christianqchung

Pretty much any content or community that regularly self polices thought crime language I immediately dislike and block forever. I have slightly more tolerance for beeping over swear words, but not much.

Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.

Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.

I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant

I don't think Luoyuan Zhang is necessarily doing this, but I'm pretty sure lots of people are using arxiv as a glorified blog and hoping no one notices.

Great post, thank you. At least AI won't reach this level of story quality for the foreseeable future.

If you're not a phone power user, you can get by on old low end stuff. When my pixel 4a died of a bad screen crack a couple years ago, I replaced it with a random used 4a on ebay for $80. Two years later and it's still completely fine for all my purposes (texting, phone calls, chrome browsing, tolerable camera, etc.), although I still haven't accepted google's deal for a free battery swap yet from sheer laziness. I've learned that I can accept a 90 minute screen-on phone battery, though it's an odd adjustment to make. Again, not a power user.

I was extremely impressed by the sora demo in Feb 2024, but there are exactly two videos I remember ever seeing from AI video gen services that will stick around in my mind: the one where realistic spongebob drives away from a cop, and Harry Potter Balenciaga (2026). The original sora launch seemed pretty boring to me as a non-creative, so I only gave it a few shots (in the early semi-failed original interface). I never tried the sora 2 app since I don't like shortform video.

Disinfo AI videos and the Coca Cola Christmas ad have also really soured my expectation of genuinely positive creative uses of video gen for the next couple years until more improvements are made, and I start seeing stuff go viral for being good instead of just being weird. I am still surprised that sora never had the grok problem of generating csam or seemingly anything along those lines.

Why test on Qwen 2.5 when Qwen 3 has been out for about a year, and Qwen 3.5 for a month? My problem with this is ironically entirely vibes based: that for some reason, LLMs love to talk about Qwen 2.5 instead of anything newer.

I don't disagree in theory, but:

<START AI SLOP>

Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.

<END AI SLOP>

Does it get flagged because of users or dang/admin? I don't see any other reason for this to get flagged.

Thanks for writing this. This is unrelated, but one downside of AI being used as an oracle is that I feel like it is/will be less likely to accidentally stumble on an article like this, which clearly explains something I probably never would've asked.

You can't. Either people will say you're overreacting to stylistic choices and that it's not AI, or that it's AI but a good comment (it's not), or that it's AI and a bad comment, but you should just ignore it like any other spam.

Have you noticed that your username is literally "its_notjack"?

Is it possible that these are in the top 10, but not the top 5? I'm pretty sure programming, email/meeting summaries, cheating on homework, random QA, and maybe roleplay/chat are the most popular uses.

A bizarre claim like that would be what happens when you let an LLM write the README without reading it first.

I mentally checked out by the time he mentioned buying ray bans as some radical personal statement on privacy and tech nostalgia.