lanternfish

I'm interested if you know of any historical research that talks about this. I can see that as a possible theory, but the counter would be that there's a fundamental difference in the nature of 'information' between now and pre-internet, where the combination of pure bulk of data and targeting means it's much much harder to actually filter than before.

It's difficult to fix this problem by interrogatin the validity of things when consuming the information in order to interrogate it causes you to have an implicit reaction. Consider advertising that operates on raw association, or curating information feeds that are designed to provoke a specific conflict/reward response.

I recall there being this huge internal debate about whether or not there's any sort of external normative quality metric to reality, or if it's all subjective.

The conclusion is that there's a DAG of 'flow' where information or something else moves from reality to reality, with the downstream realities being more capable of peaceful self organization and intellectual pursuits. The ship which brings people to the Anathem society has collected something like 3 societies in it, the first being relatively barbaric, and then each improving with each jump as it continues down the DAG. I think it's implied that we're one step under the protagonist's world on that ordering.

While there will definitely still be places that are less impacted - those two will probably be near the first to become heavily damaged in terms of credibility.

Wikipedia has multiple controls that facilitate quality and authenticity of content, but a lot of them break down in the face of synthetically polluted generated info.

The cost of engaging with the editorial process drops to functionally zero as sock-puppets are trivial to spin up that are near-human in quality. Run 50 of those for n-months and only then use them in a coordinated attack on an entrenched entry. Citations don't help because they rely on the knowledge-graph, and this pollution will spread along it.

Really what's left are bespoke sources that are verifiably associated with a real individual/entity who has some external trust that their information is authentic, which is tough when they're necessarily consuming information that's likely polluted by proxy.

Gotta remember that Anathem's society is downstream from us on the directed knowledge graph of 'enlightenment'.

Even Stephenson - who's optimistic enough about emergent tech to endorse NFTs - thinks that actually handling this kind of infopollution is the domain of a higher order civilization.

I agree. My gut reaction to previous GPT releases was interest, but for this one (before even reading it) it was dread.

I think we're very close to an inflection point where functionally all information is polluted by the possibility that it's completely hallucinated or built on something hallucinated. We're already getting there in some ways - google vs. seo, astroturfed forums, fabricated publications, and this is just that but way worse. Probably orders of magnitude worse in terms of exposed information surface.

It's basically a pollution - and one that's nearly impossible to clean. The ecosystem of referential information now has its version of microplastics.

I can't tell if new tweets are populating, I can't find any that are newer than the outage.

Edit: they are, #TwitterDown is trending

Timelines are failing to populate, and only show a 'Welcome to Twitter' message

Space

Basic probability - randomly walking a graph will tend to have you in regions of higher vertex density. Same reason why randomly picking a road intersection will tend to put you in cities - cities just have most of the intersections.

(the walk isn't exactly random but it still works - the pathing heuristic is real-coordinate agnostic).

I think the idea is that it clips onto glasses

Likely his best video - and one I recommend - is the multi-hour analysis of NFTs entitled "line goes up" (which also touches on other elements of the blockchain ecosystem).

It (likely) had a non-trivial causal impact on breaking down the NFT hype cycle which we now see to be largely dismantled.

Someone could have an entirely transactional understanding of their job but assume that - alongside many implicit elements of that transaction - there's a component of through-line longevity.

While this is true on a purely de jure interpretation of the dynamics at play, a more clear-cut example - like same-sex marriage - makes it clear that the "right to marriage" includes not only the right to life-scale commitment to a person(s) but also the right to have that commitment recognized by the state. Insofar that marriage as a legal construct carries additional privileges alongside the simple recognition, which it does, the "right" to marriage must also include the "right" to access the consequent privileges or you have a structure of authority stripping those privileges by omission.

IMO It's because - going back as far as the constitutional convention - political ideology in America has largely comprised of aesthetic movements that wear the shells of theory and policy for memetic power.

I had a religious studies professor make a - reasonably evidenced - claim that the whole 'seperation of church and state' stuff during the revolution was widely understood to basically be lip service. The vast majority of Americans were under the impression that they were starting a Christian country with a Christian government. That same professor made the - less evidenced - conclusion that the implicit divide between that expectation and the legal reality has underscored a considerable portion of American political turmoil to date.

This is an ambitious take. There are so many cogent counterarguments here that it's tough to choose one, but consider this:

The fundamental core of the American societal experiment was a separation from an overbearing authority in the pursuit of individual liberties. It seems clear to me that freedom to marry who you want, where you want, and how you want would be pursuant to that eidolon. Now, you don't have to agree with that core tenet, but on an empirical level _that rejection_ would be degeneration: a fall from first principals (which might not be a bad thing depending on your normative frameworks - I'm inferring that you're not a fan though).

Because it's learned from people saying '$STRING is $N characters' a rough correlation between the token length of $STRING and $N. Given infinite training and depth, it would learn how strings tokenize and resolve the question more accurately, but this is basically it guessing what the inflation of tokens->chars is and missing.

