The one good thing I hope comes from the en masse adoption for this sort of slop is that it renders the problem of the attention economy inert, because now anyone, including the platforms themselves, can now generate masses of pointless content at a whim. I hope, very very HOPE, that what that will do is that vacuous bullshit content will finally be SO abundant, so ubiquitous, that even regular people who generally don't care about the quality of things will FINALLY have to curate their feeds out of sheer necessity.
I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this.
To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
Right now YouTube is supposedly trying to crack down on AI-generated videos, so I think some of this is happening. I don't know how to feel about it since I keep hearing about honest niche channel getting caught up in it. Ultimately and unfortunately I think there's an equilibrium between slop vs genuine content that the platforms will tolerate or maybe even actively encourage. Youtube has GenAI tools built into it, so it's not much of a stretch for them to generate videos either if they thought they could get away with it.
The missing bit is a representation of knowledge, and a way to represent a learner’s comprehension.
Even if you shortcut by synthesizing a textbook in every major topic - that’s just one arbitrary representation, and the way topics overlap is outside of the material.
I am very interested in this though, if anyone has references to relevant research I’m all ears.
This is US centric, but you can show this to anyone in any major city in the western world and they will nod.
The problem is global. Any time you are told the problem is immigrants in your country or that your local politicians didn’t build enough housing - that’s not the root cause.
The root cause is the inevitable centralization of all wealth in corporations who can dodge taxes. This affords them the ability to accrue assets endlessly, buy politicians, achieve monopolies and bump up the prices.
There are 3 things that need to happen to restore the first frames:
1) some things like housing and healthcare must not be asset classes. It is unsustainable to demand profit growth year over year from either.
2) the wealth needs to be redistributed. It is a systemic risk for corporations and individuals to have accrued as much wealth and power as nations (and it doesn’t seem to be good for the mental health of those at the top)
3) we all need unions so workers can advocate for themselves and even the playing field. Including tech.
I’m not a communist, I think capitalism broadly works, but it requires regulation. We deregulated and it’s made a mess, we need to wind that back and patch the bad logic.
Yeah, I actually live in Toronto, and this was one the design decisions I was thinking about before building this, it's just that more people relate to the US. And I agree with the reasons you listed, immigration imo can be controlled, like what I see here in Canada, they seem to control the flow based on economic state and demand year to year.
Seeing that type of email coming from a company like Anduril would honestly freak me the frick out, no ifs and no buts about it. Which probably means I'd never be part of their target audience.
I will not sit here idly as you disparage an entire kingdom of diverse, beautiful, highly efficient, decentralized problem-solvers. Some of my best friends are slime molds.
(From inheriting an Alessi electric kettle in past life: if you are an aesthete go for it. If you are an engineer in your soul stay away).
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