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Posts
4
Comments
1,692
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that's great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.

    But yeah, I don't think it's fair to complain about how "inefficient" an early technology is and also call it "magic beans".

  • I have made only factual statements. You can believe I'm arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is "niche" or "few" in number. Those are called opinions.

    Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?

  • Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don't like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn't make it less real.

    Twitter wasn't profitable for its entire existence, it's often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.

    Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.

    Same for doordash and uber eats.

    Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they're not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.

    None of that is because they're "magic beans" from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn't, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.

    And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).

  • Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.

    Regardless of how much of a bubble we're in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It's proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it "magic beans" is just wishful thinking at best.

  • Well, it depends on how conflicted his own supporters would be. I have to assume there are a good number of 2A defenders who would take issue with this. Certainly a good chunk of them subsist on the koolaid at this point, but each extreme decision like this is the line for at least some of his base.

    If Obama had done the same thing, Jan 6th would have happened much earlier.

  • I understand your situation very well, because I was in the same spot when I deleted my Facebook 10 years ago. Turns out, it's possible to do both things. The ability to keep in touch with people was not invented when social media was. It really does just come down to whether you want to be on the platform or not.

  • So we're not talking about "influencers", we're literally talking about people you are friends with? Hah! Fuck right off! Yes, if enough of your friend group leaves the rest will also leave, that's the cut-and-dry scenario I laid out to begin with 🤣.

  • I would not agree. Every metric is subject to Goodhart's law, approval ratings is no exception. Putin has (allegedly) maintained an approval rating well over 50% for his entire career.

    I'm not saying he wants to do right by his constituents, I'm saying he wants to be told he's a winner. Trump is a narcissist. He's all the other terrible things because at the end of the day he needs to feel liked. He will only do things that he thinks will fill that void.

  • From my bubble, Meta and Zuckerberg are widely despised by the general public and have been for the better part of the last couple decades. I've never met a person who wants to be on their platform, only people who have to be. But you're probably right, most of the users probably don't even know who Zuckerberg is, or that Facebook ever renamed themselves.

    But are the personalities you want to follow on there really pulling an audience that...simple?