Yep. Between ad blockers/sponsorblock and my content choices it’s actually extremely rare that I encounter any traditional advertising. I don’t even know how I used to sit through the old cable TV ads. Now I’m already searching for something else to do 5 seconds in

I did not say future AI is limited. I said our current approach is flawed and very unlikely to ever result in a true AI. Whenever we do build that AI, it won’t be with a better version of the tech were using now, but a very different approach will have been taken.

It’s the same way we realized you couldn’t build a true AI by just trying to create enough if/then statements. You can make some fancy software, but the approach was inherently flawed.

People are also waaay overestimating how close we are to the classical AI shown in media. They see ChatGPT and understand that it has problems, but also know we went from dumb phones to super fast smartphones really quickly, so apply the same logic to AI, when it’s closer to the ‘bird in the picture’ xkcd comic. (Ironically that problem can now be solved by ‘AI’, but the point still stands). End users are bad at estimating the complexity of a given task and taking something like our current AI models to something like Cortana from Halo is a completely unknown amount of time away. Most likely decades if not centuries from now. The current approach to AI will most likely never work like that, because it has no true ability to learn and grow. At least not in the human sense.

Wife got caught with a similar phishing attempt, except this was a text. She had legitimately had a missing package and was in the middle of dealing with it and was waiting on a communication for a fix when the fake text came in. Just incredibly unlucky timing that made it all feel ‘right’. Realized it like 30 minutes later when the real communication came and cancelled the cards, but at the scale and frequency of spam these days they’re bound to find people in plausible situations where their scam doesn’t feel quite so out of place.

Hopefully some of the big political figures jump to threads. I don’t really care about or use twitter, but I can’t deny the impact it has on elections. Kinda concerned about that leading into 2024. Meta is marginally better than Elon at this point, though it is 100% a ‘lesser evil’ sort of situation.

I’ll second Bobiverse.

I’ll also suggest Tree of Aeons if you want a magical equivalent (guy becomes a magical tree). Both series capture the transition to non-human thinking pretty well

Spez is apparently only worth 10 million which is… Shockingly low honestly. Pretty sure someone with a decent plumber business could be worth more than that.

Yep. Multithreading isn’t a magic fix for these really complex games. At the end of the day some stuff just has to happen in order.

To me, the problem boils down to the lack of regulation on basic internet infrastructure. Websites aren’t free. Moderation isn’t free. Well run porn sites need a lot of money to keep running. Money, that people are more than willing to spend on something run well, despite the memes about ‘paying for porn’.

But we’ve seen time and time again that websites who host porn face issues with basic business services like payment processors, sometimes datacenters and ISPs too. Why are we allowing banks to control what is and isn’t allowed online? Why is that the ‘just go build you own’ sentiment seems to include standing up a worldwide bank, credit card system, ISP, datacenter, etc all just to run a webpage without outside interference.

We wouldn’t stomach power company shutting off power to abortion clinics or stem cell research universities just because they disagreed with it. Why do we allow the basic backbone of modern society to do something similar?

And yes, this has affected websites for content that I find absolutely abhorrent. Truth Social and it’s ilk are truly terrible, but I do think it’s worth exploring how comfortable we are with the kind of interference they faced from Amazon AWS and payment processors. What happens if Trump or someone like him wins again and the mood shifts so that companies start cracking down on trans and LGBT resources in the same way?

It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.

I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.

Does this work with the paid subscriptions? I figured that would require multiple subscriptions. Plus in my experience Google is really hostile to being logged into multiple accounts at a time. I wouldn’t want to have to constantly switch my Gmail for example.

I really don’t know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It’s just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it’s not on a desktop or TV.

Says a lot about the apps I guess. I don’t find the website to be particularly great, at least on mobile. Seems to constantly reset my filters and/or my scroll position which is very annoying. Getting a reply has a ‘context’ button, but that just takes you to the post with only that reply visible. It takes a separate click to show what that reply is actually replying to, which feels weirdly clunky.

I originally had a Google Play Music subscription. This came with free youtube premium when that launched. My wife gets an incredible amount of value out of youtube premium as she almost exclusively watches youtube content (Game Grumps, Good Mythical Morning, etc). Youtube premium is equivalent to a netflix subscription in our household. Given that I could not drop Premium at this point, it just makes sense to stick with Youtube music vs Spotify or something. I personally don’t mind Youtube music, it works well enough for my casual music listening needs. I just hate the cross contamination of it.

I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.

Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It’s less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn’t exist.

I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don’t feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.

Really feels like we need a Reddit community, or at least a ‘other social media’ community to contain all the reddit news in one place.

The only advantage corporations could have had came from having the money to throw at extremely high quality training data. The fact that they cheaped out and just used whatever they could find on the internet (or paid a vendor, who just used AI to generate AI training data) has definitely contributed to the lack of any differentiating advantage.

Probably just doing story prep, basic theorycrafting on mechanics, etc. No real work is being done and much of the stuff they do work might get thrown out anyway