[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

That's another thing I've noticed online. There's a very large "get in on this now and get rich," Crypto kind of vibe to some of this stuff.

Like, this isn't crypto, but I feel like that Venn diagram has a great deal of overlap.

This academic year is going to be interesting.

Already, news reports indicate that different stances are being taken in different states and even within states as to whether students should have access to ChatGPT.

In New South Wales, public schools are reportedly blocking the IP address via their firewalls (although kids can still VPN out so I don't know how they are going to stop any enterprising student from doing so). In comparison, the Catholic schools are apparently leaving it unblocked but are going to shift to more pen and paper assessments.

Personally, I feel the children who don't get familiar with AI now will be disadvantaged as they enter the workforce vs those used to manipulating its systems and are adept at finetuning / using its abilities to increase their productivity. I don't like the idea of using it too much as an academic crutch but we also need to raise individuals who are adept with digital tools to keep up with whatever society requires of them in the workplace.

FWIW, I don't think the schools can quite do that much to prevent students from using AI. "You can't use it on a school computer" isn't going to stop anyone when it can be easily accessed on a phone.

Oh, I have no doubt students will use AI for their homework or whatever despite school rules, or as you say, using a phone or other device to tunnel out / access it.

There will be silly kids who copy paste whatever the AI produces, without referencing/bibliography or checking plagiarism.

Then, there will be the more intelligent kind who will feed their assignment/ draft work into the AI for enhancement. Those ones will then use the AI to improve the structure / logical arguments of their work, which might give them a competitve advantage over the student who does not get assistance (from tutors/parents/AI).

Those kinds of intelligent kids will use AI "learning" to enhance their capabilities, kind of like academic doping (which already exists with some students doping up on ADHD focus enhancing drugs) - because their work would not otherwise be as representative of their actual raw capability but instead reflect a blending of their capabilities + AI.

If we can reliably predict there will be an uneven playing field from Day 1, it seems the smarter solution, for equality sake amongst children, is to teach ALL of them what it does, and get them all to use it to enhance their learning.

Bfgp wrote:

If we can reliably predict there will be an uneven playing field from Day 1, it seems the smarter solution, for equality sake amongst children, is to teach ALL of them what it does, and get them all to use it to enhance their learning.

That strategy presupposes that teachers know what it does and can keep up with "what it does" changing faster than the kids can.

Great points. I wonder what kind of citation will be required for, “AI enhanced” reports/papers. Does that go in the bibliography/references section or as small print on the title page…

Imagine having a vision of the future and all it is is “disrupt Kindle and Audible” as if they’re massive institutions controlling our lives.

Artificial Intelligence and all he can think of is “making movies”.

I can't wait to live Bleak House!

I mean, I was SO disappointed in The Peripheral TV adaptation that it made me pick up the book to re-read it to remind myself how much damn better it is.

People are using AI for therapy, whether the tech is ready for it or not

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT launched last November and quickly set off a panic across all sectors of society. Programmers are using it to code whole websites. Professors are worried it can write papers—though it seems like professors can use it just as easily to grade them. There has even been a news outlet that used it covertly to write SEO blog posts.

But ChatGPT is powerful enough that Microsoft, which owns a $1 billion stake in the company that created it, OpenAI, plans to integrate it into its search engine Bing. Which means we’re only at the beginning of understanding what ChatGPT and similar text-based AI technology can do.

For instance, could it ever replace your therapist?

It’s a fairly uncomfortable idea to consider, but users—and companies—are already experimenting with what an AI mental health professional might look like.

Microsoft extends AI partnership with ChatGPT and Dall-E maker OpenAI

Microsoft has announced a multi-year, multibillion dollar investment in artificial intelligence (AI) as it extends its partnership with OpenAI.

OpenAI is the creator of popular image generation tool Dall-E and the chatbot ChatGPT.

In in 2019 Microsoft invested $1bn (£808m) in the company, founded by Elon Musk and tech investor Sam Altman.

The Windows and Xbox maker plans up to 10,000 redundancies, but said it would still hire in key strategic areas.

Breaking the news in a memo to staff last week, chief executive Satya Nadella said: "The next major wave of computing is being born, with advances in AI."

Announcing the extended partnership, the firm said it believed AI would have an "impact at the magnitude of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud".

