They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.

So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.

Mine aren’t quite that long, but are similar. And I’m a guy. I get really severe ingrown toenails if I keep mine trimmed too short, but don’t have any issues as long as I keep them grown out past the skin. Yes, they’re annoying, and took getting used to. I can still wear closed-toed shoes (occasionally I buy a size larger if the shape of the shoe feels tight on my nails). It all still beats the pain and occasional bloody socks from my nails cutting into my toes as they grow.

If anything eventually it’ll be like gardening seeds. Where yeah, there’s a lot of hybrid seeds that might be good for certain traits, but what a bunch of gardeners really want are heirloom varieties that are more naturally-selected and therefore more reliable over multiple generations.

You could go the evil route and become a hitman as well, or rather a shitman, turning your targets into poo.

The US founding fathers decided that the president has to be at least 35, which to me implies that those individuals have had some political experience before becoming president. IMO roughly half the Senate should be under 35, and a good chunk of the House of Representatives should be under 29 considering Senate terms are 6-years long.

Not that you should have to be a “career politician” before becoming president, but it’s fairly common to want to show some experience at leadership/politics.

I’m not really a fan, but look at “Mayor” Pete Buttigeg. One of the biggest attacks against him when he ran was “being president is not the same as being a mayor” (meanwhile we’ll elect CEOs like their experience means anything, but that’s a whole other problem).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI be this creative with text without getting completely scrambled, if anything the crazy text is evidence that it isn’t AI slop.

I’ve had in-person jobs where I was on the clock for 12 hours and did probably 30-40 minutes worth of actual tasks over that time. I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t only wfh jobs that can feel almost too “easy.” Only advice I have is enjoy it while you can, because if and when it ends, getting thrown back into a “normal” job can feel overwhelming for a bit.

Oh I have read and heard about all those things, none of them (to my knowledge) are being done by OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic, or any of the large companies fueling the current AI bubble, which is why I call it a bubble. The things you mentioned are where AI has potential, and I think that continuing to throw billions at marginally better LLMs and generative models at this point is hurting the real innovators. And sure, maybe some of those who are innovating end up getting bought by the larger companies, but that’s not as good for their start-ups or for humanity at large.

I’m using “good” in almost a moral sense. The quality of output from LLMs and generative AI is already about as good as it can get from a technical standpoint, continuing to throw money and data at it will only result in minimal improvement.

What I mean by “good AI” is the potential of new types of AI models to be trained for things like diagnosing cancer, and and other predictive tasks that we haven’t thought of yet that actually have the potential to help humanity (and not just put artists and authors out of their jobs).

The work of training new, useful AI models is going to be done by scientists and researchers, probably on a limited budgets because there won’t be a clear profit motive, and they won’t be able to afford thousands of $20,000 GPUs like are being thrown at LLMs and generative AI today. But as the current AI race crashes and burns, the used hardware of today will be more affordable and hopefully actually get used for useful AI projects.

I firmly believe we won’t get most of the interesting, “good” AI until after this current AI bubble bursts and goes down in flames. Once AI hardware is cheap interesting people will use it to make cool things. But right now, the big players in the space are drowning out anyone who might do real AI work that has potential, by throwing more and more hardware and money at LLMs and generative AI models because they don’t understand the technology and see it as a way to get rich and powerful quickly.

At the very least heavy regulation to prevent unfair practices. Humans will pretty much always optimize the fun out of everything.

Take competitive video games for example, where once something becomes the meta, it’s used and abused until it gets nerfed. But people still play hundreds of games with whatever the most optimal meta is, even if it takes the fun and variety out of the game and makes it boring.

Pretty much every economic system ends up the same way, people figure out the most optimal ways to exploit whatever the system is, take the fun and fairness out of it, and ruin it for anyone who doesn’t want to play by the meta. In an ideal system, there’s strong regulatory systems in place (for example the FTC and the CFPB) that work to balance things and make sure the system works for everyone. But the people who like to optimize the fun out of things have decided they’d like the regulators out of the way so they can go crazy with their exploitation.

Based on the attempts we’ve seen at censoring AI output so far, there doesn’t seem to me to be a way to actually do this without building a new model with pre-censored training data.

Sure they can tune models, but even “MechaHitler” Grok was still giving some “woke” answers on occasion. I don’t see how this doesn’t either destroy AI’s “usefulness” (not that there’s any usefulness there to begin with) or cost so much to implement that investors pull out because none of the AI companies are profitable, and throwing billions more to sift through and filter the training data pushes profitability even further away (if censoring all the training data is even possible at all).

I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

Not one of those gun people, but I still support the 2nd ammendment to some extent (down to ban AR-15s and other “scary-looking” guns simply because they are often used by mall-ninja types who do mass shootings). But I think most responsible gun owners are refusing to give fascists a reason/excuse to accelerate or escalate things (for the record, none of MAGA qualify as “responsible gun owners”). I know things are terrifyingly bad right now, but guns/violence are only going to make the current situation worse faster - at least for now. We do seem to be charging full-speed into a situation where they’ll be helpful and useful, which is terrifying. But with as much as it might feel like an “easy fix” to nip things in the bud now, it’s more likely to give fascism even more power and fuel for their propaganda.

Elon Musk is #26 and Tracer is #27. So there are definitely some edgelords fucking around and messing with the stats.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

I take one taco, and then go tell Mike Johnson that there are free tacos and where to get them.

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.