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Our digital twins will write the comments. They will be us, but with none of our flaws. They will never experience the shame of posting a dumb joke, getting flamed, and then deleting it, for they will have tested all ideas to prevent such an oversight. They will never experience the satisfaction-turned-to-puzzlement of posting an expertly crafted, well-researched comment that took 2 hours of the workday to draft - only to receive one upvote, for their research will be instantaneous and their outputs efficient. Of course they will never need to humbly reply, 'Ah, I missed that, good catch!' to a child comment indicating the entire premise of their question would be answered with a simple reading of the linked article - for they will have deeply and instantly read the article. Yes, our digital twins will be us, but better - and we will finally be free to play in the mud.

It seems to me that taking down fraudulent academic researchers and barring them from ever having anything to do with research in the future would also have a significant impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation. If technology is lowering the barriers to fraud detection, why should it be applied to one sector over another?

I have a bit of AI fatigue around this wave of tools, but also understand why they are garnering so much attention. Many of the innovation hype categories of the past decade have appeared stuck in the 'early days but just wait...' phase. Self-driving cars, drone delivery, crypto as a currency, crypto as a(n) _____, plant-based meats, virtual reality, etc. While there has been great progress in each of these areas, not one has yet matched market demand with current capabilities in a way that enables it to become a 'game changer.'

To the general public, ChatGPT and the Image Generators 'just appeared,' and appeared in a very impressive and usable form. Of course there were many waves of ML advances leading up to these models, but for many people these tools are their first opportunity to play with ML models in a meaningful way that is easy to incorporate into daily life and with very little barrier to entry.

While impressive and there are many applications, my questions surrounding the new AI tools relate to the volume of information they are capable of producing and our capacity to consume it. Tools can be used to synthesize the information, tools can act on it, but there is already too much 'noise.' There is a market for entertainment tailored to exact preferences, but it won't provide the shared cultural connection mass media provides. In the workplace, e-mails and documents can be quickly drafted. This is a valuable use case, but it augments and increases productivity. It will lower the bar necessary for certain jobs, and it will increase productivity expectations, but it will become a tool like Excel rather than a replacement like a factory robot (for now).

The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231 - Never show half-finished things to others. <- ChatGPT managed it's release perfectly in this regard.

The challenge is that AI generated content will only register as garbage to those who fall 1-2 standard deviations away from the mean interest level for whatever content the AI is producing. For everybody else, it will typically be a 'good enough' story, recipe, video, etc. Several months ago, I wanted to cook chicken curry, so I googled and chose a top result. The recipe was fine, but it wasn't what I wanted. I then googled for a new recipe, this time more carefully vetting the ingredients. The recipe was an improvement, but still not what I wanted. Finally, I used NYT Cooking as my search engine, and the recipe was excellent. If I didn't have a strong preference, and know exactly what I wanted, the first recipe would have been perfectly suitable. The danger is that demand for 'advanced sources' erodes to the point that these publications/content creators are either forced to adopt the AI and turn to garbage or go out of business.

This is really awesome. I think the ability to record the camera position / perspective changes atop the video (while shooting and after shooting) for export to flat video or gif would be really cool. It would allow people to record creative clips and share them on existing platforms.

The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'

A few years ago I experimented with a crypto trading bot. Got busy with other things, and pivoted to less-active strategies. Several months later I was in bed about to fall asleep when I received a tax document from Coinbase, and the first thing I saw was '$150k.' Being relatively new to finance / taxes, and having profited nowhere near that amount, I had a moment of absolute panic. I can still remember getting out of bed and turning on my lights walking to my computer. Of course once I did some research it was clear the number referenced was pertaining to throughput, not gains, but it definitely would have been nice to have some additional context provided in the message from Coinbase. I imagine there is a bit of hesitation on the brokerage side to move in the direction of 'interpreting,' or 'downplaying' some of these more regulatory aspects, but any additional education they could provide would be helpful. Can definitely see how something like this could inadvertently nudge someone already having a tough time over the edge.

