AlexandrB

przedwczorajdiscuss

Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership does something similar[1]. The worst part about these systems is that the lack of accountability and appeals process. If you end up on the "bad" list, you're banned and probably SOL.

[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_38944_joe-rogans-comedy-club...

AlexandrB

3 dni temudiscuss

Not to worry, Flock, Palantir, and whoever else has use for it will keep it very safe once they buy it from the car company for $1/driver/month.

Edit: Oh maybe MindGeek too, since some car companies reserve the right[1] to record "sexual activity" in the car.

[1] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

AlexandrB

3 dni temudiscuss

The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.

Let's just be honest about that at least.

AlexandrB

3 dni temudiscuss

You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".

So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?

My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_(2015_film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Behind_the_Sun

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

It went south around this point:

    Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
    Zuck: Just ask.
    Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
    [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
    Zuck: People just submitted it.
    Zuck: I don't know why.
    Zuck: They "trust me"
    Zuck: Dumb fucks.

I don't know why anyone trusted anything that came out of Zuckerberg's mouth for the last 20 years.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok.

I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

> Buy a plethora of studios.

To be fair to Phil Spencer, this was the strategy across the industry right after COVID. Remember the shopping spree Embracer Group went on between 2020 and 2022? I think we were in an e-sports & live service bubble that has now popped.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential.

What if the answer is flatly: no? All that other stuff starts to matter a lot then.

Predicating your business decisions on a potential breakthrough that may never come is frankly insane. Imagine if at the dawn of the car industry Ford decided that it's actually a race to build the first flying car and nothing else matters.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

The "parrot" part of "stochastic parrot" is quite an ambiguous choice. Taken literally, it's referencing an animal that's actually quite intelligent and capable of complex, novel tasks but has no way to connect those to human language. How I've always read this though is the more literary meaning of "parrot" as "a thing that repeats words with no context". Perhaps "stochastic photocopier" would be a clearer metaphor.

AlexandrB

4 dni temudiscuss

Here's the thing: most things people do does not involve tokens of any kind. It is, in fact, stuff that not easily describable. For example, it's trivial for a person to walk, but they cannot verbally describe what muscles they're activating in what order to make that happen.

Cognitive skills such as tool use and complex navigation predate language as well. That means there's a core of reasoning in humans that doesn't depend on "tokens" or "language" of any kind. Language is a tool for communication and forming complex human societies, but it's not cognition.

> The thing is a parrot just says things it has already heard, it doesn't perform complex reasoning on novel situations and then explain it succinctly.

Well a parrot does perform complex reasoning on novel situations all the time. It just doesn't have the wiring to connect that to "tokenized" human language. I suspect LLMs have the opposite problem, where they exist in the domain of their "tokens" and have no way to connect these to truly novel situations that have no existing words to describe them.

AlexandrB

7 dni temudiscuss

I love how Nvidia is playing both sides. No matter whether AI's future is local or on the cloud, they come out ahead. I suspect they're going to be the biggest beneficiaries from the AI run up.

AlexandrB

8 dni temudiscuss

Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.

Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...

AlexandrB

9 dni temudiscuss

[flagged]

AlexandrB

9 dni temudiscuss

Why is this a Google doc and not just an HTML page? I was super-confused when the links didn't behave like normal links. This is like when people post a screenshot of an Apple note.

AlexandrB

10 dni temudiscuss

Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.

AlexandrB

10 dni temudiscuss

They've only been around 5 years and have grown tremendously during that time. There's no stable reputation you can rely on yet.

AlexandrB

11 dni temudiscuss

> For example, spend an entire month listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, she gets the entire royalty share.

> But if you listen to the album 100 times but then listen to lofi beats 900 times, Taylor only gets 10%.

Hahaha, I wish this was how it worked, but it's not. At all.

Suppose I spend all month listening only to Fugazi. Now some miniscule tiny fraction of my (and everyone else's) monthly payment will go to Fugazi. The biggest portion of my monthly payment will go to Taylor Swift because she got the most plays on the platform. This means it actually matters very little what I listen to because I listen to only a few hours of music a week. A coffee shop running Spotify will generate 16+ hours of listening per day and this will determine who gets my subscription money far more than my actions will.

What you're describing would be like heaven for independent artists compared to the status quo.

Having said that, you're right that AI music is partially about funnelling more money to the streaming platform. Even before AI generated music, Spotify was cutting deals with "chill vibes" artists where they would receive a smaller payment per play than a "normal" artist[1]. Mysteriously those artists ended up getting placed on "chill vibes" playlists more often than you would expect. Funny how that works. I expect the same chicanery is happening with AI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...

AlexandrB

12 dni temudiscuss

The flip side of this is "Chesterton's Fence"[1]. It's easy to propose "better" solutions, but grading has evolved to be what it is over the past 100+ years. Any novel solution will have different (and not necessarily better) second, third, or fourth order effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

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