ameancow
@ameancow@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anon is worried about men 16 hours ago:
The common denominator in all of this is the fucking internet.
We didn’t have the internet to give us opinions about men and women before. Most relationships were formed with existing social circles and friend groups. People hung out and had fun and talked to each other until they started getting frisky and then we had babies.
Now when someone wants to go get it on, they start reading the internet stories and arguments and roleplay issues, and they get tense and worried and then have no idea what to do or say when they’re in the same room with a potential partner.
We HAVE to kill off the reliance on the internet if we want people to start liking each other again, which I don’t know how to do since we’re only getting more and more locked-in to our isolated routines.
- Comment on Anon is worried about men 16 hours ago:
before the advent of dating apps, 2/3 of all relationships were formed through existing social circles and friend groups. People don’t connect easily with strangers, but having a social group means that people feel safer reaching out or making the first move, they feel comfortable sharing more of themselves and being compromising so they don’t create negative ripples in their shared groups.
People who are scared to socialize now tout dating apps as the way most relationships are formed, which is true, but dating and relationships have fallen to an all-time low so that even though dating apps “work” that’s just because the other avenues are dead or dying, and people still absolutely haaaaate the dating scene, apps and all.
You want better results? Return to tradition, make friends, be a social person, force it until it becomes real and natural. Have interests that take you outside of the house and find even a tiny spark of passion for life, and you will have friends and relationships no matter how “anti social” you think you are.
- Comment on Anon is worried about men 16 hours ago:
For the same reason we don’t have productive political debates anymore, people don’t have productive interpersonal relations anymore. Everyone withdrawing to their internet safe spaces has made a whole generation of men and women who instead of talking to each other, read horrible stories from other men and women and retreat further and further from actually talking to each other.
Now when you put a young man and woman in the same room together, they’re both on edge because both their minds are consumed with anxiety about what the other is “planning.”
- Comment on Based on a true story 18 hours ago:
We’re not given much choice.
You simply don’t exist as an American without a car and a phone and internet and an address with your name on it. Anything below that is considered fringe, poverty or societal reject. Good luck getting a job without a smartphone and your own car, don’t expect public transportation to be of any help, it doesn’t generally exist outside the larger cities and what there is of it, often sucks and takes hours out of your day. Our “public” internet is mostly coffee shops who make you buy something to sit there using their slow-ass wifi. If you fall on hard times, you have to apply for aid, which comes with stacks of provisions, like having an address and a phone, and this kind of aid is only available temporarily and if you accidentally make too much money they will cut you off.
If you’re savvy you can learn to use things like libraries and carpools and food banks and other resources for the needy. But it’s really, really hard to get out of poverty once you fall down. Most institutions and companies that provide services of any kind charge you more and more the less money you have. You need to have over a certain amount in your bank or you pay fees. You need to pay your bills on time or they charge you twice as much, you need to keep a credit history maintained even if you’re broke, because most employers include credit checks in their hiring process.
Most of the “middle class” you see here are suburban families working multiple jobs 6 days a week or more. Two people working often requires two cars, now your monthly transportation costs outpace your living expenses. Have kids or want to have kids? Good fucking luck figuring out childcare or daycare and paying for that too. It’s okay, smartphones and tablets will raise your kids. Keep the machine moving.
- Comment on Based on a true story 18 hours ago:
I cannot comprehend owning a $5000 car.
That’s insane that some people have 5k to spend.
- Comment on Based on a true story 18 hours ago:
The so-called “wealth” you see in the American middle-class is mostly just debt.
- Comment on If you're still on Reddit... 19 hours ago:
Reddit gets half a billion browsers a month. They announced last year that they would be partnering with Google to train and host a new generation of AI, and we also know now that people like Elon Musk have no qualms about enforcing their agendas on the site.
The number one way to filter the plausibility of conspiracy theories is to ask one simple question: How does this impact the rich?
For the vast majority of normal kook conspiracies, they fall apart almost immediately when you apply that filter. They have way too much to lose to risk gambles on covering up moon landings and flying saucers or perpetrating huge hoaxes that need a vast contingent of people involved to maintain. Meanwhile, social engineering… that’s easy as shit, you can do it alone if you have the resources. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It starts simple with “Hmn I want to make people realize that investing in my company is a smart move” but quickly degrades to “We can’t let people think this genocide is bad, it will wreck our bottom line.”
- Comment on If you're still on Reddit... 19 hours ago:
They’re banning or shadowbanning people almost arbitrarily, they don’t want more human users than bots, they can control the narratives and conversations and public sentiment with a turn of a dial if they get enough bots who seem like convincing human users to all chime in about something.
You can really see the disonnence on a major post criticizing Elon Musk or on the topic of vandalizing Teslas. The posts are all highly voted, but the top comments are all crying and whining that Musk “doesn’t deserve the hate” or how “vandals should be put in jail, we obey the law in this country!” and a lot of other very obvious oligarch fellation machines.
