Honestly, during the dotcom bubble at least workers were getting paid and jobs were abundant. Things didn't start getting bad for workers until it popped. We're supposed to be in the 'positive' part of the AI bubble and people already seem desperate and out of hope.
Everyone not directly involved seems to want AI to pop. I'm not sure if that says anything about its longevity. Not very fun to have a bubble that feels bad on both sides.
I like the idea behind https://oasis-ai.org/ where you can actually try to take advantage of the 'dream logic' inconsistency of each frame being procedurally generated based on the last one. For example, instead of building a house, build the corner of a house, look at that, then look back up and check if it hallucinated the rest of your ephemeral house for you. Of course that uses AI as the entire gameplay loop and not just a graphics filter. It's also... not great, but an interesting concept that I could see producing a fun dream logic game in the future.
Threads is the one really taking off. Personally I'm not thrilled at Meta and Zuckerberg increasing their stranglehold on social media, but it seems to be the way things are going.
As someone who lives in Canada, I can say "performs optically like snow" can be completely blinding. Still, it seems like a good idea as long as we're careful about sight lines.
Can confirm doing charity collection that we often encountered this. Credit card processor said there was nothing we could do about the more sophisticated attacks that used a wide range of IPs. We basically stopped them by freezing everything if there was an unexpected traffic spike. Not perfect, but it worked and they stopped trying us.
Originally when I started my comment you mentioned watching cable TV (since removed), but I think a lot of people forget that cable TV started out as an ad free service as well. It's just the same bait and switch over and over again. Revenue must be maximized and competition is always either non existent or in collusion.
I'm thinking less about AI training and more about having a source of (reasonably) reliable information from the net, in case AI generated fake images and generated cross referenced texts start making it too difficult to discern real history from malicious rewrites. It's bad enough now, but can get much worse with the proliferation of AI agents.
So to follow my example, that would be no computer or internet until age 15. I don't know, seems harsh. I'll also have to swap my TV for a 10" one that only gets 2 stations.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say capitalist culture is eating its own young, due to its fixation on business culture. And I'm saying that as basically a capitalist. Not sure where we go from here.
I hope this isn't too contentious but I'll try to cover most things. I've posted this a few times, but I checked out 4Chan about twice in the early days and saw CSAM both times and it gave me personally a visceral hatred of the site. I've heard it got better/that's not representative but it's a hard thing to shake. The origin of the site is also supposedly Moot getting kicked off SomethingAwful for posting 'lolicon' (child anime porn). They've also gone after and doxxed pedophiles though, so the sites relationship with that sort of content is... complicated. I think most of the worst ended up moving to 4Chan clones quite awhile ago because it really splintered again at some point and became known as the cleaner Chan board.
It's also known for its extremely abrasive mildy sociopathic culture and 4Chan posters have a very samey 'posting voice' where if you don't like it you can hate it. It permeates a lot of the internet, but 4chan is kind of seen as the epicenter. I think it also gets blamed for a lot of negative internet culture like doxxing and choosing targets to harass, although I'm not sure how much of that was actually 4Chan. I think most of those people moved on to Kiwifarms. 4Chan probably gets some hate for things that other Chan sites have like Qanon in a sort of 'you started this' way.
And finally the politics are complicated. It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing. It definitely seems like they had a shift in political tone for the (IMO) worst at some point.
Personally I won't hide that I'm a hater and an unapologetic curmudgeonly old man, but that's my perception. On the other hand if you think the CP stuff is overblown, don't care about the negatives because there are apparently good boards there that are insulated, or are just hard right yourself then it is one of the last major discussion boards on the net. Some of that's probably out of date (like I said I gave up on it pretty quickly) but I'd wager most people with negative opinions are thinking of one or more of those. I'd be interested if any haters have other reasons.
I think they're distracting from the fact that it's a huge tax on the general public. You might say it's obvious, but people just don't process it the same way even though that's what a tariff is.
The state gets more power over you without UBI (assuming a social safety net of any kind already exists) - without UBI it needs a larger apparatus to decide how to distribute funds, and it can pick arbitrary reasons to cut off your funds. Under UBI administration would be far simpler and cutting off your income for political reasons would be far more noticeable, since it's supposed to be universal.