Musk just let Nick Fuentes back on Twitter so I guess he's decided the way he's going to make up the $6 billion revenue shortfall the company is facing is to get 750 million Nazis to buy a blue checkmark.

If there are 750 million Nazis in the world, we've got bigger problems

there are worse people still on twitter, Fuentes just didn’t last because he has cultivated a movement so insular and racist that he has forgotten how to dogwhistle.

The article kind of makes that point

"Fuentes’ mistake was immediately going all in on his white nationalism. Other neo-Nazis have maintained their accounts long after the Musk-owned platform reinstated them over the last few months."

So you can be a hateful, white supremist, but just keep it mild.

*this part is a bit controversial but I was thinking it and wondered about other's opinions*
At first I was going to say how horrible that was but isn't that what a diverse society is really? We can't stop people from thinking or feeling certain ways but we can stop them from expressing those ideas loudly, we can stop them from holding public events, etc.
So if these looney's do keep it toned down should they still be barred from existing.

I found this quote from the article mildly humorous:

Gizmodo reached out to the company for comment, but since the platform no longer has a communications team, we will likely not hear back.
farley3k wrote:

The article kind of makes that point

"Fuentes’ mistake was immediately going all in on his white nationalism. Other neo-Nazis have maintained their accounts long after the Musk-owned platform reinstated them over the last few months."

So you can be a hateful, white supremist, but just keep it mild.

*this part is a bit controversial but I was thinking it and wondered about other's opinions*
At first I was going to say how horrible that was but isn't that what a diverse society is really? We can't stop people from thinking or feeling certain ways but we can stop them from expressing those ideas loudly, we can stop them from holding public events, etc.
So if these looney's do keep it toned down should they still be barred from existing.

Barred from existing? No.

Barred from Twitter? Yup, still good with that.

farley3k wrote:

So if these looney's do keep it toned down should they still be barred from existing.

"One person, one vote" explicitly implies that arseholes get a voice too.

Jonman wrote:
farley3k wrote:

So if these looney's do keep it toned down should they still be barred from existing.

"One person, one vote" explicitly implies that arseholes get a voice too.

I mean, sure, they can easily hold a pen but they aren't going to be terribly accurate while filling in the bubble. And, god help them if they ever want to vote for a write-in candidate.

Does the Metaverse Need Burritos? Chipotle Went on Roblox to Find Out

Making a Chipotle burrito in the metaverse isn’t so different from making a real one.

Players on the fast-food chain’s Roblox game use their computer mouses to drag and drop ingredients from the virtual counter to an open-faced burrito. White rice, black beans, garlic guajillo steak, mild salsa, cheese. The timer starts. Five, four. Fold the burrito corners using the keyboard arrows. Three, two. Make the final roll using the “up” arrow. One. Next burrito.

When entering the Burrito Builder game, a prompt tells players they’ve been transported to the first Chipotle, created in 1993. The digital restaurant looks like the real location, down to the writing on the menu. Surrounding the restaurant is a series of Chipotle-inspired stores—BurritoBuster, Carnitas Cinema and Tortilla Records—as well as houses and a park.

On Roblox, Chipotle has digitized the experience of working at a real-life restaurant. More than 4 million users played the game its first week, and more than 17 million have since then. It follows Chipotle’s first metaverse experience, released six months earlier—a maze to earn virtual merchandise and free burritos at real-life restaurants—to accompany its Halloween-themed Boorito marketing.

I feel like Burger Time did this back in the 80s.

@swolecialism wrote:

Amazing how "move fast and break stuff" basically only meant "move fast and break the law" because they figured out that if you got rich enough fast enough the laws stopped applying

Just make sure you're only taking money from plebs, and not scamming your rich investors. Elizabeth Holmes didn't get that memo.

Prederick wrote:
@swolecialism wrote:

Amazing how "move fast and break stuff" basically only meant "move fast and break the law" because they figured out that if you got rich enough fast enough the laws stopped applying

Hey, it's the history of America!

Prederick wrote:
@swolecialism wrote:

Amazing how "move fast and break stuff" basically only meant "move fast and break the law" because they figured out that if you got rich enough fast enough the laws stopped applying

I love that person's Twitter handle.

