For me, this is making things much much less nuanced.

We are always at war with Eurasia

I just found this on AliExpress: $112.58 | 1-70mm Wire Stripper Manual Wire Stripping Tool Portable Electric Drill Powered Copper Scrap Wire Peeler Hand Crank

My summer job, apparently.

Yes, they do. Sitting alone in a room, creating video content creates a self-centered and narcissistic worldview. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have you are not really interacting with a single one of them. Get out of your house and meet people in your neighborhood, share your work with them then I’ll be impressed

Zuck owns more than Facebook, too. ANY big social media platform is similarly toxic.

These people have co-opted our social discourse for evil causes. And they aren’t the only way to share work online.

Creative people do not have a right to my admiration if they provide fresh bait that the oligarchs use to degrade democracy and civil society

Nah, if you are feeding the Zuck, not my team. The principled creatives aren’t there.

It sucks to try to make a living as a creative. But giving your efforts to support social media platforms controlled by the worst people is inexcusable. Zuck literally and provably helped the fascists gain power.

The creatives I can respect create because they are compelled to. They work jobs and create when they can. They share their work on less shitty platforms and in actual real life.

I remember at my first job in high school in a store on Main Street. We had a sidewalk sale with other business owners.

My innocence was lost when my boss instructed me to place higher prices using our ordinary white stickers and then cover them with ‘discounted’ orange sales stickers at slightly higher prices than normal.

These dicks just do it at scale. Amazon is a tawdry crime organization. We all know it.

Boo hoo, losers. Your device has a power switch. Influencers have a warped and inflated sense of the value they create. They can stop at any time and use their skills in other ways.

Making good content is hard, but ‘good’ content doesn’t have an expiration date. Shallow brain-rot content does and that’s what the algorithms reward.

The entitlement that influencers have is nauseating. There are many creators out there laboring in near obscurity and producing useful content all the time for little or no compensation.

They are tools for Zuck and fools for propping his platforms up. It sounds like a hard slog, but they can stop any time.

I don’t buy it.

A diversity of regulatory approaches especially in such a complex subject really does need the 50 state laboratory.

In fact because states are smaller markets, it might encourage the development of more smaller companies. A complex regulatory landscape gives an efficiency edge to players who focus product development in specific states.

Anything to keep this shitshow happening in a more democratic way is fine by me. Anthropic and that Altman fellow seem so desperately out of touch with humanity, I welcome any disadvantages we can give them.

As a junior biologist, I remember having the realization that viruses and other quasi-living things are just an epi-phenomenon of life. That was a level-up moment in my training, a lot of things clicked into place.

Meaning, if one could magically remove all viruses from the biosphere, they would re-evolve very quickly. Let alone the fact there are significant numbers of viral fragments in our DNA, some of which have been co-opted and used for crucial purposes, such as the mammalian placenta.

Plus the tendency of some of those fragments to move around the genome, providing a source of variation that is sometimes selected for.

Viruses and maybe this archaea may not meet a binary definition of ‘life’, but any biosphere anywhere in the universe will have things like them in great abundance. Any evolving system will produce them.

Yeah! Great to hear. Please continue to be a fixture in your neighborhood.

As Fred Rogers told me once, in a conversation that was just between us, a friend is a person in your neighborhood.

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There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

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It definitely does in my experience. I have intentionally used it for specific tasks for defined periods of time. And then stopped and used only my normal online search tools and a text editor without AI assistance. My projects were written concept development, plus some light coding to create utility scripts.

From just my own experience there is definitely a real cognitive hazard associated with using LLMs at all, for all but the most specialized tasks where an LLM is really warranted.

The scripts worked fine, as they were quite simple python utilities for some data cleaning, so I see a use there. But I found that the concepts never caught fire in my imagination, whereas usually a good share of concepts developed manually turn into something that gets a deeper treatment, even a prototype design at least.

Lucky people. They will have a period of mourning and then enter a cultural renaissance.

Websites work very well and are scalable af. A plugged in person with a track record like that could go Web 2.0 and probably net more.

It is exactly because Microsoft does suck fucks.

Fascism is capitalism unmasked.

Medical miracle AND a manmade horror beyond my comprehension.