Without the scammy crypto angle ("Worldcoin") it's less ghoulish than before. And a company collecting biometric data to run an identity service isn't necessarily evil. But this one is not to be trusted, because the individual behind it is not to be trusted. The moment it suits his world-bending needs to sell my eyeballs to the fascists, he will do so.
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
""Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes)."
I'd be curious to know how OpenAI and Google employees came to learn about and sign on to this brief (and, relatedly, why my OpenAI friends aren't on it.)
> I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.
You can tell the message was written by committee, or by a large language model prompted to respect "both sides". No human with a soul could honestly characterize the situation as passively as this: "The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life."
We've had it for a few years in SF and, while it's very convenient, I haven't witnessed the revolution you speak of. Judging from the traffic, people still mostly get around in their personal vehicles. There's about as much parking as before and it's still a nightmare. But I'd like to believe.
Maybe colleges shouldn't have accepted these kids in the first place or shouldn't move them along. But I think the author is raising a different alarm -- the number of kids who "do nothing, want nothing, and try nothing" seems to have spiked significantly. Public schools, at least, have a mandate to care about this.
I think the problem of student motivation is much broader than this author's college; I've heard it echoed by so many professors lately, but never as poignantly.
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
The "↑11" bucket -- which Saul labeled as "Megacorps ($300b-$3t)" -- now contains at least one individual human. How far we've come (or fallen?) in just a year.
As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.
Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.
I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1
(It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)