Likely an Amerocentric comment, yes, that assumes gambling can only be as destructive and predatory as it is in the US. I don't know anything about how it works in the UK but it's plausible to me that it's not as harmful a force there, as you say.
If not illegal, what if it's used as justification to further lock down browsers and operating systems? Apple makes a ton of money selling traffic to Google and has a vested interest in preserving the effectiveness of targeted advertising.
After social media, streaming, crypto, what have you, too many of us have come to understand that advances in technology in this era are going to be used against us more than for us.
I agree. I think of these alternatives as off-ramps, not replacements. In 2023 I ditched my Reddit and Twitter accounts thinking it would be very difficult. Today, the idea of losing the off-ramps no longer bothers me.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
One strange form that the post-truth era takes is deciding that stances you don't believe in aren't even real. Saves you the trouble of having to engage with them meaningfully.
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
Exactly. I always think about the ways consumers make terrible decisions with everyday purchases at the grocery store etc. If people could easily estimate unit costs in their head for example, a lot of predatory options would have to go away. But calculators keep people from having to get good with everyday math in their head, while those same calculators sit unused in many everyday scenarios where people don't go to the effort to use them.
It's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.
We were warned very early on, by people more prescient than me, of all the secondary harms to society like this one that were going to come with LLMs. We can't be surprised.
Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.
There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.
It doesn't sound like it used to be any better. Maybe we don't need to complain about AI destroying things that already sucked, like billboards or Linkedin.
Are you making the argument that surrendering general thinking, problem solving, research, and creativity is nothing more to be concerned about than no longer memorizing URLs and phone numbers?
I read his take as not that "we've solved prose", but that we've created the McDonald's slop food version of prose, and people who are undiscerning will cause it to succeed and dominate the culture. While the effects of other people eating McDonald's affects us all in indirect ways, the effects of other people accepting lowest common denominator slop art/labor is going to be much more dire.