Empirically, it's mostly been rural communities that have had their living standards raised (by moving into cities). It's not very pretty, but on a purely numerical level the benefactors far outnumber the hurt (using a very specific framing of increased lived experience).

If you're looking for narrative experiences, Disco Elysium is likely the best video game story ever told - bar none.

Maybe not the best story (although it's really good) but the intersection of presentation and prose is exceptional. One of the few times the medium has really surpassed raw text on the storytelling metric.

Some of those narrative sequences will stay with me for the rest of my life.

It's pretty clearly an attempt at humor, but there's still room for troubling conclusions within that framing.

For one, the fact that Musk is even being recommended that kind of content is concerning. Twitters algorithm is set up in such a way that to get exposure to that kind of content, you have to be intentionally engaging with pretty delirious circles of narratives.

Additionally, of all the possible jokes to make on all the possible pieces to riff off of, he chose a pretty mediocre joke on an almostly tepidly incoherent take - his joke isn't necessarily endorsement, but it's still an intentional choice that doesn't really signal the kind of responsibility investors are probably looking for.

I think this is a pretty significant misreading. The basic argument of Yishan's thread (external to the 'all tech companies want to do is tech, not politics' angle which is honestly kinda tangential) is that social media is hard because it's social, not because it's media. The part you're pointing to is meant to develop this because it's a fundamentally social effect which causes both sides of the aisle to feel marginalized by the institution - something I think we can agree is pretty empirically true. All that's needed for the (increasingly accurate) predictions of Musk's difficulties piloting the ship to stick is the intractability of _calm social discourse_ in what Yishan is calling the new 'culture'. I don't think Twitter having a political bias is relevant there.

Leijurv isn't using Kitteh2 for AoC (YouTube videos indicate python). I think it was just a project.

Now, I understand that there are very valid logical supporting arguments for small government, but let me get this straight:

In a situation where massive fraud was committed by a corporation because the government inaccurately blocked government oversight, your solution is to decrease the size of the government... presumably meaning the oversight never would have been attempted in the first place.

Crypto is exactly where libertarian advantages should be manifesting - the advocacy of a small government is exactly _more_ situations like FTX.

The discriminant between the two positions is that 'free speech' (as constructed here, I probably disagree with the conclusion) need not be a binary. Where backdooring encryption is clearly a binary policy that once triggered can't be revoked, this is only because it pertains to hidden information. Mitigating the proliferation of specific classes of content can be done with specific intent because you know what types of content you're mitigating - fundamentally this is no different than a website (like this one) deciding not to contend with certain types of content (as the rules imply). This means that you break out of the 'slippery slope' argument pretty easily and can get access to 'not negotiating with domestic terrorists' without the negative externalities of suppressing open discourse.

There's a cogent argument which would claim that proliferation of the Christchurch shooter's footage would serve as a specific causal factor for future mass shootings, especially because part of the motivation of that shooting was exactly the proliferation of that manifesto. In that sense it's almost a memetic threat because any proliferation of the video locks in the reward structure for future copycats. In terms of discourse about what should/shouldn't be generally exposed to people with only a passing interest (external to any discussion about how that moral imperative aught to be enforced), the Christchurch footage would be pretty close to the top of my blacklist.

Moreover - I'm pretty sure anyone with a modicum of net-literacy could find that video with relative ease if they really wanted to. It's clearly not a binary of proliferation and censorship, but a complex gradient where different mediums of curation have different thresholds for that kind of exposure.

https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet done here without an edit button

It still holds a pretty compelling position in the cultural zeitgeist - it's become an object beyond an event, largely decoupled from its origination by virtue of its excellence.

People also created and consumed food for pretty much the same reasons.

Historical analysis and consideration of past culinary preparations is still very useful as an endeavor.

Or - a user follows a public figure out of good-faith interest, one of their tweets sparks controversy, and the replies get bad-faith violent (happens all the time). Then the next post is an ad for toothpaste. Colgate's not going to be happy to associate their product with vitriol.

Ultimately, YouTube users have a higher degree of control over what they consume, because they self select each video on a drop-by-drop level; on Twitter the user only curates which hoses they get blasted by. And we know that YouTube still struggles with ad suitability.

The same mechanism applies - sponsored posts don't want to be seen with any proximity (distance or time) to image-detrimental content.

I do believe it was - and it also betrays the critique: there is a wealth of discourse on what "real" art is - and that discourse has largely moved beyond "art as representative of real world phenomena". That attitude is a component of a larger set of reactionary positions which try to reject modern and post-modern developments in the artistic world as misguided - an orientation which often tries to justify itself through an appeal to the "old masters" and a failure of some modern caste of charlatan art-theorists who've usurped the true intelligentsia.

NFT art is art - probably more-so on an accidental level than by any intention of the original creator. There is a perversity to the context in which it is created, and that contributes to its artistic footprint orthogonal to its actual aesthetic value.

The same is true of this AI generated art. It's a different artistic fingerprint than - say - Dali, but that doesn't mark it as "bad". If anything, the fact that it's created by a machine puts it in a league entirely of its own. There's a great opportunity here for interrogation of art in a machine created context, and I'm excited to see how the dialog around it evolves.