It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.
When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”
I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.
And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.
The best AI tools will also cite references, like Wikipedia, so you can click all the way through.
We need to be able to distinguish between giving kids a chance to learn how to use AI, and replacing their whole education with AI.
Right under this story in my feed is the one about the CEO who fired 80% of his staff because they didn’t switch over to AI fast enough. That’s the world these kids are being prepared for.
I would rather they get some exposure to AI in the classroom where a teacher can be present and do some contextualizing. Kids are going to find AI either way. My kids have gotten reasonable contextualizing of other things at school, like not to trust Google blindly and not to cite Wikipedia as a source. Schools aren’t always great with new technology but they aren’t always terrible either. My kids school seems to take a very cautious approach with technology and mostly teach literacy and critical thinking about it. They aren’t throwing out textbooks, shoving AI at kids and calling it learning.
This is an alarmist post. AIs benefits to education are far from proven. But it’s definitely high time for kids everyone to get some education about it at least.
Haven’t touched that pile of shit in years.
We killed a lot of people to ensure that oil is bought and sold with dollars around the world. No way we’re going to let that currency crutch just go away.
There’s no way this was Cloudflare taking a stand for liberty and free speech. They are simply choosing to obey one less regulation. Less for them to do. Less to be accountable for. Less to special-case for one country.
These corporations hate being regulated - it could be by a direct popular ballot, not politicians, and they would still resist. Let’s not mistake corporate obstructionism for libertarianism.
That’s moderation. When there’s a law against it, that’s censorship.
Frankly a couple of countries have passed laws against Nazi speech and paraphernalia, and after the Nazis plunged the world into the biggest war of all time and murdered 12 million people for their racist ideology, I’m cool with that. If that’s the bar: I can live with it. Murder 12 million, your little club no longer gets to meet.
There have always been rational limits on speech.
I agree. I share my use cases mostly to put the critical thinking behind them on display. I’m sure the crowd here is very savvy. But in the general public I agree that many if not most people would be completely seduced by the obsequious & confident tone of the robot. It can do so many things that it becomes tempting to rely on it. You wish it worked better than it did, and if you let yourself get lazy, you can easily slip into trusting it too much.
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As time goes by I’m finding a place for AI.
I use it for information searches, but only in cases where I know the information exists and there is an actual answer. Like history questions or asking for nuanced definitions of words and concepts.
I use it to manipulate documents. I have a personal pet peeve about the format of most recipes for example. Recipes always list the ingredient amounts in a table at the top, but then down in the steps they just say “add the salt” or “mix in the flour.” Then I have to look up at the chart and find the amount of salt/flour, and then I lose my place in the steps and have to find it again. I just have AI throw out the chart and integrate the amounts into the steps: “mix in 2 cups of flour”. I can have it shorten the instructions too and break them into easier to read bullet points. I also ask it to make ingredient substitutions and other modifications. The other day I gave it a bread recipe and asked it to introduce a cold-proofing step and reformat everything the way I like. It did great.
Learning interactively. When I need to absorb a new skill or topic I sometimes do it conversationally with AI. Yes I can find articles and videos but then I am stuck with the information they lay out and the pace and order in which they do it. With AI you can stop and ask clarifying questions, or have it skip over the parts you already know. I find this is way faster than laborious googling. However only trust it for very straightforward topics. Like “explain the different kinds of welding and what they are for.” I wouldn’t trust it for more nuanced topics where perspective and opinion come into it. And I’ve leaned that it isn’t great at topics where there isn’t enough information out there. Like very niche questions about the meta of a certain video game that’s only been out a month.
Speech to text and summarization. AI records all my Zoom meetings for work and gives summaries of what was discussed and next steps. This is always better than nothing. I’m also impressed with how it seems to understand how to discard idle chit chat and only record actual work content. At most it says “the meeting began with coworkers exchanging details from their respective weekends.”
This kind of hard-and-fast summarization and manipulation of factual text is much easier with AI. Doing my job for me? No. Hovering over my entire computer? No. Writing my emails for me? Fuck off.
The takeaway is that specific tools I can go to when I need them, for point-specific needs, is all I want. I don’t need or what a hovering AI around all the time, and I don’t want whatever tripe Dell can come up with when I can get the best latest models direct from the leading players.
They’re not enforceable, binding laws anyway. It’s a bunch of corporate CYA. They want to be able to tell a judge someday that they did everything they could to inform you of their business practices and get you to agree to use their product responsibly. The company’s chance of facing a court action is much higher than a user’s chance of being held to whatever they agreed by checking a box.
Putting the “mildly” back in mildly infuriating.
Yeah exactly. Hank Green hints at this in the video title but skin is the biggest problem that had to be solved to move us onto land. How does one keep from drying out? It’s like we made a spacesuit for ourselves and now live in it.
They went through a very public divestment of the company from all the “family” centric hate groups. The owners still donate to them personally but the company’s charitable giving arm does not.
You could call them woke for “backing up” a gay marriage or you could say they chose not to go to the trouble of breaking heads over some gay marriage. I know the Trump era has emboldened the worst of us, but that doesn’t mean everyone is for sure willing to prove that their PR has been phony all along. They don’t have enough to gain.
I learned about this from an awesome Hank Green video about how life evolved to move out of the ocean onto land. Developing air breathing lungs was one step in that, and it appears that lungs developed from stomachs. Any soft tissue with a lot of blood flowing through it close to the surface can absorb some oxygen. Some fish began to develops such sacs and use them to gulp and capture airborne oxygen. And he notes that there are some surgeries today where they may “aspirate the patient’s colon” with oxygen to keep their blood oxygen up when conventional breathing must be supplemented. Breathing through your ass is in fact a thing.
Not only does it need to become possible, it needs to become more effective than other treatments like crowns and implants. I think it’s going to be a long time, and even then will only be applicable in limited cases for a long time, and will be really expensive.
In theory. Long term vacancy is not in any corporate landlord’s plan, though. They will adjust rather than seek impossible rent forever. And aside from large apartment buildings, most residences (75% of 1-4 unit buildings) are owned by small landlords who don’t give a shit about network effects.
The only way that happens is if the rent is too high.
That’s not the only way. It’s not even very likely. If they are looking for too much rent and can’t get it they will lower their ask rather than sit there month after month getting nothing. Too high rent is the most easily fixable situation conceivable.
Other explanations include things like: it’s owned by someone who is elderly and due to their health or other problem they simply aren’t managing it actively or are even incapacitated and can’t make major decisions. Perhaps the owner died and the property is in the probate courts, which can take years.
Also, the presence of squatters doesn’t necessarily indicate it has been vacant for a long time.
I agree with you that education is not primarily workforce training. I just included that note as a bit of context because it definitely made me chuckle to see these two posts right together, each painting a completely different picture of AI: “so important you must embrace it or you will die” versus “what the hell is this shit keep it away from children.”
I fall in between somewhere. We should be very cautious with AI and judicious in its use.
I just think that “cautious and judicious” means having it in schools - not keeping it out of schools. Toddler daycares should be angelic safe spaces where kids are utterly protected. Schools should actually have challenging material that demands critical thinking.