dick_stitches

Yo-ho yo-ho

Isn't this EXACTLY how it worked before publishers started using the internet? You had to pay either a subscription, or per issue for every magazine or newspaper you wanted to read. Instead of having subscriptions to "dozens of different news outlets", people only paid for a few. The ones that interested you most, you paid a subscription for, and if you were interested in anything else, you just bought single issues.

I don't know about you, but I don't live in a utopia that works like this. Journalists have wages, web servers cost a lot of money to run. Printing presses and physical distribution channels also cost a lot of money. If information should be free, how should publishers pay for all of these labor and infrastructure costs?

I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now

Paisley: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_(design)

No, LA isn’t getting anything done. Not clearing encampments of likely less a humanitarian decision and more of a “let’s keep doing nothing” decision

That’s the fun part! When the US government is also in charge on enforcing the law, they can do whatever they want!

I could hear this explosion from 7 miles away

I thought Apple's WWDC keynote showed some good uses for it, but you're right, it kind of is just incremental, and may or may not be worth the privacy/compute cost. I personally am mostly excited that Siri will be able to contextualize my calendars, notes, messages, etc. There are lots of bits of information I've lost over the years, that isn't actually lost, but just buried, and current search just isn't up to the task of finding it. Or searching through notes: instead of having to remember when I took a note and where I asked it, I can just ask Siri a question and it'll basically search through my notes and find the answer.

I also think it's going to completely change academic research. Instead of going to Jstor and using a traditional search bar, you could just tell the AI assistant what you're thinking about, what your theories are, etc, and it will search the catalog and find relevant sources for you. It removes a layer of friction, which I think will make a lot of people more efficient/effective.

The main argument I see against it is "well that is all well and good, but none of that will matter when the internet is full of AI-generated crap." I mean yeah, that's true, but the internet is already full of non-AI-generated crap. Sifting through the shitty ads and "sponsored posts" has already made the internet nearly unusable IMO. That's a bigger problem that we need to deal with, that's separate from AI.

I think healthy skepticism is always a good thing. A lot of people seem to be looking at this tech as a panacea, which it absolutely isn’t. It’s still really important that we have the ability to identify when it may be hallucinating, just like we really need the ability to think critically about literally anything on the internet.

I’m excited for it. I don’t think hallucinations will be a huge concern. Knowing about all (or most) of the content on my devices is a MUCH easier prospect than knowing everything about everything, which is an idea that OpenAI or Google certainly aren’t trying too hard to refute about their models

Not me but my friend technically made the world’s biggest chicken nugget. Turns out getting Guinness to certify it is kind of a pain though so it’s not on the books