gdulli

> AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane.

Or social media, or targeted advertising, or fast food.

I do want to know what new movies are coming out. I do want to know what new restaurants open. Advertising is information, most of it isn't useful but some of it is, and a halfway intelligent adult can separate the fact from the opinion.

I don't want ad tech and surveillance capitalism, I don't tolerate services with unskippable ads. Regular TV commercials are skippable with a DVR, which is critical. It's tech companies that turned advertising from sometimes helpful/usually annoying into unacceptable.

There's a game of one-upsmanship here to express the least possible tolerance for advertising in general, which I don't get. It's not a cancer on society, it's a necessary thing that's gotten dumb and out of hand.

We can use AI to make video clips to trick boomers on Facebook into thinking Obama eats babies. They already want to believe it. AI isn't outputting real full-length books and movies.

It's really the whole tech industry as it exists right now and AI is a victim of bad timing. If this AI had been invented 40 years ago there'd have been a lower ceiling on the damage it could do.

Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)

Computer graphics have been improving for decades but the uncanny valley remains undefeated. I don't know why anyone expects a breakthrough in other areas. There's a wall we hit and we don't understand our own consciousness and effectiveness well enough to replicate it.

It made sense to pay less money for lower quality prepared food. Now the price is comparable to better food.

Paying for convenience does make sense if you value the convenience.

In the last 12-24 months the price of fast food in particular has risen at a higher rate than inflation has hit other types of food and goods. Fast food makes no economic sense anymore.

And you're right, the food has gotten worse as well.

An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to process without AI, you have too many results to check for correctness when they come out of the AI.

This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and handwave the correctness.

Modern software engineering culture is a treadmill ever in search of the next best practice that must be applied to a field made up of bespoke scenarios.

So much of the current internet is posts that read as a superposition of sincere and parody, and until that's resolved how do you know how to respond?

Why would you give this sort of work to a machine that can't be responsibly used without checking its output anyway?

Smug ignorance is the most exhausting kind.

It doesn't know when you're wrong! Pretend I'm shaking you by your shoulders as I'm saying this, because it's really important to understand!

I just don't think that's true anymore. Netflix isn't going anywhere. Twitter and Reddit have taken highly visible user-hostile actions since back in 2023 and people stayed. People have become too passive and docile to switch anymore. The portion of the population that's discerning enough to leave is small.

> Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves.

It's not a linear scale. A lone wolf can't produce the latest Assassin's Creed game. A committee can't produce Stardew Valley or Balatro. They're different capabilities, not a simple matter of more/less.

That one's easy. Because they can con people into paying for it.

How could anyone not have understood from the start that this would be the result of this technology?

Wherever customers decide the line should be. It's only ever about money. If people wanted to buy this the publisher would be thrilled to sell it.

There's a reason we've collectively coined the term "slop" while there's been no corresponding terminology to describe good works of AI.

You're so close.

I'm sure the temporarily not-yet-rich-from-AI will find a way to shrug that off.

The uncanny valley remains undefeated.

I wouldn't say that Epstein is a vindication of conspiracy theories, at least not the "Bigfoot" type. Epstein was already in trouble with the law for trafficking over 20 years ago. The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that. It's shameful that these stories didn't get more attention sooner, but the general veracity of them wasn't in question.

The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we didn't believe at all is the Comet Ping Pong one, which was appropriate.

Throw return to office in there. You know it's coming eventually.

Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.

Twitter is certainly terrible for those reasons as well. Terrible people are excusing apolitical enshittification because they're thankful the Overton window has been pushed down to where they live in the bottom of the barrel. You just can't say the latter part too loudly here because there's sufficient sympathy and affinity for it.

It gets lost in the distracting partisan bickering over Musk/etc, but Twitter has gotten hostile and crappy in many ways like this that have nothing to do with politics. Imagine how much more hostile this action would have seemed in 2010. But now, people put up with it.

Your comment doesn't make sense because the fact that "dead internet" has been coined since then (along with the popularization of "slop" and "hallucination") means there is a line and we have crossed it. Denial doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.

It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways emerging technologies would eventually be used against us. Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them. Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.

The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren't discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won't have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.

"Why don't they just make the plane out of the black box?"

I don't know how he could ban it. AI can't be used to reliably detect AI for the same reasons it's unreliable at other tasks. He didn't really have a choice but to sell the same grift everyone else is selling. He's stuck in a prisoners' dilemma that everyone is losing except a few people at the top.