(Sorry, bsky devs; I like what you've done here, but it's clear our species' brains aren't ready for the medium in general.)

If the only thing "AI" actually accomplishes is to flood social media with astroturfed propaganda, eventually making it so that no one believes anything on these sites was written by a human and hollowing them out of actual human participation...

...I'll call that a win.

You built a pattern generator, not a consciousness. It has no way to tell fact from fiction. What did you *think* would happen?

It can't possibly have taken them this long to figure this out.
openai.com/index/why-la...

I'd like to propose a novel disorder: pathological anthropomorphism
www.psychopathia.ai

You're telling me an AI researcher is myopic and almost completely uninformed about other fields of study that could complement their own? No way; that bunch is famously multidisciplinary and supportive of the humanities.

I get that the underlying intent there is a bad faith argument, but...what if the words themselves are accurate? The real "ambient social disorder" is the rampant misinformation about cities/other people that results in terrified, jumpy people carrying AR-15s around.

It takes someone truly ignorant about how this technology works to attempt to regulate "objectivity" and "top-down bias" — but that's been broadly true about government regulation of the tech industry for decades now.

one insidious thing about evil is that it makes thinking about anything else difficult, not only crowding other things out but also making them seem meaningless; it drains all but a sliver of the world of colour and saps the will to live outside that sliver — unless you ignore it, which is giving in

It was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of darkness, it was the winter of despair.

If you win, you get these shiny points made of diamond, but if you lose...well, actually, either way the devil gets your soul.

Calling all Faustian bargain hunters!

TikTok is (almost certainly) creating a proprietary singing TTS model and would very much like you to donate some training data.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/07/tiktok-live-music-competition-gimme-the-mic/

Spotify's "AI" DJ is an underrated productivity hack.

Every time that obnoxious TTS voice pipes up, I immediately un-distract myself from whatever I'm doing to hit "next track", and then I can get back to actual work.

So I guess it does have *one* redeeming feature.

I agree that the consumerist version of travel described in the essay is a net negative, for a number of reasons, but attempting to pull all travel experiences under that umbrella is reductive and narrow-minded, exactly the accusation the author levels at "travelers".

"In order to prove my point that this thing is not worth doing, allow me to quote some people who never did it."

This is not a case against travel; it's a case against tourism, and it says more about the author than it does the subject:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

Dying and coming back as a lazy Web 2.0 marketer looking for a domain name, call that reinkrnation

Came here to see if this had already been done. Was simultaneously satisfied and disappointed.

The further I get into the album, the more I wonder if it's not so much that the songs have aged well, but that I'm enjoying yelling along in nostalgia as if they're sea shanties, swinging my water glass like a flagon.

brb, reconsidering some life choices.

I wasn't sure I was going to scream that particular question into the void, but then I saw this post, and it was as if the universe was saying, "Ask, my child. These are your people; they will know."

https://bsky.app/profile/wapplehouse.bsky.social/post/3jyr53k7c2w2l

Is it just me, or has some of Dashboard Confessional's early stuff, particularly The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, not aged as poorly as it could have?

With nothing to tell the system, "Hey, it's cold enough; you can take a break", it just...keeps on refrigerating.

Can't wait for the electric bill.

I was today at 3:45 AM years old when I learned what happens when your thermostat batteries die while the AC is on.

My OCD is thrilled to have something new to worry about when I go on vacation.