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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • this is the era of AI

    Uh, sure, so long as you define an “era” as “a period wherein a bunch of C-suites wet themselves over unproven tech.” I hope you realize that something having a lot of money behind it for a few years isn’t indicative that it’s about to revolutionize the world. There are plenty of near-useless things that had lots of excitement behind them, and still didn’t go anywhere.

    I’ve seen what GenAI and LLMs can do. It’s a magic trick; it looks impressive, but for almost every possible use case just isn’t helpful, and unfortunately for all of us, the magicians (i.e. OpenAI et al) are douchebags on top. This is not tech worth advocating for.



  • Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.

    Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.








  • I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.

    Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:

    • Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
    • Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
    • Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
    • Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them

    This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.

    If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.



  • I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.

    Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.




  • I’m so sick and tired of this gleeful throw-people-under-the-bus attitude that effectively dehumanizes people because they “voted wrong,” as if there aren’t millions of people among Trump’s voterbase who were effectively tricked by an entire network of con-men and grifters. As if there isn’t a giant oil-baron-funded media machine working tirelessly to convince people of a smorgasbord of lies.

    I find it disgusting how easily you and others with similar takes will cheer on the suffering of your fellows. And let the Republican Party off scot-free in the process. Because apparently blaming a bunch of people who – let’s be real – by-and-large don’t pay attention to politics is apparently more important than blaming the people who’re deliberately engineering mass suffering. Not to mention how you’re currently partaking in schadenfreude over a problem that’s affecting many people you ostensibly agree with and care about! Everybody in America has to deal with the consequences of this bill!

    Nobody in the U.S. voted for censorship or for fascism, save an extraordinarily scant few terrible, terrible people. If you decide that vast swathes of people “deserve this” all because of that few, I don’t think you ever actually wanted to help anyone so much as you wanted an excuse not to have to care.