Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.

Would it save time at this point if, rather than reporting on every Republican paedophile, we just reported every time it was revealed that a Republican wasn’t a paedophile?

There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:

Tweet 1:

Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT

Tweet 2:

Bro just discovered “thinking”

I downloaded Comet to give it a fair go, loaded it up, and then went “…now what?” Couldn’t think of a single thing i could use the AI interface for.

My personal favourite with Atlas is when he demonstrates searching your history. It takes him longer to type out the command than it would to open your history and search manually, and then it takes It like 10 seconds to find a result, when a manual search would be instantaneous.

The future is here!

Yeah, robots doing drudge work is exactly the future we were promised. It’s just that that’s supposed to allow humans to have more free time to pursue their interests, not die in a ditch from starvation.

If this means you can ask it to pretend to be a busty nurse with a limp, that already exists. If it means that you can say “what’s the name of that video with the busty nurse with a lisp?” and it’ll give you a link, then that’s potential, right there. I can imagine them right now torrenting every porn video they can and getting one llm to transcribe it to create training data for another llm while a third llm does image/scene analysis.

You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

Or, let’s say that it is a utopia and you somehow get in. Congratulations, you now have to spend an eternity with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

I blame google. Seriously.

I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.

But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.

Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.

So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.

It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.

I love how the photo of the inside of the place looks like it’s ai generated

I, Tonya(?)

Spider-Man (I don’t know which of the Tobey Maguire films, though)

Hereditary

The Shining

No, they want to keep her out because as soon as she’s in she can force a vote on the Epstein files

I agree with this screenshot of a tweet

Better yet, a system which requires co-operation between different parties

I recommend it anyway. It’s always fun to play with someone else’s ideas. You end up writing stuff you otherwise wouldn’t. And there’s something to be said for “I’ve got x amount of time to finish this” due to external factors. Just don’t pay attention to the competition aspect and you’ll almost certainly find it rewarding.

I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.

I forget who it was, but a public figure once said that birthdays are horrible because it allows people you thought you were close to to demonstrate how little they really know you

I don’t disagree with your point at all, but I don’t think the divorce thing is separate from feminism. Women became financially independent because of feminism, and felt emboldened and worthwhile enough to leave abusive situations because of feminism.

It’s perhaps fairer to say that we can, at least partially, credit feminism with these things. It didn’t magically do it in the way that misogynists would like to think, but it’s definitely not unrelated.

This is such an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

And this is because 99% of our press is explicitly right-wing and has a somewhat fuzzy relationship with truth.

Thanks, Murdoch!