dougb5

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)."

Amicus brief is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...

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.)

https://archive.is/KpWS8

Yes, it would help so much. Especially if a lot of people with money and power voiced their honest opinions at the same time.

Minor correction: "sparks of AGI" was in reference to GPT-4, which came out 5 months later in 2024. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712)

Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)

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.

I too loved that song as a kid, but it's from 1985. It felt like the right song for that era too!

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.

To clarify the headline, this is the effect for households that use a GLP-1, not the country overall.

Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

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.

It's an order-of-magnitude notation used in Saul's "MagWorld" writings and podcast. Recommended: https://saul.pw/mag/

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.

Yeah I can make it available! Contact me at the email in my profile and I can explain what I have.

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.)

I also recommend the Scam Factory podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2cfjCS28vx1MVoukNjpINt

And make restaurant reservations! We also make restaurant reservations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806755

I'm confused here. How should this additional context change our understanding of the intended meaning of "the open web is already in rapid decline"?

https://archive.is/twynO

Agreed. Techno-solutionists now use the verb "solve" in every imaginable context -- often where there's not a coherent question, let alone a workable answer ("AI will solve physics!"). It's comfortable to see everything as a system of equations.

Cloudflare can detect and block verified AI bots that comply with robots.txt and respect crawl rates, and do not hide their behavior from your website

It's the bots that do hide their behavior -- via residential proxy services -- that are causing most of the burden, for my site anyway. Not these large commercial AI vendors.

I learned of this when users of my dictionary search site (OneLook) started complaining. I'd been in contact with folks from dictionary.com in their early days, and I've watched its rise and fall with curiosity. If whoever owns reference.com now is reading this, I'll buy it from you and I can promise to honor its original mission as I have with OneLook -- make me an offer.

FYI dictionary.com and thesaurus.com are still available on their original domains. I believe that, under prior ownership (IAC), they consolidated the traffic of their properties under reference.com in order to get higher audience numbers in ComScore and hence better ad deals. It's baffling to me that they (apparently) either let the domain expire or sold it to a spammer. It's accrued brand equity since 2008 -- and no doubt a lot of backlinks, for whatever that's worth now.

This makes me think about the credibility of single-author vs. multi-author papers in different disciplines. In computer science, a paper is seen as suspicious if there's just one author (at least nowadays). But in economics it seems much more common. Can an economist explain this for me (or perhaps a paper written by multiple economists?)

My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.

Further, the people who have purchased this situation for us, and the wealthy tech VCs who are staying silent now, are all people this community once admired.