Biologist123

Is this a new record for enshittification?

Eh? The more standard view is that Clegg put in place efforts to ward off regulation as long as possible…he’s as popular as Jimmy Savile in the UK.

Err…becuase we speak Scottish not English.

I guess you have to turn it on. Might be handy for things like electrician courses, DIY jobs, maths homework etc. Maybe one day even surgery!

Well done. This is precisely what the future will look like. I’ve hacked together my own version of this using N8N whereby I feed in tasks via text or photo through telegram and it outputs a to do list. At some point I’ll link it to my personal wiki and then have it action tasks. This was just a fun project, but one design decision is to keep third party services away from commercially sensitive emails.

Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!

The UK has land ownership inequality comparable to South Africa and Brazil. Quite something.

Maybe add climate change is real but there’s little we can do to stop it/change the systems which result in it.

Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.

Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.

There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic:

“The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uses_of_Disorder

Great idea! May I ask what the information source is?

Thanks. V helpful. Especially the point about dopamine hits.

Can I sketch out one future of news for input?

- Personalized

- No adverts

- No hidden dopamine hooks

- Assigns probability of accuracy

- Explains relevance to you personally

- Explains emerging news events and context, highlighting propaganda/news manipulation where relevant.

Very interesting. Could become a geopolitical and trade football between Europe and US. Tariffs anyone? Ultimately it’s a question of power: will Europe allow its citizens to be predated upon? My guess is probably.

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.

One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.

[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]

I sometimes think of the internet as an alternative dimension: as mind space; it was Terra Nova and speculators rode in to grab the available real estate. But as the experience also showed us, there are maybe infinite mind spaces, and the job of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo is to open those new spaces where networks can be built around principles other than enshittification.

It’s a fair point, but as a thought experiment, how would you feel about AI writing the essays and simply regurgitating those? Legal but not in the spirit of things I think.

It definitely wasn’t cheating. But I felt it was not in the spirit of the exam system which I believed - maybe wrongly - was designed to test one’s ability to write a fresh essay from scratch under timed conditions.

What would you say about someone getting AI to write high standard essays and simply spend learn those word-for-word?

It’s also not cheating but not in the spirit of the thing I think.

A college-friend from the Unviersity of Oxford, where students write one or two essays a week, got the top first (best mark) in his history degree. Initially impressed, one day I asked him his exam method - where each student must produce 3 essays in 3 hours (or did then) across about 5 or 6 papers. My friend’s approach was to thoroughly research 12 essay questions and pre-write 16 page essays for each paper, which he would then learn verbatim and trot out word-for-word the best fit to each exam question.

This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first).

I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.

Perfect.

Afrikaners held political power, English-descendents economic power.

I remember Crap Towns, I loved it! And the Idler! Which had an entire section on jokes for which punchlines had been half-forgotten.

Great and thoughtful reflection piece too.

I’d like to add a few other ideas into the mix as for some reason I’m uncomfortable with the idea “you can’t say that anymore” that I wonder if it’s become a thought-terminating cliche.

Firstly, I suspect there’s always been two forms of puritanism: one with power and one without power. We didn’t historically hear much from puritans without power (famously some shipped off elsewhere and founded an empire). And the ones in power? Well a fish doesn’t know it’s wet…and all the other sods now have X accounts and podcasts!

The second point is to reflect on the fact that British humour is a curious thing. You noticed yourself that satire may have curiously little real world bite.

Maybe there’s been a category error: humour isn’t a mechanism for social change, it’s a coping strategy (I live in Luton, not Hull, TFFT). Or worse mechanism for social control. In my brief time in the Uk I noticed that “banter” often chipped at eccentricities or quirks, and served to bring people into line with group orthodoxy.

In short, and to mirror your uncertainties, I’m just not so sure it’s as clear cut that free speech has been curtailed somehow. Or that humour was ever about just having a laugh.

You make the assumption that maintaining the status quo is the norm. In reality, change is the norm - sometimes slow, sometimes fast.

I make this point because I strongly suspect humans become unhappy when their expectations divert from reality in a way that feels costly to them. If our expectation was environmental change, rather than equilibrium, this might change our opportunity set for managing, for example, environmental and climate change. And make us a lot less unhappy.

Thanks, “actively choosing” assumes we have conscious will. Whilst widespread, this belief is alas just an assumption.

If you set up (or more likely inherit) a story that change = loss, you will also onboard a needless eco-anxiety.

Well done in getting this up immediately. Pieces like this BBC piece are either implicit or explicit propaganda to define “nature” as a world without humans. Even the word “freakosystem”, as novel as it is, sets up an implicit good/bad dichotomy.

Edit: If you on-board the assumption that all change is bad, you potentially open yourself up to a great deal of anxiety associated with that change.

I’m now weirdly keen to hear the answer to this. Telenovella level tension on HN.

I can just imagine the experimental set-up…”son, what the f** are you doing”. “Chill out dad, I’m just going to blind fold you and run some electricity through this coil, and you have to tell me where New Bedford is, got it”. “I told you you ain’t getting no inheritance”. Etc