One thing they do is allow him to raise taxes on the middle class and poor, who will be paying those tarrifs, while lowering the taxes for the rich. Everyone's talking about some 3D chess when "more money for the rich" has always been the only consistent Republican policy.
I hate this mindset that Americans are lazy, they are usually some of the hardest working people in the globe. The wealthy are greedy, and wealth and power continue to concentrate at the top while infrastructure, working conditions and public services crumble. I don't fault anyone for not wanting to contribute to that, quite the opposite. I don't see how the jobs you mentioned are going to start commanding better wages when everyone has to rush to do them because there are no more options.
I'd feel a lot better about it if more countries held values of free speech and democracy. If mainland China were like Taiwan, great. Unfortunately I fear those might just end up being viewed as instruments of America's decline.
But a large degree of the exception was being excepted from being blown to smithereens during WW2, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't usually come around twice.
With Brexit and now this I've been thinking that if someone out there is intentionally trying to dismantle the 5 Eyes they're doing a bang up job of it. Step 1 appeal to their nationalistic or even imperial senses to make sure they piss everyone else off, step 2 stoke some internal grievance politics, step 3 get them to unload an entire AR15 magazine into their leg (to paraphrase Dril).
Or how about this analogy - Google removing "don't be evil." Does it mean anything? Maybe not, but it probably signifies an internal political shift, and we might want to keep an eye out to see what it is.
This even under sells it a bit. Trump style conservatism has turned toxic and Musk is heavily associated with its worst aspects (think the "salute"). I think a lot of Americans just don't get how angry the constant threats of tarrifs and attacks is making people. For a mental exercise they should try imagining how mad people were about egg prices, then imagine how much angrier they'd be if on top of that their largest partner started talking about wanting to explicitly ruin their economy if not outright invade them. It's insanity.
Maybe not now. I wasn't alive for the Vietnam war but I remember saying anything bad about the Iraq war 2 was a quick way to get fired and a bunch of death threats for a few years. Now things have flipped, but you've got to keep in mind that attitudes change and people like to pretend they never supported viewpoints that have become unpopular.
I agree with all of this, and frankly it has me terrified for the future of humanity. With enough AI and automation you don't even need other humans, just the resources to hoard more means of production. The only rational argument I have for how we get somewhere else, is eventually once we start hitting the end game of resource accumulation someone's going to start launching nukes and the destruction of technology will send us back to a time when other humans actually mattered. A bit optimistic, I know.
Python scripts for managing and automatically editing photos. Anything bigger and once the code reaches a certain point it starts actively breaking things, and in some cases, makes them unrecoverably worse. I have gotten benefit as a programmer being able to break down projects and spot when it's going down the wrong path, but I think you need quite a bit of experience to use AI on large codebases or with types of code it has few training examples of. I've also caught it 'fixing' code by essentially silencing errors without addressing the underlying problems.
Especially considering that governments such as the UK (I know they left the EU but I'm more familiar with them than the current EU members) have a pretty grim history of exactly that.
Well almost half of them are supporting this. Then there's that story yesterday about Erdogan banning his opponent in Turkey. South Korea just narrowly avoided turning into a dictatorship (and honestly they're still in the weeds a bit). And something like 1/3 of South Koreans still support that would-be dictator. I've just been extremely depressed lately about the prospect of democracy and freedom of speech just being dead ends.
Even here in Canada my local Conservative Party leader is trying to remove checks and balances on his power in my province. I guess the paradox of tolerance is real. Too many people want strongmen or are at least indifferent.
Is there a Democrat doing ANYTHING beside Bernie Sanders? Chuck Schumer is actively aiding the Republicans at this point. Where are the other Democratic leaders to rally people? Where's Kamala Harris or Hillary, I thought they were supposed to be strong leaders? I only see the far left of the party doing anything at all. I honestly think the Democrats are so captured by corporate interests that they would prefer Trump than to build on any leftist sentiment while America absolutely burns its reputation to the ground. And half the country still supports this which is its own can of worms (and I could go on about worldwide attacks on democracy in general but it's depressing enough). I hope the Democrats are cooking something up or hopefully they get reformed in time to do something.