Time to buy stock in water lol

I’m sure I’m missing out, but i have no interest in using chatbots and other LLMs etc. It floors me to see how much attention they get though, how much resources are being dumped into their development and use. Nuclear plants being reopened for the sake of AI?!!

I also assume there’s a lot of things they’re capable of that could be huge for science, and there’s likely lots of big things happening behind closed doors that we’re yet to see in the coming years. I know it’s not all just chatbots.

The way this article strikes me though, is that it’s pretty much just wasting resources for parlor-game level output. I don’t know if i like the idea of people giving up their ability to write a basic letter or essay, not that my opinion on the matter is gonna change anything obviously 😅

Guess i was asleep that day 😬

Bothers me that much of this data has been collected without explaining what its intended purpose is. All those captchas that want you to pick out cars or bikes etc, Pokemon game that wants you to scan locations for free items… It simply never occurred to me that these were actually just ways to train AI surreptitiously

But they’ll have stragglers just the same as any major social media site. Even though many here have standards they won’t easily abandon, there are scores of people that won’t even know if/when AI started being used on the site or would care enough to leave if they did.

Plus every time we leave a platform we need to find or build a new one. The time it takes to get others to migrate and develop into a worthwhile community is hard to predict and it may not even work out. It sucks social media is such shit anymore, but it seems inevitable that it will remain that way given the landscape of the Internet at this point.

I say this as someone who’s drifted from Fark to Digg to Reddit to Lemmy over the past 20-25 years 🎈 (zero loyalty as well)

They don’t care where the money comes from, and at this point they know there’s no cost to their reputation for doing shit like this either.

Duly noted, i appreciate the feedback 👍

I’m glad i ran into this article, because it spells out something I’ve been suspecting for some time. Back in 2016 i got a sour taste from Facebook, mostly because it helped expose how shitty a disappointing amount of my acquaintances were.

In addition to that though, i was finding less of my feed was posts from friends and were more from ‘Liked’ groups and suggested groups etc. I gradually found myself stopping there less and less and eventually stopped going at all. Years later, i finally decided to come back and see what I’ve been missing and it’s an absolute shitshow now.

Just the other day i went on and started scrolling on my Facebook feed and after several pages, it occurred to me that i hadn’t seen a single post by any of the friends. I don’t have a lot of friends/family/acquaintances on there to begin with (~150 i think) so it wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t sharing that much anyway. Still, I became determined to see how many posts i would have to scroll past before they inject one of my friends posts into the feed. It was the first time i reached the ‘end’ of my feed–I actually reached 250 posts (given my count was correct) when it told me i reached the end…and by that point i didn’t see a single post or anything pertaining to any of my friends in that session…just liked groups and suggested groups.

So when i read this article, i perked up when I caught this particular part.

"And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you’re following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.”

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is trying to do what every social media company is trying to do these days–create an endless feed of content… They’re just trying to make it “curated” by AI so that the user has to do little/nothing to find stuff that’s speaks directly to them, get hooked and begin endlessly scrolling (sounds like paradise, right?)…

It gets worse though! Many of the groups i was suggested (and some I had chosen to follow) were simply posting AI-generated garbage. One thing i kept seeing is Art-focused groups misattributing works to famous artists. How many times I’ve seen a work supposedly by Monet and it was stupidly obvious that it wasn’t. The comments will be in the hundreds or even thousands, and 99% of them will be one-word praises like “beautiful” or “wow” or other useless stuff like that, and the 1% remaining are people appalled that their favorite artist is being mis-credited and that the group should know better being dedicated to that very artist.

Don’t even get me started on the AI-artists suddenly becoming Facebook-famous like “Juan Brufal” who i strongly suspect isn’t even a person at all, but a company/schemer/who tf knows. Bonus points to that fucker for posting their works captioned with something to the effect of “Juan Brufal 1976” as though that’s when it was painted (surprise! it’s not a real painting)… After a bit of googling it turns out 1976 is when the AI “artist” was born. None of that is openly shared though, and the name/year format is the same as many others use when attributing other artists works, so it’s easy to convolute the meaning. Hardly anyone even send to care though, and the few that do are drowned out by the “beautiful” comments flooding every post. You can’t even avoid some of these fuckers because Juan Brufal et al are in all the popular art groups – and in many of the groups that the algorithm is going to recommend to me as well. Can’t avoid these assholes, so the play is not to go there anymore—which is all the easier knowing I’m not likely to see anything my friends are posting there in the first place. Maybe they’re already as tired of this shit as i am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The bottom of the barrel is a distant memory at this point, Facebook is becoming shit on a primordial level lol

Bobby Kotiktok 😎

“Thank you for holding, sir. What may i do for you?”

"Actually, could you put me back on hold, that jazz station is lit "

From what i gather, they waited until after the reviews were in. They got a good score, which i guess would have been impacted by the inclusion of microtransactions, and released them after the reviews were in. Sounds like they were trying to avoid the bad press they would have gotten for including them (or perhaps purchases even, from people starkly against the practice)

Oh yeah, that fuck face. Glad to see someone face consequences for their actions. Hollow comfort, but I’ll take it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That makes sense. Carrying a library is a whole different thing from having access to a library…

I’m in the same boat. I like having physical copies of my favorite games, music, movies, and shows. I also like supporting the artists/productions, so it’s a win-win that i can buy their products. I’ve always struggled to understand why someone would pay the same price (or nearly as much) for a strictly-digital copy.

Making everything fully digital has its advantages but i never once thought it would act as a complete replacement for physical media.

Perhaps they’ll be fined 1/4 day’s profits and carry on like nothing happened ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Trump 2024, lol

(Edit: just to clarify–if you want all that bullshit, Trump is your man 🙌)

(Edit 2: /s would apparently have been the appropriate indicator of my lack of seriousness. TIL!)

Somebody had to take up the mantle since Consumer Reports cannot be trusted anymore

The malware’s coming from inside the operating system 👀

I haven’t tried them myself yet, but there are filters you can use to prevent specific topics/keywords from entering your feed.

If they had the capacity to feel shame, I don’t think they would have penned that article. Disgusts me how quickly people abandon humanity for a few schillings