I said nothing pro-AI. But by accusing me of that, you reveal where your own bias (and defensiveness) lies. So thanks for that.

You’re also exaggerating the facts. They didn’t stage an intervention. He turned to his wife and brother and said “do you think my AI use is unhealthy?”

I don’t even know what that second one is, and I wouldn’t touch Xitter with a ten foot turd.

Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.

Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.

I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but

What a condescending opener. Whatever you think of George Lucas, he’s made some cool stuff, he did it the old fashioned way, and he’s not constrained by resources. But rather than listen to what he has to say on the topic, this guy begins with the presumption that no, George must be deluded from swallowing propaganda.

I’m hardly George Lucas’s biggest fan but this writer can blow me.

I understand the suspicion but you might want to keep some daylight between “qualitative data” and “bullshit.”

I completely understand that quant data is always more certain to work with, but to totally discount qual data leaves you utterly blind in a lot of fields where quant measurements are impossible to standardize.

I love the relief work around the eyes. It’s so much nicer than if the entire top was just flush. I’m sure it was a lot of work, too!

I know. My weakness isn’t necessarily waiting time, but time spent on dull work like housework. My brains starts going “BOORRING!”

So many people are already functionally hooked up, even if it is happening through their eyes and not a direct wire. Prove me wrong, everybody: don’t touch any of your devices for a week. It’s nigh unthinkable now but I remember times when the internet didn’t exist, cell phones didn’t exist, I had no cable TV, no game console, and would only turn on my little black and white Mac to write a paper for school. We listened to music a lot, socialized in person, smoked a lot of… various things, had a lot of sex. It’s a rather poor trade we’ve made if you ask me.

It’s an interesting case for leftists because there is no means of production to be seized. Nothing needed to create websites or apps is hard to get or proprietary. If anything, the means of production is capital itself, because only by paying people can you direct a lot of them to spend time on any particular thing. I wonder if communism has already addressed this case somewhere. I’m hardly educated on the topic.

I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.

Yeah there’s a lot of wishful thinking in this article. They still have a shit ton of cash, a lot of smart people, an incredible ad engine they can deploy onto any internet property. The metaverse was a complete wank but they still have more to work with than just about anyone out there.

Even if this article is right, and their arc has finally turned downward, it’s because they’ve finally hit the peak of an absolutely epic run. Stink of death? I hate them as much as anyone, but yeah… no.

When the messenger has a stated mission of generating ad views, you should absolutely question them. Damn you really are absolutely miserable at telling when someone has an agenda.

Ah yes, Gizmodo, arbiter of scientific truths. Their agenda is clear: to get you to click, typically with an outragey clickbait headline that reinforces your favorite narrative.

You need to learn the difference between debating someone and shouting at them that they have no argument, no logic, no evidence, and ill motivations. I can think of a couple other things you also need to do, but I’ll keep it PG.

I laugh in your face. This article has a clear agenda, not me.

Here’s that last paragraph. Microsoft’s finding actually sounds like it does have the disruptive factor: people are trained to use AI and then it is removed. And finally, finally in the very last sentence of the entire article we get the one piece of information that’s been missing the entire time: doctors perform better with AI help, but then worse than ever without it.

My conclusion? Let people have AI and perform better with it.

Carpenters trained on power tools will suddenly perform worse with hand tools than carpenters who were never given power tools. But if they are given power tools, they can build homes faster.

No shit?

The findings are also in line with a study Microsoft published last yearthat looked at cognitive decline among knowledge workers, which found that the more people lean on AI, the worse they perform when asked to work without support. It also echoes a study out of Poland, which found that while doctors are better at spotting cancer risks with AI assistance, they perform worse than the no-AI baseline once that assistance is removed.

Changing the terms of the test in the middle of it, without warning, is disruptive. I’m not convinced it “fried their brains.” The same would happen with a calculator suddenly removed during the middle of an exam.

Funny… the one thing I still use Facebook for is getting rid of crap I don’t need - my neighborhood Buy Nothing group is there, though I wish it weren’t.

I’m doing my part!

That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.

Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.

I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.

It’s just my opinion but the “brand war” on HDDs is a little overblown. I too recall periods where Seagate got bad PR for quality issues, but I’m not concerned that 10 years later any HDD I buy from them is going to croak as soon as it’s half full. There’s no way they would still be in business if that image is true. I think many times if there is a difference in quality between brands it’s the difference between 99.999% and 99.998% - gasp! double the failure rate! - and then it evens out again.