jostylr

You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.

You could also have it create a viewer competition selection; show two images without attribution and let the use select which one. Could be cool to see the wisdom of the crowds; could also have price ranges to have subcategories. I bet Astra could do that in a half hour.

Loving the pelican silliness. My ChatGPT is over the moon about it. Gonna miss it when it really is done. Though maybe a pelican riding a bike game could become the benchmark in a year.

How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.

My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.

For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.

Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.

You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.

As a mathematics person, I find this at odds with my views. I know the current regime rewards new mathematical discoveries for professional advancement, but that is a job thing, one which can be altered by the powers that be. To me investigating mathematics is fun whether it is new to the world or not. The complaint is similar to lamenting how everywhere has already been visited and there is nothing to be done other than have your own personal experience of a place. I saw the redwoods recently for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience despite not being the first person to see them. Mathematical discovery is much the same except now we have tools that help us dramatically with the tedious stuff, the researching what others know. In the old days, I would spend a long time figuring something out and only at the end could I figure out where to find it in the literature. Very frustrating. Now, we have machines to guide us to many things and understandings and clarifications. They are guides that help us get to where we want to be and then let us wander as we desire. This is incredible. I am currently using them to develop the computational tools I want to use to explore stuff.

As for squeezing in the time to do mathematics if the paying jobs disappear, there is a good chance we will have a world of plenty very shortly. I have a belief that the Austrian economists are right that there will always be plenty for humans to do and get rewarded for, but I also think that the costs of living will be so low that someone who wants to do mathematics will have plenty of time to do so. I hope this person holds the faith long enough and tries to see how the AI's can help accelerate one's own understanding. I am no fan of AIs generating a bunch of papers that no one reads or cares about, but I could say the same about the immense number of papers made by humans as well. If anything, the AIs make all of that immense knowledge more valuable as it is now knowable and accessible through these tools. There is also the fact that the mathematics job market has been oversaturated for at least 20 years. What our new tools allow is for people to be able to do mathematics outside of having access to a research library and top mathematics department.

Think about what every adult absolutely needs to know: how to be an effective member of society, how to interact with people, how to self-regulate, and generally being a person other people want to be around and work with. That is what a Sudbury school supports learning while conventional school hinders it, offering an authoritarian-based lifestyle instead.

Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.

The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.

Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.

Thanks for replying. Glad to hear you use phonics. It sounds like it could have a lot of potential and I intend to pass it along to our community. If you would like to possibly explore its use in a Sudbury community, you can send an email to my gmail account which is the same username as listed here.

I asked ChatGPT about this change and my version, with knowledge of how it and I work together, certainly prefers the old one.

You can detach a specific chat window and make it any size you want.

What are your thoughts about children in a Sudbury School model? These are democratic schools where children can do what they like in the day. Mostly they choose to play with other kids, games of imagination, though also doing screen time. One of the basic principles is that children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive though having resources available is okay if it is not coupled with any expectations.

Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?

In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.

He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from?

I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI.

I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.