I remember one woman who rode BART with Silicon Valley techbros realized that "disruption" was just "white boys crimin'."

Rat Boy wrote:

I feel like Burger Time did this back in the 80s.

I loved that game... on Intellivision... oh dear...
IMAGE(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQO4HznoSmdIs0Hv9_-hSS2AukPm9b_nDdJQ4ERWSaLc_x8dbLiUucR1XgYkYs6eHRdOXw&usqp=CAU)

Prederick wrote:

I'm genuinely becoming convinced a fair number of tech guys like.... don't understand life outside of their idealized, optimized version of reality. Like, they don't understand why you'd read a book, why you're enjoy making a piece of art, it's all just "disrupt" and market opportunity for content.

It's f*ckin' bleak, honestly.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:
Prederick wrote:
@swolecialism wrote:

Amazing how "move fast and break stuff" basically only meant "move fast and break the law" because they figured out that if you got rich enough fast enough the laws stopped applying

I love that person's Twitter handle.

I remember one woman who rode BART with Silicon Valley techbros realized that "disruption" was just "white boys crimin'."

1000% it's this. Seems like the people known for kicking off this buzzword are LOUSY with corruption and robber-barroning their way into profits...until it inevitably fails and they lose because it's usually smoke/mirrors/bullsh*t. Every time I hear someone crowing about disruption I look forward to watching them tank on bloomberg.

There was some screen-capped convo I caught on Twitter of some dude arguing that ChatGPT and AI art are the path to a utopian society and...

...like, these dudes always make these promises. And they're always at best, wrong, but usually just self-serving lies.

Every single one of these dudes makes the same promises, and it all ends the same. A very small group of people enriching themselves immensely, while selling to a very large group of people that no, seriously, just keep grinding and listening to our podcast and HODL and you'll be a millionaire too, we swear.

WAGMI, etc.

Not really a good place to put this thread, but because he's a tech bro, I'll put it here:

Tech CEO Bryan Johnson is hell bent on discovering the fountain of youth, no matter how much money it costs, pain he endures, or skepticism you have. “I am,” he says, “what I always longed to become.”

The night before we met, Bryan Johnson didn’t get up once to pee. The development excited him greatly, because it was proof his plan was working.

In previous weeks, Johnson had been spending 30 minutes at a time sitting on top of an electromagnetic machine to strengthen the pelvic floor. The contraption, which feels like two small hands repeatedly punching you in the sensitive region in quick succession, is typically for women who are hoping to rebuild strength after birth. But Johnson wanted to use it for something else.

In Johnson’s world, anything less than complete perfection is seen as deficiency, and the nightly urination was getting in the way of perfect sleep. The machine seemed to have fixed the problem. He proudly showed me his sleep activity for the past week as registered by his smartwatch; he had scored an enviable and perfect 100 each night, on 8.5 hours on average. There were other benefits, too. The machine had substantially increased his “urination strength” and the distance from which he could stand from the toilet while peeing—a sign, he claimed, that he was getting younger, not older.

Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.

Johnson is not a professional athlete, nor does he have any obvious illness. He is, in many ways, a Silicon Valley success story, the founder of the payment processing company Braintree, which purchased Venmo in 2012 before it was acquired the next year by PayPal for $800 million, making him rich enough to pursue far loftier goals. Soon after that, he founded Kernel, a neuroscience-focused technology company focused on developing a helmet that will, in his own words, “bring the brain online.”

But his latest obsession might be his most ambitious project to date. At a minimum, it is certainly his most personal. For nearly two years, Johnson has been using his body as a science experiment, a vessel through which, he hopes, humanity can understand its utmost limits through his own regimen of extreme dieting and exercise, which has been developed according to what he believes is the top scientific literature of the day and tweaked according to how his ligaments, tendons, liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, and skin respond. He describes the process, in which he analyzes his body and then adjusts his “protocol” for the slightest imperfections, as “gorgeous” and freeing. Others might see his situation differently. He no longer eats what his brain wants or, at times, does what his brain wants. He has constructed a machine out of science, and outside of one large exception—his personal preference to remain predominantly vegan—that machine dictates his life.

Y'know those women who spend a kersplillion dollars to look like a real-life barbie doll? This is the dude version of that.