/checks for dolphins flying out of the oceans

Even from your living room.

Then why not Puerto Rico before Canada ?

The part that I find should be the question is: Would ex-Canadians be able to run for President ?

They were not naturally born in US soil. So there would be like … 35 years where no ex-Canadian could run for president ?

So why would a country want to become part of that deal ?

To be forced into another country that they would have zero right to lead ?

I would certainly say “fuck that” to that deal.

Another reason to tell Obama to fuck himself.

If the status quo is NAZI and you do not challenge it … then you will be remembered as a NAZI. That is all there is to this. And that is fair.

int* ihadatonepointforgottenaboutpoundefinesyoubastard {};

The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.

But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.

The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off of some bones.

Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the fun horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)

For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.

The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.

All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. Such is it with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: eventually, the pot will burn dry.

no

bread is flour with yeast and water leavened via fermentation then baked.

chips are corn masa or wheat flour made into a dough with water with no yeast and not fermented then fried and salted.

why do people think that leaving out facts between things makes them the same thing ?

If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.

Removed by mod

I’m sorry that you can’t enjoy your Xmas if adult exchange gifts.

I feel badly for you. And a large part of me suspects this post is just trawling for arguments and bad faith.

Happy Holidays!

most towns used to have more than one newspaper and they used to display their political bias happily on the front page.

all the sides were represented by five or six different people discussing an issue with maybe each person bringing a different side from a different paper to the discussion.

tv and cable and internet tore apart that public dialectic.

and it forced fewer papers to try to portray more sides “equally”.

now a city is lucky if it has one newspaper. and they can’t possibly cover every angle any longer because if you have been in a newsroom in the past 15 years for most small to medium town they are like four people now when 30 was required for reporting, photography, editing, and classified section. And the big towns now might have two that both bend towards the middle from the left and right with a stripped down, skinny and pissed workers.

So sorry conversation amongst a varied and well read public is required for that to work.

and no one reads anymore we all just write and move on.

using A.I. to be creative is like using debit card to buy things.

you have to ask for permission from a corporation to use it first.

I’m arguing that death squads of one v one are like death squads of fifty v one.

That is not a country that I want to live in. That country, the death squad country, will kill more than thousands.

But whatever, OP. It is just one must actually occupy the moral high ground to claim it. And assassination is not a moral choice. But you do have a funny picture.

Haha.

the other brown shirt

Santa is the bringer of the New World Order

I have to read out loud to myself to finish a book or an article.

It has made my reading comprehension go through the roof. And I didn’t understand that about myself for my first 45 years.

Perhaps you might be preying upon a vulnerable person with your “friendship”.

Thus far you have milked them for imaginary internet status points. What a friend.

They are going after the billionaire who won’t play along with Trump.

And they are being on purpose hypocritical and smarmy. Even that senator’s wikipedia page labels him as a businessman before being a senator. Priorities priorities

If they did, and no one could tell the difference.