slfnflctd

I don’t have XM radio

Well, that's where a lot of this type of content is (seemingly, at least) alive and well right now. Satellite appears to be here to stay, and can provide tremendous value on long drives. Particularly if you're doing a lot of them.

I'd love to see more FM stations return to human DJs, and human curated playlists. But until/unless that happens, we still need somewhere for those skills to be utilized and refined.

Look into the Adbusters organization. I'm not sure I agree with them on everything, but they have created some excellent satire over the years and been involved in prominent protests.

Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations?

Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it.

The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.

nor did the calculator play with our emotions

It seems to me this here is the dangerous 'force multiplier' for destructive outcomes.

It's one thing for a kid to become obsessed with a fictional character. It's a whole different playing field when that character can talk back, remember things, and potentially surface all kinds of subject matter which cannot be predicted and could at times be harmful.

Not even remotely the same level of impact. I think we're almost at the point where LLM education (as in, teaching awareness of the basic tech and its shortcomings) needs to start in Kindergarten.

The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.

It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.

The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.

Offtopic, but if by "Dragon Wing series" you are referring to the Death Gate Cycle by Weis & Hickman, it has been beloved to me since I read it as a teen in the 90s. I have gone through this entire series at least 3 times despite not usually re-reading books, and I feel like it holds up.

I think it also influenced a lot of work which came afterward.

I kept trying to find 'the people who have it all figured out' for way too long. I was in my mid-20s before I able to start letting go of it.

I'm still angry and upset that there are so many entities which prey upon this natural human tendency and twist it toward fruitless, bizarre ends.

If you know what you're doing, you put anything important on an M-disc.

Everything else is prone to random flaking. Some discs last much longer than others, but there is not always an easy way to know in advance unless you do a deep dive on the state of manufacturing at the place and time it was made (if such info is even available).

Environmental conditions can also have an effect.

I think most people who have crossed paths with a lot of optical media over the years are aware of this, but your average consumer? Probably not.

Let's also not forget that humans are more than capable of creating tons of 'slop' far worse than any current SOTA model would create, and I would argue the majority of what people write is in this category.

Models are still improving, and if you can't tell whether one was behind what you're currently reading 100% of the time (which I'm sure you know you can't), the distinction no longer matters except in very specific cases, and you have to go to a lot more effort to uncover that distinction.

blandly plausible filler material

The real salient point, in my opinion, is whether we can get generative AI to create game content which is not this, but rather novel, engaging and interesting with a solid gameplay loop.

I'm genuinely curious and think it's a cool area to research.

I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is

To me, this is great too, and it's why I still enjoy reading fiction.

However, having conversational NPCs which can behave in complex ways isn't just about a story any longer, it's about a more accurate simulation. I want to see where the non-deterministic machine(s) can take me. I want to poke and prod and discover new mechanisms. I want to make my own story.

Once I was quite religious. I was discouraged from reading fiction by elders because they said it is a "waste of time" and "basically lies". In this way, whether it was written by a human or a machine is irrelevant if I can't tell the difference. I would have a qualitatively different response if I knew whether a human or bot wrote it, but in the long run I'm not sure it matters in cases where I don't know.

I see someone else recently read Children of Strife.

Damn, I really enjoyed that book. Best of the series so far, in my opinion.

Not only this, but another perverse incentive is hereby introduced: Where published statements are carefully crafted to seem like LLM generated hallucinations, but are written in a way which opens various kinds of plausibly 'accidental' temporary loopholes for certain categories of actions.

There are historical precedents for similar things. I hope some effective means of curtailing such behavior can be devised.

I forgot that I once had (and frequently wore) one of those long ago. Pleasant reminder.

"The market can remain irrational..."

I called bubble on Tesla and Bitcoin both over 10 years ago.

Still going strong.

It's a whole lotta chaos, fueling some pretty messed up stuff. It is hard to watch.

I mean, I agree, but good luck with that. Especially in the current environment.

We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.

If at all reasonably possible, try to find a place where drugs can be tested to see what they really are (sadly a rare thing still, but it exists).

The next best thing to do is talk with people in the scene and find out what they consider a trustworthy source. Any single person trying to offer you pills is a potential scammer or worse, you need to verify from other sources whether they're legit.

