domain:city-journal.org
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud.
I may elaborate on this in another post, but even assuming zero participation in social media, the algorithm is always listening. Often directly through apps on your cell phone, and indirectly from every link you click, video you watch, search you make, how long your eyes linger on something while you scroll. The degree to which a crude homunculus of yourself is being constructed in the cloud, whispering to you through your screen on the margins of every page you visit is horrifying. It was not a rhetorical flourish to describe it as a second subconscious. I absolutely believe that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Propaganda is what you say, just on a much larger timescale. With the addition of blocking certain ideas and types of thinking. You don't need to spread your message all the time. Just make sure it's the only message available.
I remained timescale agnostic in my definition, so that doesn't contradict any part of my reasoning. As for blocking ideas, there are a few ways you can do that with propaganda, but they're limited. You can spam your ideas to drown others, or you can debunk / or prebunk the ones you don't like and/or mark them as low-status, but if by "blocking" you're referring to literally preventing other ideas from reaching their audience, than I'd argue you're the one conflating concepts and "approaching this from an angle where propaganda is something I don't think it is".
They won't need to change themselves to block the next Joe Rogan
How is this a response to my point? I specifically said they won't need to change to block him.
People still play video games, people still fret about missing graphics options and bad games being sold for 60 dollars, but there's no central outlet for that like he provided
Exactly what my argument would predict.
faceh
2hr ago
So what can’t these systems do today?
Far as I know they can't renew a prescription for you, which has been my personal benchmark for 'agentic' AI for a year or so.
Or maybe its not that they can't but they aren't permitted to for liability or similar reasons.
I just want to be able to ask the thing "I'm running low on [pharmaceutical product], please order up a refill. And sometimes that process requires navigating multiple phone trees for both the pharmacy provider and the party doing the prescribing, to provide various sorts of documentation, sometimes via fax(!) and to make a payment and arrange for pickup or delivery at a convenient time.
All stuff I find very boring and tedious, so if I could offload it to an AI I would do so in a heartbeat.
Grant_us_eyes
2hr ago
Chalky, grey-ish pastels are a neutral 'chameleon' color that reflects and attenuate to whatever you put up against it. This allows for ease of decoration when it comes to styling a room without having to worry about extreme color scheme clashes - most people focus on these colors to allow for re-sell value in their houses.
Fun aside, when my parents had to re-paint their entire house for reasons, I was the one pushing my mother for more vibrant, intense colors as opposed to said chalky, grey pastels. She had developed a bad habit of constantly repainting rooms in a succession of ever-worsening colors.
Except for one room, which she never touched - the kitchen, which was done up in a warm, rich, pumpkin-like orange.
After a long spate of harassment(and more color samples than I will confess to - Lowes should have been giving me a commission, geeze), I finally convinced her to go with the richer, warmer colors, and she no longer repaints rooms.
fmac
2hr ago
thousands of jobs that are about to be lost soon
Why are you sad about jobs created by a bubble being lost by the bubble popping? Isn't that just a return to the status quo?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
Or to think about it another way, a generation's pop culture isn't the pop culture created by that generation necessarily, it's the pop culture enjoyed by them. So there is a Charlie Brown Christmas special for boomers and one for Gen x and one for millenials despite them all being written by Charles Schulz who was born in the 20s.
Grant_us_eyes
2hr ago
I'm reminded of Demolition Ranch.
For those not aware of the name, Demolition Ranch is a guntuber who's been doing gun-tubing for quite a while, and recently stopped to focus on his family.
People have commented on how his later content diverged quite a bit from his early stuff, with sensationalist activities and click-baity titles and zany video cards.
When questioned about that, he basically replied that what was getting the most view count, hence the pivot. In other words, that's what getting him the money.
The attention and engagement economy, it seems, says alot about what the mass of humanity demands.
faceh
2hr ago
True, but in many cases you will have to actively fight the algorithm's attempt to get you to partake in whatever drivel is popular with everyone else, and watch out for its attempts to sneak in ads or other content that someone is paying to put in front of your eyes.
oats_son
2hr ago
The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Considering the same people aren't in charge, having declined to continue their leadership due to what you just posted, I don't think that's a possibility. It's also worth pointing out that Democratic leadership doesn't pick the candidate, the voters do.
faceh
2hr ago
If there's one thing I have always and forever refused to do, its falsify my personality or my preferences.
I won't give something a 'like' on any social media site unless it is actually content I would genuinely prefer to see more of. I hand out dislikes liberally when it is even an option when I encounter things I would really rather never see again.
I will adjust my rhetoric to account for an audience's tolerances for controversy, but I won't shift the message itself.
I have literally never stated a position on an issue that I wasn't prepared to at least half-heartedly defend. I try to state my positions on any issue with as much clarity and precision as can be mustered with the English language.
And I do hope my reward is that whatever AI-Algorithm God arises will not have to guess at my preferences and utility function and will thus be able to give me an experience that is very closely optimized for the things that I truly enjoy, and not just the things I pretended to enjoy to fit in or to trick onlookers into thinking I am at all different than what I am. If the GodGPT looks across the entire history of my internet usage, and sees what type of youtube content I liked, the type of subreddits I subscribed to, the arguments I got into, the songs I played, the films I rated highly (and low), the type of people I interacted with, going back for decades now, I think it'll have an easy time figuring out what type of world to stick me in to win my hedonic approval.
