mercer

that sounds like a character from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I'm not looking forward to president Tucker Carlson :-/

one of my biggest pet peeves is podcasts/youtube videos that would be perfect to listen to while resting, if not for some loud and obnoxious intro/outro music. Or a too-loud background muzak track. If I want muzak I'll go to the supermarket or stand in an elevator.

Adolfler would've been even worse.

bad in relation to what?

wave wand

Since the switch to Wero, I've noticed that I need to do an extra, seemingly pointless click. it's not iDeal!

I imagine they do have 'real solutions' that are a bigger problem to some than their inability to govern is...

sadly, over here in the netherlands and I assume elsewhere, the job as a postman changed drastically when they privatized. room for the human element has been all but squeezed out for profits long ago.

> People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.

I've had some interesting conversations about the pre-AI slop and how the distinction is often not too meaningful. I mean, on some level /knowing/ that the corporate slop was written by a person kind of loses its meaning when one considers the amount of filtering, rules, rewriting, and so on is involved by a string of people who either don't care about what they write or actively dislike it.

A lot of this stuff often had at least flickers of a human soul behind it. I imagine for a lot of the soaps, hallmark movies, and romance novels this might've made some difference, even if just subconsciously recognizing the author(s) and building up some kind of image around the other by yourself or with others.

I'm reminded of some of the truly awful 'worship' songs I grew up with, and how some of the authors (often of course sticking close to the source material) even had a kind of following. some of these songs were just a little 'too' predictable, but others felt pretty much like they were written by AI, except back then none of us imagined that AI could really do this back then.

Or the pastor I spoke to who was convinced that chatgpt had access to his more personal notes, because as an experiment he made it write a sermon, and it (probably? obviously?) extrapolated from the prompt the more specific theology he followed/ascribed to.

I'm not knocking the value of a sermon or song, even if boring and predictable, or perhaps even when AI-written. they often explicitly /don't/ serve the purpose of being novel or new, but I find it super interesting how these aspects of real life are, to a degree, not too hard to replace with AI.

Thankfully for this pastor, most of his value involved human connection, knowing whoever just married, died, got sick, and having his full humanity on display from the pulpit!

I'd say I'm pretty attuned to detecting AI content and I was fooled a few times at inattentive moments. I imagine a lot of people fare worse, assuming they even truly mind whether it's AI or not.

I recall some documentary came out or was announced? maybe that has to do with it?

maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...

A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on.

I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did.

EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.