There's probably a better than 50% chance you'll get something close enough to what you want regardless, because incentives are aligned with everyone having a good time. But just like everywhere else, bad actors will always exist.

Bitcoin doesn't have long conversations with you, including deeply technical ones, in a way that you thought only a human being could just 5 years ago.

They are not the same.

I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.

This is a satisfying way to deal with frustration. Unfortunately, it also gets spit all over whatever device you're speaking toward. Sometimes worth it for sure, though.

As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.

False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.

A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.

I think part of it depends on what kinds of friendships you have.

Some kids have major problems finding healthy, positive relationships with other kids in real life, often for very arbitrary reasons. For a subset of those, interacting through screens eliminates a ton (if not the entirety) of the friction of IRL interaction.

What it really all boils down to for me is that relationships are deeply important. Once upon a time, I thought I could be an island. I was wrong. Maybe there are a few who can do it, but not me, and probably not most of us.

Poor people often get a pass for various reasons. Many/most of those reasons may be bad or stupid ones, but I see it as a silver lining. There is often much more of a sense of community than in other places as well.

Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.

AI will certainly cause job loss. It already has (regardless of to what degree it was an excuse for something else in many cases). I agree with what you say, though.

The big question to me is whether the people who lost those jobs will have better opportunities in the future. That's kind of up to all of us.

My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period.

Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.

In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.

I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.

Pure speculation, but simply the presence of em-dashes may be a statement in itself.

One of the big problems I see currently is all the wild accusations being thrown around by seemingly half the internet that every little thing has been AI manipulated upon the tiniest suspicion. We will go mad tearing each other apart if we keep escalating this behavior.

Yes, some of it is blatantly obvious, but not to everyone-- so I think those casting aspersions need to really back up their claims with more than one or two bits of 'evidence'. I have been accused of using AI to write comments (which I have thus far never done), and I know I'm not the only one by a long shot. Such a waste of time and energy. Ignore it and move on if something smells off to you.

Also I am just so, so tired of the em-dash argument. Humans have been using it for a looong time. Let it go.

Far too many of us (particularly younger people, but not only them) undervalue or are dismissive of philosophy. I once was like this, partly because at the time I'd been brought up - like most humans - to believe my parents' religion held all the answers philosophy might address.

I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.

Same thing happened to me. My reading comprehension isn't always great first thing in the morning, but I still feel like the title was/is somewhat confusingly worded.

Yeah, I'm kinda sad about that one. Most of my friends and family are aware many of these are fake now, but argue that it still invokes the same response in us so it's okay. For me, though, however intangible or irrational it may be, I do feel a sense of loss.

Funny enough, this is actually one of the few things which has bothered me with the AI boom, and I'm mostly pro-acceleration. A lot of what's happening seems inevitable. But surprisingly, knowing that cat or dog or bird or lizard or butterfly or whatever has a strong chance of being generated really does take something out of it to my mind. And I say that also knowing the extreme amount of staging which has long gone on with traditional nature videography. Somehow, knowing the animal is real means something... I'm still trying to figure out how to better understand and express this.

this is presumably written by technical folks, who know how these systems actually work, and should know better than to use such anthropomorphic, magicalhocus-pocus terminology

I get your point. But regardless of whether we can definitively establish if any of these Generative AI LLM agents are conscious (we cannot, because we can't even say the same of our fellow humans, see Philosophical Zombies), the bigger issue which we are already in the midst of is that many people believe and behave as if they were, and how that downstream behavior has very real consequences in our world which cannot be ignored.

The results of people anthropomorphizing needs to be dealt with more than the actual process itself (which we have no way to stop anyhow).

These agents have mostly conquered the realm of intelligent-seeming expression of complex ideas through language. Speaking about their actions in terms of ethical concepts is not only appropriate, but necessary.

It may be relatively achievable to get 10 'friends' into ethical alignment via helping them all develop a deeper perspective on philosophy in general and a particular, finite set of ethical questions specifically.

Doing this with thousands of people - let alone hundreds of millions - eventually becomes statistically impossible. There is a hard cap defined by energy requirements somewhere for any given system. Large scale ethical alignment is simply not a solvable problem in our current situation.