> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree.
> [...]
> Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
I did something similar 10 years ago, but instead of llms I used word2vec to calculate a embeddings of product descriptions and map those to existing categories. The LLM approach is very likely better, but I'm curious what the cost difference is.
Well Russia Today isn't really a news source. It's more of a propaganda outlet. But so are most of the sources that we call news, anyway. Maybe if high quality news sources existed, Kagi could uprank them, but they don't.
This isn't similar to the Yandex situation because Yandex actually returns good results and Russia Today is garbage.
Where is the dehumanisation in “I stopped using this because it makes extensive use of a source I consider untrustworthy”? That seems like quite a leap.
Critical thought is not about negativity, it is about evaluation. You take a statement and evaluate it based on its merits using an epistemic system which prioritizes consistently, evidence, and logical coherence.
Saying it is disagreeable is like saying that honestly is disagreeable. Sure, it can be, but it is not an inherent feature, and a lot depends on how it is delivered.
This is the ideal: friendly criticism. But first you have to make friends. If your audience aren't your friends, you can exercise your silver tongue to charm them while still delivering your criticism. If they aren't your friends and you unfortunately don't have a silver tongue, you can be negative, or be quiet, or stick to subjects they won't feel defensive about. You can't have the ideal in practical reality.
If you don't have a silver tongue, say what you mean without denigrating anyone or anything, or just don't comment at all. There is no requirement to be negative for the sake of being negative.
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
Oh, that actually seems ... bad. On the gripping hand... restricted in which way? I learned to program on the BBC B, for instance.
I keep thinking that computers that are actually made to be good for children should be a thing. Perhaps like "A Young lady's Illustrated Primer" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age )
I can't see how anyone can think "the exporters pay the tariff" makes any sense. TBH, we'll never know how many people thought it made sense because it didn't matter.
In the end money move around. If - for example - the government would just give the citizens the money from the tariffs in equal share (I mean not that I suggest they would, but technically possible), it would be like taking from the citizens that consume more and give it to the citizens that consume less.
So, yes, it is correct in a practical immediate sense that "the exporters pay the tariff" but that excludes many relevant issues like how prices evolve (which are paid by the consumers), what the government does with the money (it could share or not) and what others decide to produce (to avoid tariffs). But definitely many people didn't thought of all that ...
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.