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Growing up, the internet did not feel real to me. Just a collection of memes fighting each other, fire-walled from reality. It seemed like an entertaining farce but not real.

This was relatively true for the internet I grew up with, but it is certainly not true now. What happened in the capital was quite a wake up call. And much of the blame for it does look to be the result of things like click-through maximization and engagement maximization pushing people towards extremes, things like karma and likes allocating status to those staking out extreme positions. It is a terrifying thing to think about, but if you start thinking of social media influencers and followers as a sort of client-patron relationship, the historical precedents are not comforting.

For myself, I am coming to terms with the fact that I cannot really trust any opinions that have been inculcated in me during the wild years of social media. I have deleted my Reddit and Facebook accounts, have diligently trained the YouTube algorithms to avoid any even remotely political content. I no longer trust myself to develop sensible opinions in such an adversarial environment and am doing my best to just not have political opinions and focus on simple things like maths and programming.

Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. Perhaps once such things like this exist, I will allow myself to have opinions. But until then, I don't think I have any hope of making sense of this cacophony tuned for my engagement. Until I get such a thing, this will be my last post on HackerNews.

Drexlarian nanotechnology?

Engagement is engagement.

Note: This is a fictional article, obviously. My apologies to NYT. Nonetheless, I consider something like this to be an inevitability.

I would not be surprised if it were already occurring somewhere. Perhaps the title should have informed people this is fiction, but I think that ruins some of the effect

I hope I am not breaking any rules. And if I am, well, you know what to do now, don't you?

If the purpose of love is merely the feelings associated with love then the scenario I described is not pathological. I am not willing to bite that bullet.

The strange thing about super-stimuli is it looks very ridiculous when animals fall for it; there is the funny example of a turkey trying to mate with a red balloon on a stick. But it is the nature of super-stimuli that they will not seem ridiculous when we fall for them, because the very features we use to gauge authenticity are what will be simulated. And so we will get sort of hollow simulacrum that emphasize these features and lack everything else.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of love. A sailor is not supposed to actually reach the north star.

You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.

You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.

She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.

In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.

It strikes you that true love does exist after all.

If you do not put a price on something, it will be exploited more not less.