On the one hand, it’s depressing because people seem to care more about fitting in than being rational.

But on the other hand, it’s reassuring that we’re so eager to solve things collaboratively that we’re willing to set aside our own personal opinions.

Our relentless obsession with social connection will either be the thing that kills us or the thing that saves us. And I honestly have NO idea which.

I recall there was a story from Predictably Irrational where the experimenters were trying to figure out how to get participants to avoid double-dipping tortilla chips.

Along with a control condition, they tried setting up a sign that said “NO DOUBLE DIPPING”, and I think they also tried paying people or getting them to promise not to double dip, stuff like that.

The thing they found most successful was to set up two bowls of dip: One labeled “For double-dipping”, and one “Not for double-dipping”.

They supposed that once they had to do a physical action where they sorted themselves according to “what kind of person they are”, they wanted all of their visible actions to be consistent with that.

Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?

I can understand that take, but to me the more relevant comparison is the fossil fuel boom.

Like the advent of more powerful creative tools (camera, printing press, etc.), fossil fuels allowed us to do what we were already doing but faster.

Unlike a camera, though… Coal, oil, and gen AI all have to pull raw material from somewhere in order to operate, and produce undesired byproducts as a result of their operation.

In the early days of fossil fuel, it must been impossible to even conceive the thought that there might be limits to how much we could safely extract raw materials or dump hazardous residual crud.

From one person’s perspective, the world seems so impossibly large. But it turns out, there are limits, and we were already well on our way to exceeding them by the time we realized our predicament.

I think we’re sprinting towards discovering similar constraints for our information systems.

It won’t be exactly the same, and much like climate change I don’t think there will be a specific minute of a specific day where everything turns to shit.

But I think there are instructive similarities:

• The most harmful kinds of gen AI, as with fossil fuels, will have the highest ROI.
• There will be safe, responsible ways to use it, but it will be difficult to regulate from the top down and full of perverse incentives to cheat from the bottom up.
• It will probably continue to accelerate even as the problems become more noticeable and disruptive.
• It will be next to impossible to undo the damage at a significant scale.

Edit: Yeah, I’m also not too sympathetic to the death of copyright. It’s long overdue. The original conception of copyright was botched from the start – more about capital and censorship than about anything for the good of all humanity. But still, there are two good things that I see about copyright that I worry about losing in a “post-plagiarism future”:

1. Accurate attribution

I like knowing where an idea came from, whether it’s an artistic concept or formal information. It’s nice to know where I should go to continue the conversation and see more thoughts that came from a similar source.

2. Faithful replication

I think it’s important that ideas keep their same general shape when they’re copied around, at least when the copier isn’t deliberately intending to modify them. Things like satire can easily be mistaken for earnest content if you tilt your head 5 degrees to the side. I don’t want the discrete bits and bobs of that kind of content to get sucked up and recycled to make arguments for the very thing the original author was arguing against.

Edit 2: I remembered there’s a Google Tech Talk from ages ago, where the speaker argues copyright is unnecessary to preserve these two attributes in the digital age, because search engines are so reliable that you’ll never be confused about the origin of a work, and computers only make exact copies of things so there’s no risk of degrading a work over time. I think those arguments have not aged well, lol.

If you dislike vapid slop that’s designed to maximize adherence to opaque and fickle metrics, you might wanna reconsider whether gen AI is fine and unrelated to the problem.

We’re seeing the genesis of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome here. Toxic promotion algorithms are quaint, comparatively.

Edit: Fwiw, I did not downvote you. Have a good day, friend.

What’s the “bigger problem”?

Occassionnaly

My answer is usually “I don’t use computers the same way you do, so I probably won’t know what you’re talking about.”

hussy

My brain has been so badly poisoned by the internet that I initially failed to read that as the actual word.

Super gross conclusions/recommendations from the marketing firm in the article.

I imagine that if the finding was “gamers spend more time watching friends play”, they’d suggest monetizing the couch cushions.

Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.

Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.

I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.

It’s kind of like asking for the best video.

It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.

Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.

Most universal answer I can give is:

Every country that has attempted communism has been desperate and vulnerable.

Desperate to find a strongman to save their crumbling old government, and vulnerable to having the CIA appoint their own strongman in turn.

Skelepede

Santa gets an intern obsessed with ML:

“Santa! Do you realize that naughty kids tend to grow up to have children who also end up on the naughty list? I looked into it, and it actually correlates with a bunch of things like the parents’ health, income, ethnicity… who their friends were in high school… I think we’re judging kids for being born into circumstances beyond their control! Santa, what do we do?”

“Hm. Did you say you could build an app to accurately predict the naughty/nice status of a kid based on basic demographic information? Build it. I’m going on vacation.”

Forbiddet

I never give money to the homeless. They’ll just buy drugs and alcohol.

I keep it for myself. So I can buy drugs and alcohol.

—

For real though, I try to give $5 if I can. Some people will waste it, some will make good use of it, and it’s impossible to tell from the outside looking in. So I might as well swing at every ball. Giving to charities is good too, but they don’t reach everyone (for all sorts of reasons).

You know it. Just like I prefer having massive student debt and no degree to show for it. 😎

I remember when all these outlets were endlessly claiming that Millennials believed a whole bunch of stupid shit that we didn’t.

It never ends, does it?

over the long term–and I’m talking, like 20-30+ years–it could be positive. One of the things that made the US economy strong in the 60s was the fact that we had strong labor, and strong manufacturing

Looks to me like the strong economy of the 1960s coincided with ending 20-30 years of high tariffs… Sooo…