- Comment on Horses ARE Forever 3 days ago:
Because it’s pro-AI hype BS. No idea what it’s referencing here and now on lemmy where most people here are far less accepting of AI hype, but I’ve seen it used on the highly delusional Singularity subreddit. Usually followed by hundreds of comments from people making actual real-life plans for what they’re going to do when the “artificial super intelligence” makes them wealthy.
- Comment on Rocky rock rocking 4 days ago:
Wow, just TYPICAL that one of “you people” would just IGNORE the fact that the object is actually an accumulation of particles that were formed in a number of astronomical events over billions of years, I guess you don’t even CARE about the rich history that went into this object and only care if it’s “well rounded.”
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 4 days ago:
Reading is incredibly important for mental development, it teaches your brain how to have the language tools to create abstractions of the world around you and then use those abstractions to change perspectives, communicate ideas and understand your own thoughts and feelings.
It’s never too late to start exercising that muscle, and it really is a muscle, a lot of people have a hard time getting started reading later in life because they simply don’t have the practice in forming words into images and scenes… but think about how strong that makes your brain when you can form text into whole words, when you can create images and people and words and situations in your mind to explore the universe around you and invent simulated situations with more accuracy… I cannot scream enough how critically important it is for us to exercise this muscle, I hope you keep looking for things that spark your interest just enough that you get a foothold in reading and writing :)
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 4 days ago:
the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text.
This is what’s missing being discussed in nearly every online argument about AI art that I read online, there are rarely people who make the actual argument that the whole purpose of art and writing is to share an experience, to give someone else the experience that the author or artist is feeling.
Even if I look at a really bad poem or a terrible drawing, if the artist was really doing their best to share the image in their head or the feeling they were having when they wrote it, it will be 1000X more significant and poignant than a machine that crushes the efforts of thousands of people together and averages them out to set of averages.
Sure there are billions of people who are content with looking at a cool image and think no deeper of it and are even annoyed at criticism of AI work, but on some level I think everyone prefers content made by another human trying to share something.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 4 days ago:
Large discord groups and forums are still the proving ground for new, young writers who try to get started crafting their prose to this day, and I have watched it for over 30 years. It has changed, dramatically, and I would be remiss to say I have no idea where the change came from if I didn’t also see the patterns.
Yes it’s entirely anecdotal, I have no intention of making a scientific argument, but I’m also not the only one worried about the influence of LLM’s on creators. It’s already butchering the traditional artistic world, just for the very basic reason that 14-year-old Mindy who has a crush on werewolves at one time would have taught herself to draw terrible, atrocious furry art on lined notebook paper with hearts and a self-inserted picture of herself in a wedding dress. This is where we all get started (not specifically werewolf romance but you get the idea) with art and drawing and digital art, but we now have a shortcut where you can skip ALL of that process and just have your snarling lupine BF generated for you within seconds. Setting aside the controversy over if it’s real art or not, what it’s doing is taking away the formative process from millions of potential artists.
- Comment on RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE 5 days ago:
“Wise fwom youw gwave!”
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
I experimented a few times with throwaway accounts and yeah, they’re locking or shadowbanning people just for engaging with politics or social issues. They don’t want humans influencing these topics, they want people to read what the bots are saying without distraction.
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
Which makes it incredibly dangerous. Opium has destroyed empires.
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
This is just one of the commercial products too, the companies that have their own in-house tech development departments have their own proprietary systems for just creating an entire realm of content at the touch of a button.
Want to reveal some new development to a story that didn’t exist before today? Use your content bots to manufacture a bunch of blogs and journalist tweets and news websites that look exactly like they were made 10 years ago, with links that go to supporting sources. (which you also manufactured with a few keystrokes.)
The internet isn’t just dead, it’s a shambling corpse raised to feed off the living, animated by its undead lich overlords.
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
Amazingly it appears like a pro left wing website. That is some wonderful camouflage.
This should be making everyone with half a brain freak out right now, even though I know nobody is going to pay attention until it’s too late.
But that website, reddit, is probably the last remaining public spaces that reflects the actual attitudes of the majority of people. (Boring lib shit, but hey better than than facebook or twitter.) So when we’re learning that this site is being hijacked by bots and corporations trying to subtly take over and replace the users so they can “adjust” the nature of popular sentiment, it’s a giant blaring air-horn of alarm that we’re about to see a massive manufactured-consent engine come to life.
People as individuals are amazing creatures, as individuals you can talk to people and make them learn and get them curious.