Like, many actors seem to get very frustrated when they get pigeonholed into playing a single popular role for years and years on end, or typecast into the same types of roles over the whole career. Imagine how bad it would be for a nigh-omnipotent computer deity to feed you up horrible slop content for the rest of your life because you kept pretending to like [popular thing] for so long that your entire digital footprint suggested that it was your favorite type of content ever.
roystgnr
2hr ago
Player of Games and Use of Weapons have a somewhat similar dark vibe, and I could definitely see someone disliking those while liking other parts of the series. Maybe try Excession if you want to give the series one last chance? But frankly it sounds like the series just isn't for you, and you should switch to something else, and IMHO that's perfectly fine. It's a culturally influential (rimshot) series, but it's not the only or the best sci-fi book series out there.
in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases
The contrast between the general "which party should we go to next" culture of the Culture and the "what asshole tricks are we going to need to pull next to keep these people's parties from being ruined" culture of Special Circumstances is definitely intentional by the author, as is at least some of the way the assholishness "leaks" out of that supposedly self-contained organizational apparatus. IMHO the series would have been insufferable if you took away its insufferable characters, though; with just the external conflict it would have come across as just another Mary Sue "look how the universe becomes more awesome when more people think like me" Utopia story.
theincompetencetheorist
2hr ago
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experiÂence, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbÂness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any maÂterial other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepÂest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus! Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964
Those who engage in this projection of their identity out on social media are narcissists plain and simple. The feedback they receive have none of the corrective mechanisms since that would reduce the use of the media, so there is an obsession by the platform too soothe and allow sycophancy to further lull in a narcotic state while allowing the further projection of their aspirational identity which they love. They aren’t in love with themselves they are in love with the identity they project on the world. Which in my view is a worthwhile distinction.
It is also worth noting projection out on the media isn’t strictly necessary. This state can be also achieved with watching content that “educates” like self-help, health and so on where simple act of consuming of the media fuels a narcissistic self-image which under no circumstances can be manifested in the real world since that would it would shatter the projection.
oats_son
2hr ago
Myth TFL had some physics that made the multiplayer fun and broken, yes. The fetch lightning propelling the dwarf bombs sounds like a lot of people did it. Unfortunately, it is not present in Myth II. Generally, you have to keep the AoE guys away from the melee guys, yes. You frequently see melee dudes mopping up other melee dudes though.
Well remember even passing the basic casual Turing test used to be extremely difficult. It took at least 65 years between the creation of test and systems beginning to pass it consistently. And I still remember science articles and science fiction stories from the 90s and 2000s talking about it like it was the holy grail. It’s only in the past few years that it’s started to seem like an inadequate measurement of an AI’s capabilities.
Interestingly your motivated Turing test starts to sound a lot like the Voight-Kampff test from Bladerunner.
gattsuru
2hr ago
I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.
There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.
But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.
There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.
But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
Enough crypto/defi exploits where you won't necessarily get that great a bounty from whitehat and whilst the money that you'd pull out isn't necessarily 'clean' as you'd want it to be it also isn't necessarily theft to do the exploit.
In the same way that 90s CGI now sticks out like a sore thumb, I'll bet that current day LLM output is going to be glaring in the future.
Interesting idea! Although there is definitely CG from the '90s that still looks downright good. Jurassic Park comes to mind as a masterpiece, which largely worked because the artists understood what worked well with the technology of the time: night shots (few light sources, little global illumination) of shiny-but-not-reflective surfaces (wet dinosaurs), used sparingly and mated with lots of practical effects.
CG only became a negative buzzword when it got over hyped and stretched to applications that it just wasn't very good for at the time. In some ways it's improved since (we can render photoreal humans!), but it still does get stretched in shots that are IMO just bad movie making ideas ("photorealistic, yet physics-defying").
I could see AI slop going the same way: certain "tasteful" uses still look good, but the current flood of AI art (somehow all the girls have the same face, and I've definitely spotted plenty of online ads that felt cheap from obvious AI use) will be "tacky" and age poorly.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
Washing that level of wealth is essentially impossible unless you've got Cartel or country-level infrastructure behind you. It's 'dog caught the milk truck' levels of issue for most people. Your most reasonable path would be to use mixers (and have to be third-party decentralized which are more rare than you'd think) and slowly chip it out and hope nobody unscrambles it since you then become a massive target for both the original owners of the funds and interested second parties of various levels of legitimacy and violence.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3hr ago
Beer garden
phailyoor
3hr ago
I think a loooong effortpost should be allowed to have 1 paragraph of aislop as long as it's not relevant to the argument and can be deleted without hurting it. It would be a fun challenge for aihunters to find it. Maybe with a disclosure or something.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
3hr ago
Hm, the first paragraph of that is coming up 0% AI written for me in ZeroGPT.
AI conquers the Em-dash, Apple users most affected.
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