Especially when it doesn’t even work lol.

He explains that “cutting-edge AI capabilities” are now available for every company to buy for the price of standard software. But that instead of building a whole AI system, he says many firms are simply popping a chatbot interface on top of a non-AI product.

Well, yeah, because that’s what LLMs can do.

We’re not near the point where it’s reasonable or intelligent to allow “AI” into the driver’s seat. There are specific spaces where machine learning can be a useful tool to find patterns in data, and you would plug that model into normal tools. There are plenty of normal tools that can be made more user friendly with a well designed LLM based chatbot.

There are not a lot of spaces where you would want an ML model and and LLM interface, because there’s just too much extra uncertainty when you aren’t really sure what’s being asked and you aren’t really sure where the underlying patterns of the model come from. We’re not anywhere close to “intelligence”, and the people selling something claiming they’re “doing real AI” are almost certainly misrepresenting themselves as much as anyone else.

I’m always skeptical of anything LLM, but this looks like an interesting use case on the surface.

The difference is that they can boil the frog gradually.

Traditional media tries to move people, absolutely. But a newspaper has to address the crazies and try to convert people into crazies in the same paper. If they’re too extreme, more moderate people can see that right away, and it’s easier to minimize engagement with it.

With social media, you personalize the content surfaced. You start by making it seem mostly sane, with an out there idea here or there. Then, as they start to engage with the slightly mild stuff, you move the “mostly sane” in that direction, and the “mild” moves a couple extra steps. Now, you’re part of a movement. Everyone around you is changing their beliefs, and the new ones aren’t that far off from your previous beliefs, so why not follow?

6 months later, you were always pretty left/right-leaning (cognitive dissonance, baybee!!!). But it looks like the consensus is finally shifting your way. It’s just a small step further right/left, and everyone around you is making it too. The world is changing for a better, so let’s be that change.

I started to highlight bits to cut out and highlight as the key points, but it became pretty quickly that that link already is the executive summary. It’s already basically in outline form, and a super quick read.

You don’t need to rely on the headline.

Is web of trust still a thing?

That was intended to be kind of a distributed way to determine who didn’t suck.

For interaction? Pseudonyms with a ramp up into being able to interact fully is the middle ground. Your activity on that specific site will be monitored to kick you out if you behave inappropriately, but it shouldn’t carry across sites unless you voluntarily use a third party identity provider (which is a good option to have).

Massive scale is a big part of the issue. It raises the barrier to entry for competing platforms (because being able to scale to rapid growth is a huge up front investment, and can easily cripple your platform if you don’t do so), and brings the moderation responsibilities beyond anything actually manageable. Small to mid sized communities being the norm is much more manageable, much easier to develop for, and much healthier generally.

Maybe he’s just enthusiastic about a game that does something he’s into?

Memorizing everything is impressive for a human.

It’s less impressive for a computer.

What’s the value of cheap clothes that aren’t even suitable for a single wear?

Seriously.

Yes, there’s an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there’s way more arbitrary complexity that doesn’t serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.

Also, maybe just don’t copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.

Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there’s nothing they need that can’t be done locally is stupid as hell.

I’m not into the subscription library thing (though I do have PS+ premium, because it was a reasonably cheap upgrade from the base package on Black Friday when I caved and bought a subscription), but I can see how some people find value in the subscription library that’s included.

That said, fuck Luna specifically, because I tried the “included with prime” version with one of the legends of heroes games, got moderately hooked, and it will only let you export the saves when they remove the game from the paid library. So even your saves are held hostage to a paid subscription.

If we’re talking “free” devices with some commitment, I’m OK with some limitation until the terms are met.

The second you charge a dollar for it, it should be unconditionally illegal to have it carrier locked the day they walk out of the store. 60 days isn’t good enough.

You shouldn’t be buying anything from there.

Those cheap clothes would be overpriced at free.

It’s still massively downgraded from a console. And many faster twitch games are straight up unplayable in the absolute best case scenario.

Yes there are really bad products and their QC is horrible. I’ll say the same for Aliexpress, Taobao, Amazon, Walmart and Bestbuy.

There’s a huge difference between some 5/10 products at Walmart and Best Buy and the best case being a 5/10 product with the majority being 2/10 and some being actually dangerous like Temu.

They’re not remotely similar.

Hey, they also decided to take screenshots of everything you do every 2 seconds and put them in an unsecured database. That might work.

It’s too bad conspiracy theorists bullied them into half assed encryption and allowing people to turn it off until next time Microsoft reverts it.

They can identify new accounts with the same behavior patterns easily enough if they really want to. Amazon can absolutely shut them down.

I meant they have no recourse against Amazon refusing to host them.

They can ban them for TOS violations. Good luck suing.

There is no alternative that they could choose.

RCS is absolute horseshit unless you send it to Google, which is absolutely unacceptable.