amemorablename
If true—and it’s sure not hard to believe it is given the endless fucked up stuff western colonialism and imperialism has done over centuries—all I can say is, they make ghouls look like casper.
The kind of people who believe the US is a democracy, yet simultaneously believe they are being ruled by varying degrees of evil and that the only time the people should get consulted is once every 2-4 years, at which point they should panic and take all of the responsibility for what was done by other people during the time they were sleepwalking through politics.
That is a part I’ve been mulling over lately, the extent to which people are expected to take responsibility for so many things the system, as violently enforced, says they have almost no control over, while also being told to fuck off if they want anything specific from the system that differs from what the elites want.
It makes no sense. Regular people are either responsible or they aren’t, they have power or they don’t. And the evidence shows that the policy-making has little to do with what regular people in the US want. So why do people keep getting taken for a ride with the idea they’re in control if only they’d vote the correct way once every 2-4 years. People have got to admit the reality to themselves and stop expending so much energy for a facade.
“And do not quote me.”
At this point, Brynjolfsson points out that, “You’re on camera,” to which Schmidt responds:
“Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.”
I almost wanted to say the US is a clown car of a country, but that would be insulting to clowns.
I feel that. It’s especially awful to me how much of the US, there is no alternative and you’re essentially being forced to do a dangerous high-risk activity on a regular basis just to get to and from places for basic survival (that is, if you can afford a car and are capable of driving and so on - and if you can’t, you may be dependent on someone else doing that dangerous high-risk activity). The amount of cumulative stress from that, not even getting into the number of injuries and deaths, has gotta add up to a lot.
And the whole concept of driving as the main means of getting around is so backwards and ineffectual that the richest people bypass it and use private planes instead. All the traffic, the accommodating different directions people are coming from, lights, stop signs, turnoffs, you end up with so much starting and stopping, it’s wasteful for gas use, wastes time, and isn’t even freeing like it gets portrayed as because you’re highly limited by the roads and their traffic patterns and design. And don’t get me started on how so many road designs have no consistency at all and vary widely from moment to moment, because forbid any of it makes any sense and was planned ahead on.
So it sounds like the spirit of what this person is saying is, if somebody bad were to use the phrase “don’t do genocide”, then we should go consult people being genocided and ask them if it’s okay to say “don’t do genocide” because it’s not really clear if it’s the right thing to say, since somebody bad used it. 🫠
Oh yeah, on some apps, there definitely seems to be profiles that are liking everybody. I’ve heard it speculated (not sure if confirmed) that they tend to give you a visibility boost when you are a new profile, which is why you can end up with a few likes in the beginning then nothing. Though with Hinge, I found I wouldn’t necessarily get any even when new, possibly because Likes are more limited per day than some apps and it allows you to send a message with a like, so it’s a bit more conscious.
Np, hope it helps (and feel free to let me know how it goes, I’m curious to know if it works for anyone else). And yeah, I remember trying CharacterAI briefly in the past for language learning myself; main difference I find with this type of setup, is 1) The corrections are “on the side”, not organically part of the conversation itself, so you have the main conversation which the AI is focused on and then you have suggestions/corrections you get if you say something its evaluation thinks has incorrectness for that language. 2) Both apps have forms of conversation where they can be more unguided in terms of what you talk about and have “roleplay” type of scenarios that are a little more structured for practicing specific kinds of things. For example, I was just doing a little talking with a “roleplay” on Tutor Lily called “explaining symptoms to a doctor.”
So if I compare it to trying to learn through just any LLM, point 1 seems to be the most significant difference. Since technically you could already get an LLM to roleplay most things, albeit with more effort than with these apps’ scenarios. But getting corrections on the side while talking to an LLM seems to be a more specific engineering/design thing that goes beyond LLMs alone. I might try to ask the creators and see if I can get an answer, but I’m unclear still on whether these apps are powering the corrections purely through an LLM itself or some other kind of AI evaluation with it.
There’s one I’ve been on for… I’m not sure, could be more than a year, though I was inactive for a while during periods of that. I have a grand total of 4 likes and 3 of them were recently when I was inactive, which seemed like the app was giving me a bit more visibility to draw me back in. (And none of them are people I want to match with.)
Based on the things I’ve heard, the game seems to be that these apps tend to “rank” you early on and then from there, you’re mostly stuck where you are unless you pay to get more visibility. And because rejections are not something you “see” unless you match and then the other person unmatches, you have no way of knowing for sure if your interactions (likes, or on Hinge, messages without being matched) are being seen by anyone or if they are buried in the stack.
I know on Hinge, from the end of receiving attention, there’s a limited number of likes you can see at a time without paying. So presumably that means that if, for example, somebody gets flooded with likes/comments and gets 100 of them, they’d have to go through and match or reject with each one to see all of them if they are a free user. And because some women get flooded with more attention than they have the time to engage with, that effectively means you might never get seen at all.
I know that’s not exactly an encouraging way of looking at it, but considering the mechanisms of it helps remind me that it’s likely not something to do with me and is far more likely I got in a bad spot early with the “ranking” and can’t get out of it without paying. So sometimes I go through it for the hell of it to remove people in my stack, or send out the occasional like/message, but I try not to spend too much time on it when it’s designed to work against me.