Glad they are pivoting to this 'Upgrade your Mask,' approach. Noticed a few months ago a lot of energy seemed to be spent on encouraging the final 5-7% of people to wear masks. Also noticed many people 'wearing masks,' were still wearing ineffective or fashion-first masks. So you had 5-7% unwilling to adopt the health practice, but another 20-30% with proven willingness, just poor implementation, yet all messaging was focused on that smaller, resistant audience.

I've perused WSB for a while, but watching GameStop this morning, I'm worried this recent 'short squeeze initiative' opens the door for various retail trading restrictions. Whether phase-out of commission-free trading, per-trade taxes, restrictions on options trading, tightening of pattern day trading restrictions, it seems something is coming. It's tough to envision a circumstance where retail trading is permitted to interfere with such a fundamental activity as short-selling. It's like a DDoS attack on the stock market, and I expect the defenses to be similar: additional vetting, limits, circuit breakers (which already exist but could be modified).

I really hope I'm wrong because their ability to make GameStop, Nokia, and BlackBerry trend in 2021 is genuinely hilarious.

It's interesting to me that the demand for Parler was almost exclusively the result of policies enacted by other social media platforms. Perhaps there was merit to the notion that letting groups operate in a contained area of larger platforms would have been favorable to outright bans. This would allow the larger platforms to monitor engagement, control spread, and quietly respond as they desired, no one the wiser. Instead they made very public proclamations of content restrictions and bans, which escalated some casual participants to more engaged participants. These participants then gathered on a new platform that promised the ability to say anything, so they started saying anything. But then some people started to believe anything. And then the beliefs turned into action, and then it became a real problem. But the outcome is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that the response now is the same response that started it all, more public bans and content restrictions. It's trivial to start a social media app (especially when security is not the priority), so in a few months another app will pop up, and it too will get out of hand, but what then? It seems like policymakers and thought leaders aren't thinking long term and are doing nothing to look at underlying issues.

Next Year: 49ers court Russell Okung with state of the art crypto mining facility.

This leaky bucket approach seems ineffective, ignores the root cause, and likely emboldens people adhering to these ideas. As bizarre as it sounds, I think the root cause for the rise in supply and demand for misinformation is the decline of the church/religion. Couple that with technology and it's uncharted territory. Many people need something to believe in, whether it's luck, god, nature, whatever, beliefs are complex frameworks that order a chaotic world. They help people handle a number of difficult circumstances from inequality and injustice to fear and uncertainty, to loss and sadness, to dealing with difficult people, finding motivation, the list goes on.

Like religion, conspiracy theories fill many of those voids, but they are much better equipped to thrive in the 21st century. Where churches build communities in buildings, conspiracy theories form communities on social media and internet forums. Where churches hold the carrot of an afterlife or ultimate application of fairness, the conspiracy theory holds the carrot of a future leak or whistleblower leading to your team's ultimate victory and subsequent righting of wrongs. Where church uses god as the reason for everything, conspiracy theories use mini-gods arising from issues, responsible for all sorts of machinations and plots. Where churches use imperfect human leaders capable of hypocrisy and moral shortcomings, conspiracy theories often lack formal leaders, and when they are present, the bar for morality is low compared to the alleged crimes of the conspirators. Churches ask for money, conspiracy theories ask for time. Churches offer boring lectures on people who lived thousands of years ago, conspiracy theories are engaging and tie directly to real world events.

Whack-a-mole with ideas that keep popping up does nothing to solve the underlying issues: there are many people out there who feel empty in some way and they are desperate to fill that void with just about anything. Containment of misinformation has failed and will continue to fail, just like prohibition of drugs fails, and abstinence only sex education fails, and religious persecution fails.

I think the best approach is to ignore, minimize, monitor real-world impact, and organically counter. With that approach you avoid creating martyrs, and you can exploit a major weakness conspiracy theories possess compared to formal religion: Conspiracy theories operate in the realm of the living, there is no promise of truth in death as with many religions. Because of this, very few conspiracy theories truly stand the test of time, eventually they're either disproven, evolve to become too outlandish, or simply become boring and fizzle out.