We live in a vast digital spectacle, but we don't participate in the spectacle -- we consume it. Since nothing is real anymore, since our entire reality only exists through digital media, and since we have absolutely no agency, why not vote for a shit-poster for president? It's fun as hell to watch him troll all those tedious snobs in DC. Fuck those guys.
Then enough people voted for him that something incredible happened. He won. That wasn't supposed to happen! For once, something changed, and everyone who voted for him was a part of that change.
Actually accomplishing something is fucking intoxicating. It's so easy to get hooked on that heady feeling of mattering at all for once in our pathetic, powerless, alienated existences as cogs in a giant wasteful plastic machine. We spend months, then years, then decades drifting without meaning, working jobs we hate, taking our kids to shitty day cares we can barely afford, waiting 19 month to see a doctor about that new weird lump, and so on.
For these people, reality has never been so real. They're actually in it now, doing things. They've chosen a new content-creator-in-chief, and they want his content to take over the whole spectacle.
Yes, but then I couldn't harvest all your sweet data.
Kidding! It's a static site on my personal server that doesn't load anything but the content itself. It's mostly just a PITA to reformat it all mobile.
Is that really all they do though? That's what theyve convinced us that they do, but everyone on these platforms knows how crucial it is to tweak your content to please the algorithm. They also do everything they can to become monopolies, without which it wouldn't even be possible to start on DIY videos and end on white supremacy or whatever.
I wrote a longer version of this argument here, if you're curious.
Unions are never the solution in and of themselves. They give workers the power to do something about problems together, no more no less. The alternative is to not have any power and maybe ask politely.
Wow that was a wild read. I just punched out a snarky comment on my phone about how capitalists conflate technology and progress using the American healthcare system to illustrate that. I didn't expect it to get analyzed so much.
@wahming@lemmy.world I'm actually an EU citizen living in the US. I'm sorry my comment bothered you. It makes me really upset to see how poorly my wonderful friends and neighbors in the US get treated, probably precisely because I do have a European example to compare it to, so it's just always on my mind. Cheers, friend.
We'd have to hammer out the exact numbers, but I'd bet against that quote I pasted claiming that marketing, sales, software, and R&D are going to be automated away.
Past automation technologies had the most effect on low-skilled workers. But with generative AI, the more educated and highly skilled workers who previously were immune to automation are vulnerable. According to the International Labor Organization, there are between 644 and 997 million knowledge workers globally, between 20% and 30% of total global employment. In the US, the knowledge-worker class is estimated to be nearly 100 million workers, one out of three Americans. A broad spectrum of occupations — marketing and sales, software engineering, research and development, accounting, financial advising, and writing, to name a few — is at risk of being automated away or evolving.
I'd take that bet, even at outrageous odds. I've now won over 700 dollars betting against self-driving cars with people in the tech world, and another couple hundred against crypto. Some of that even came from my former boss. I think I've won over a grand betting against tech hype in the last 4-5 years.
Business Insider, in the unlikely event that you read this, DM me. Let's make a bet.
Yes, it is literally true in the field of computer science, but it's being thrown around loosey goosey in a way that does not align with how it would be used in a technical sense, at least my in experience, though it's been 15 years since I was in school, and 5 years since I did my last machine learning work in robotics.
The field of AI contains ML, but "an AI," singular, as used in this headline, is a generalized intelligence. When you write a headline "AI is building..." that's not the technically correct usage I am used to.
But my point is that suddenly what any industry used to call machine learning and has been doing for a decade or more is getting puff pieces as part of the AI hype because of LLMs. Anyone so much a thinking about a markov chain is changing their marketing copy to be about how they're an AI-driven company.
100% of these AI hype articles are also puff pieces for a specific company. They also all have a very loose interpretation of "AI." Anything that uses any machine learning techniques is AI, which is going to revolutionize every industry and/or end life as we know it.
Anyway, that complaint aside: That seems like a plausible use for machine learning. I look forward to wealthy Americans being able to access it while the rest of us wait 19 months to get a new PCP and take out a mortgage for the privilege.
The basic gist is you define "agents" as individual actors following very specific set of rules, usually quite stripped down and simple, and then simulate lots of agents acting together to see what the emergent properties are.
Generally, your agents have rules, you set up the initial conditions, and then you have a "time step," or a "turn," in which the agents interact.
For example, you might simulate a social media platform by saying that each person (the agent) has two rules:
Each person will make one tweet, composed of a gpt2 generated sentence
Each person will like boost any other person's tweet that they see whose tweet most resembles one of their own, by using something like a string distance similarity cutoff or something
Each time step might look like this:
Each user makes their random tweet
Each user is presented with N random tweets from the whole pool of tweets, weighted by how boosted they are (a twice boosted tweet appears in the bag three times, so to speak, whereas a non-boosted tweet is just there once)
At the end, you could see how even under these conditions, some tweets go viral. And this is what I mean when I say interpreting the results of agent-based modeling is tricky -- you sort of purposefully craft your agents to get the result you want.
This can be a bit confusing, because that's a bit backwards to how the hypothesis-experiment-conclusion thing normally works, but agent modeling is more an interpretive act than a descriptive one. The point is to see if you can recreate an emergent, complex behavior with simple rules. The model I made up just now, which I haven't actually coded up and might not work at all (though I'm tempted now...), wouldn't explain tweets going viral, but it might give some insight into the baked-in nature of going viral in the very structure of twitter, even independent of the content of the tweet.
One of the classic uses of these sorts of models is what these authors did -- you look for tipping points. Roughly speaking, tipping points are when a change in a system produce a qualitatively different behavior. So, in our example, we might notice that once a tweet has a certain amount of retweets, it gets retweeted forever, or something like that. We might change the initial conditions or rules of the game (how many tweets per turn, how many tweets does each user see, etc.), and glean some insight into how those affect that condition.
People love to do agent-based modeling for markets, as you might imagine. I think markets are silly, so I also think many of these models can be quite silly, especially the ones that are intended to predict things to make money, which can make very, very complex agents (imo this is a strange application of the idea of agent modeling), but some of them are very good. Again, I personally think markets are dumb, so my bias is going to show, but people do really good agent-based models using coin flips or energy exchange in ideal gases to show that inequality is baked into markets.
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml Posts 12Comments 348Joined 2 yr. ago
We live in a vast digital spectacle, but we don't participate in the spectacle -- we consume it. Since nothing is real anymore, since our entire reality only exists through digital media, and since we have absolutely no agency, why not vote for a shit-poster for president? It's fun as hell to watch him troll all those tedious snobs in DC. Fuck those guys.
Then enough people voted for him that something incredible happened. He won. That wasn't supposed to happen! For once, something changed, and everyone who voted for him was a part of that change.
Actually accomplishing something is fucking intoxicating. It's so easy to get hooked on that heady feeling of mattering at all for once in our pathetic, powerless, alienated existences as cogs in a giant wasteful plastic machine. We spend months, then years, then decades drifting without meaning, working jobs we hate, taking our kids to shitty day cares we can barely afford, waiting 19 month to see a doctor about that new weird lump, and so on.
For these people, reality has never been so real. They're actually in it now, doing things. They've chosen a new content-creator-in-chief, and they want his content to take over the whole spectacle.