) see, but the way they do it kinda like how Plato defined what a man is. And I’m just plucking a chicken here.
If you see a logical flaw - please do point it out for me. I don’t see any.
And endless scrolling is pagination with a page size of one and a gesture (scroll down or swipe) for the next page. And trust me, “next page” can be helluva addictive. Endless pagination is an aesthetic preference. It may make it more slicker, frictionless, more visually appealing to get addicted, sure, but it doesn’t change a thing about the core element of the addiction. Same endless feed can be easily made counter-adductive by degrading relevance past some threshold, which clearly tells me the issue is elsewhere.
That (plus a clause that exempts algorithms with user controls with full informedness and ability to confidently and reliably predict the outcome = old good filters and such) is the thing that should be in the legislation’s definitions section.
But then in the actual law it’s worse than “algorithm”, they’re actually banning broad over generalizations and design patterns instead, stuff like this:
>> recommender features – content selected and displayed based on information associated with the user’s account;
(Obvious legit use cases are regional content and user preferences.)
>> endless-feed features – continuous feeds of end-user content;
(Pure design pattern, pagination can be addictive at any span size.)
Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.
I thought this only applies to LLM inference providers, but not raw GPU rentals.