So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
> every algorithm … every UX tweak
Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS), would that count as consent?
Would a GDPR-type banner also count? Although I guess GDPR banners generally need JS to execute, so that wouldn't be allowed - I guess a GDPR-like interstitial page would be needed before accessing most websites? Or what would consent mean?
> the right to execute code on somebody’s device
1. Would that include serving text, image, and/or video JavaScript ads? 2. Would this mean that JavaScript or anything beyond text/images/videos would generally be forbidden on the web, without 'consent' (also depends on the question above about what counts as consent)?
Regardless, if we did do away with most ads, do you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away? Become paywalled? Something else?
My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.
When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.
I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.
I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.
Got the exact same answer.
These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices.
The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald".
One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare.
Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers.
You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time.
Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.
1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
2. For every social media account you have: close it.
3. Profit
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do.
You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.