A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.
I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.
Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.
Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
Honestly even the curated subs I was a part of were pretty toxic or echo-chambery now that I've had time to look back
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).
Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.
You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.
Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?
Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?
To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.
And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.
I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.
Except hn. Never disengage from hn.
Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?
Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.
RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
1. Car crashes
2. Street/bum fights
3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)
4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")
5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)
Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level
It's almost as if they like the population to be afraid.
maybe you find a suitable board on 4chan
Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI has accelerated this process, at least for people who don't notice when they're getting played (or who don't want to notice).
A similar thing I have randomly come across multiple times on YouTube are videos consisting of a still AI image of a white person mistreating a black person (e.g. a white police officer screaming with rage at a black man eating in a diner) and an AI voiceover text telling a GPT-generated story hashtagged #heartwarming, e.g. "The white police officer was violent against the black man... What he didn't know was this was a highly decorated veteran!"
Some of these are clearly getting picked up by the algorithm and drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The factories behind these are probably halfway around the world but realized the race relations of a large economy can be exploited for profit or geopolitics.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1ojydgq...
https://www.reddit.com/r/themayormccheese/comments/1ojtbwz/a...
Note how that second one all uses the same script, "I have 7 babies from 7 different baby daddies!"
BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.
Probably bots?
See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.
I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?
This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.
Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.
I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.
And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.
E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining
people are less confrontational the more local it is
At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.
Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.
Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.
I want to say "I remember things better when I write them down", and because I think I'm a smart person I think my memory is good.
I don't know how well I'd remember things if I'd spent a large portion of my life building memorization skills. Maybe I could be 100x better at memory if I exercised it more?
Even then it would be a bad study because you'd have an extremely narrow biased sample with a very specific culture. It'd be impossible to separate out cultural or genetic differences.
I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.
As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.
When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.
(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845772 "meta predicted 10% of revenue came from scams"
I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.
And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.
People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.
i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.
Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.
It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.
Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.
Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?
the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..
HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.
Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?
On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.
> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.
Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.
> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.
And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.
Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.
You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.
I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.
My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.
The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are common (politics), and thread discussions like on HN where real life versions are fleetingly rare. I dont think its entirely fair to conflate the two. eg:
> Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions?
I discuss on HN as much to find and genuinely debate alternative opinions, and IME thats a pretty common pattern. i have learned so much reading other comments, formulating thoughtful responses to others, and have others break down / extend / critique my own shared opinions. Its what makes HN enjoyable and also the primary way its different than other social media sites.
206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title.
Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?
Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.
I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.
By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.
The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.
On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.
So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.
Using language in an anti-thinking way seems like a somewhat interestingly thought through mission though. If that's even the case.
The fact that you try to think about it that much though is arguably what makes it almost funny.
Art doesn't have to make you think or convey any ideas. L'art pour l'art. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or wherever.
I'm purposefully not engaging with whether LLMs are actually even good at what they do, which is another discussion.
You should definitely keep minors away from this dangerous brainwashing.
Even better "AI"s lead to outsourcing of thought, search capabilities, speed reading and critical reflection.
I'm sure this take is at best oversimplified. Probably mostly wrong. But it's certainly something I will think about while hiring from now on
Do you have a different experience in academia recently?
Adopting LLMs is easy. I use Claude code for tons of stuff, but I'm very grateful it wasn't around when I was in school and starting out in the industry.
This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.
I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.
If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from.
>> My brain is exploding of complexity every time
So very clear :)
Chinese uses different symbols for punctuation and the comma in particular is surrounded by padding.
Such a low bar.
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
20 years ago I remember all the scary articles/studies about the web ruining education.
e.g
Net cheaters (from link below)
The ease of gathering information on the Internet has a darker side. The simplicity of finding out things on the Web also makes it easy for students to cheat. Cutting and pasting text from a Web site and into a paper is effortless. So is wholesale copying or purchasing finished essays or reports. About a fifth of online youth (18%) say they know of someone who has used the Internet to cheat on a paper or test. While 9% of those who have been online for a year or less know someone who has cheated, 19% of those who have been online for 2 to 3 years and 28% of those who have been online for more than three years know people who have used the Net to cheat
from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...
I think of this concept living second hand through other people's lives (social media) it's not living your own
If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Reading should help one think, but it is not to replace thinking...
I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.
But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.
I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
However, three generations or so is not enough time to see the effects of this form of selection on our species. All the great things we see in life that we’ve built rest on the laurels of behavioral patterns and neuron networks established by millions of years of this hunter-gatherer paradigm. Now that is over for most of the breeding population. What is next for us is the interesting question. What are we selecting for today? What sort of person tends to be the most fecund? Where are our alleles heading? I mean, we aren’t even selecting for reproductive success anymore. For example, the people who need to rely on ivf to reproduce today perhaps would not have reproduced in the past, and whatever alleles that conferred that infertility might have been regularly lost in the population shortly after they emerged through mutation. Now, that ivf offspring survives, and might harbor these alleles instead to the next generation where they will also depend on ivf to reproduce.
Intelligence is also not being selected for. Intelligent people tend to have kids late in life when sperm and egg quality are already in decline harboring more mutations than gametes from younger humans. They tend to also have fewer kids. Lack of education on the other hand is correlated with having more kids younger in life. The poor and uneducated therefore have a higher fitness.
It does not seem to bode well that our present level of intelligence will even be around in 10,000 generations time given that the selective pressures that generated it in the first place are now lost.
Maybe that is the great filter: intelligent life is short lived as the changes to behavior that emerge from it being widespread and technologically capable lead to that very intelligence no longer being selected for.
Socrates was really ahead of the curve on this I guess…
Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk.
It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.
This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.
The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.
Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.
Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.
Schfifty Five https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978
If social media is a tool for anything, it is for the company to generate ad revenue. Sure there is value someone can extract (keeping in touch family). But I can also extract value from junk mail (using it as scrap paper for notes and lists.)
AI is still a tool. I think? I have not seen any direct way that monetizes it through ads, yet. I expect AI with a revenue model will look way worse.
AI is turning people dumb. I see it all the time with code slop. It's the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish". Maybe a tool-using approach to AI is "should me how to do this", rather than "do this for me". "Show me an example of some code" is more useful to me than unleashing it on my project.
Also, social media is obviously a sort of digital narcotic. Probably should be scheduled.
Deleted all my social media accounts except Youtube (but I use Unhook to remove everything except my subscriptions and the search). Haven't felt better. I use Telegram and Whatsapp and SMS to keep in touch with friends and family, nothing connected to any social app. I avoid all of the social-media-lite features in those apps like the plague.
Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.
Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…
Get outside, do something.
So statistically, even if one is purely honest and accurate, most likely you aren’t in that one particular silo.
The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.
[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.
less ?
We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...
If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.
Don't discount the effect of lead in paint, pipes, gasoline, etc. It's not a surprise that Republicans try to roll back regulations that remove lead.
“Bad thing X has been happening forever.
AI _guarantees_ X will exponentially get worse, but it lets me do (arguably) good thing Y so it’s okay.”
AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.
(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)
Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily_ responsible, but I think there's little doubt it played a role.
okay, call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709
Well in this case, this definitely happened to this one kid.
At least one already. I suspect your comment won't age well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
> Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar.
You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
"played a role" != "instigated". everything "played a role" there.
their fucking government did it.
>You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
are you for real?
You took out a pretty important word.
> are you for real?
Yes? Both sides of the conflict used social media heavily to justify their actions and generate support for continuing the conflict.