As a population? As a group? Worthless troglodytes, unevolved pond-scum, slime, oozing shit that seeks the lowest level. This is why we need to have a lot of concern over platforms that purportedly depict average people having average conversations, because as a population, people look to their peers for cues and when everyone is taking cues from a single, artificial entity made to look like millions of real people, we need to start pouring water on some servers somewhere.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
Using a VPN to log into reddit can get you account shadowbanned instantly. Just an FYI.
What’s worse is it’s infectious. If you log into your main account on a VPN, get shadowbanned and change accounts without clearing your history, changing IP and deleting all your cookies, your next account will also get immediately shadowbanned.
If you argue about politics, shadowban. If you make too many reports, shadowban. If you do anything on reddit that isn’t the most milquetoast, bot-like comments on media and celebrities, you will likely get banned or shadowbanned.
The place is overrun with very convincing AI bots that even go as far as criticizing reddit to look convincing, but a large portion of users aren’t even real anymore, maybe as high as half in some communities by my reckoning.
They don’t want human users anymore. They announced a few years ago they were using reddit as a “test bed” for new AI models, they want a site that millions of people visit every day that looks like a social media site where users can communicate, but they want to be able to control what everyone is saying and discussing with a control panel, and it’s working to fantastic effect.
- Comment on Skill issue 1 week ago:
Just remember that evolutionary biology is largely considered quack science, by evolutionary biologists themselves (at least in terms of how ev-bio is used to write papers and books about how horny men and women act in bars, and why your Tinder profile isn’t working.)
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”
By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, and barely read, they were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
This early draft for The Last of Us just gets weirder and weirder.
- Comment on The consequences (of my actions) have been extreme 1 week ago:
I’m still completely confused how you seem to be shifting your stances around. Despite how much fun you seem to be having trolling everyone, I do NOT find recreational enjoyment arguing with people who don’t know how to string words together, so I will block you to end this, you’re on your own with everyone else you’ve confused here over the exact same messages.
- Comment on Luxury bones? In *this* economy. 1 week ago:
That’s right, the wealthiest nation on Earth.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
My sad epiphany of late is that not only are my nation’s population largely unevolved troglodytes whom would barely survive if we weren’t the richest nation and able to provide them with bare-minimum comforts or at least utilities, but so is everyone, everywhere, since before recorded history. And if anything, we’re at a HIGH POINT in human intellect and knowledge. Don’t let the current trends and localized issues trick you, objectively we’re at the highest point in human history for literacy, knowledge of the world, peace, prosperity and communication.
But there have never been nations and leaders of nations who have done all they can to immortalize the times they accidentally sent state secrets to the public journalists. Nope, they etch in stone their accomplishments and genius victories.
This tells me that most of what we know about history and leaders across the world is in fact, utter bullshit, and always has been. The reality is everyone is fantastically dumb and it’s only our creative minds working as a group that let us get this far. People like Trump and his cabinet are an unavoidable side-effect of the fact that largely, our population is very easy to manipulate, and people generally care far less about what’s true or not than they do how comfortable they are.
- Comment on The consequences (of my actions) have been extreme 1 week ago:
I don’t know who you’re “angry” with but you’re either soft-defending the people who had the server or doing the worst job in the world specifying who you’re directing criticism at.
The abuse of trust is the problem there, not the trust itself…
There’s no scenario where you’re not the a-hole if you’re going to parrot something someone else told you in private, elsewhere.
I’ve definitely got some bleak ass humor with some friends in private but forwarding messages people sent you in private to other people and group chats? Really?
I think a lot of people here feel like you’re mounting a case against Derek, or at least saying the guys with the discord server are not accountable or less accountable.
- Comment on "Meritocracy" 1 week ago:
Their ultimate goal (the ones who financed this administration if not the members themselves) have the clear goal of crashing the economy so they can reap it all up at a bargain, then when the markets recover, they will be holding a large portion of America’s material resources. To say nothing of whatever Putin is paying them to weaken our military standing. It could very well be a deliberate ploy to kill trust in our intelligence agency.
But that would be way too smart for these clowns. It’s simply more likely that a lifetime of waging politics on social media and television doesn’t really prepare you for the exacting and demanding requirements of actual national security.
- Comment on The consequences (of my actions) have been extreme 1 week ago:
A brainstorming space
He posted nudes of his ex.
Can we stop twisting ourselves in knots trying to make fabricated and abstracted situations? When you’re shitty on the internet, and let other people see your shitty shit, shit is going to come back on you. It’s your fault, you made a mistake. Period. This isn’t deep or hard to figure out.
- Comment on The consequences (of my actions) have been extreme 1 week ago:
It’s wild how many people feel entitled to just do or say whatever they want without repercussions, and then make themselves into victims when they do face those consequences.
This user above is obviously one of those who are bristling because they realize they are vulnerable to this exact thing… it’s very telling, the people who rage at the idea of having their “private” content leaked are always the ones with the worst private content.