When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.
The survey this is based on has a summary page, but they don’t post their survey error estimates. What I can tell, without giving them my email, is that the entire survey was 250 adults. How many of those are “gen z” I have no idea, but if you are generous and say 1/4 that is 63 people considered gen z. The 46 percent that reported dipping into savings would then be about 29.
Just so everyone prognosticating about the state of the economy in this thread is aware, you are commenting on a survey that has a very low n and did not publish any sort of margin of error.
AI doomsday marketing wank has the same vibe as preteens at a sleepover getting spooked by a ouija board.
The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.
The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
“Premeditated” in the context of homicide means someone intended to kill someone else. That is, they set into motion a course of actions because they believed that course of action would result in the death of a person.
Homicide in the context of fatigue or impairment are not usually premeditated because people generally do not put themselves in those cognitive states believing that doing so will result in the death of someone else.
Historically judicial systems have recognized that those cognitive states are more likely to result in unintentional deaths so do hold people operating vehicles under those conditions to a higher standard of punishment than, say, a sober person involved in a fatal crash. At the same time they consider intent and hold people in those circumstances to a lower standard of punishment than those who actually intended to kill someone.
PhD Level expertise:
According to this article delinquency rates on car and credit card loans more than doubled for households earning 150k+ from 2023 to (presumably)2024! The delinquency rate MORE THAN DOUBLED!
. . . From somewhere around 0.17% to 0.34% of all loans in this class
So, no households earning more than 150k are not struggling.
Reporting relative percent increases for extremely small values is a journalism sin.
Andrew German wrote about this. From his blog post I got the impression that this issue is mostly impacting compsci. Maybe it’s more widespread than that field, but my experience with compsci research is that a lot more emphasis is placed on conferences compared to journals and the general vibe I got from working with compsci folks was that volume mattered a lot more than quality when it came to publication. So maybe those quirks of the field left them more vulnerable to ai slop in the review process.
Is this really that precise? Reading through these 10 points, many of them seem quite vague to me. Phrases like:
[. . .] a structural renewal of a wider movement for social autonomy [. . .]
or
[ . . .] emancipatory defence [sic] of the need for communal constraint of harmful technology [. . .]
could mean a million different things, for example.
How can this be projection? Silicon Valley’s culture brought us fraudulent medical tech, cryptocurrency scams, industrialized wire fraud, illegal taxis, and DRM juice machines. A paragon of honesty and integrity if I ever saw one.
Word guessing machine.
What does dystopia mean to you?
In this particular case, the things I find dystopian are the tendency of a disconcertingly high number of people to allow a tech company to mediate (and eventually monetize) every aspect of their social lives. The point I was making is that if this tool were to experience widespread adoption, even putting aside the massive surveillance and manipulation issues, what will inevitably happen is that a subset of people will come to rely on the tool to the point where they cannot interact with others outside of it. That is bad. Its bad because, it takes a fundamental human experience and locks it behind a pay wall. It is also bad because the sort of interactions that this tool could facilitate are going to be, by their nature, superficial. You simply cannot have meaningful interactions with someone else if you are relying on a crib sheet to navigate an interaction with them.
This tool would inevitably lead to the atrophy of social skills. In the same way that overusing a calculator causes arithmetic skills to atrophy, and in the same way that overusing a GPS causes spatial reasoning skill to atrophy. But in this case it is worse, because this tool would be contributing to the further isolation of people who, judging by the excuses offered in this thread, are already bad at social interactions. People are already lonely and apparently social media is contributing to that trend allowing it to come between you and personal interactions in the face to face world is not going to help.
This is akin to having sticky notes to remember things, just in a more compact convenient application.
I really disagree with this analogy. It would be more appropriate to say that this is like carrying around a stack of index cards with notes about people in your life and pulling them out every time you interact with someone. If someone in my life needed an index card to interact with me, I would find that insulting, because it is insincere and dehumanizing. It communicates to others "I don’t care enough about you to bother to learn even basic information about who you are.
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the application
I really cannot stand this bromide. We are talking about a company with a track record of using technology to abuse people. They facilitated a genocide (by incompetence, but they clearly did not give a shit). They prey on people when they feel bad. They researched ways to make people feel bad (so they will be easier to manipulate). They design their tools to be addictive and then manipulate and abuse people on their platform. Saying "technology is neutral is the least interesting thing you can say about tech in the context of the current trends of silicon valley. A place whose thought leaders and influencers are becoming ever more obsessed with manipulation, control and fascism. We don’t need to speculate about technology, we already know the applications of this technology won’t be neutral. They will be used to harm people for profit.
A tool that keeps track of people in your life and gives you small talk cues seems dystopian in its self. Relying on that you would just further isolate yourself from others.
Thinking about it, I am pretty sure I would immediately despise anyone who used this tool on me, even apart from the fact that they would be putting me into a meta database without my consent. I would despise people who use this tool for the same reason I despise people who crudely implement the strategies from “How to win friends and influence people”. Their interactions are insincere and manipulative.
I’ve got a buddy who is a professor and he catches llm cheaters by asking them difficult questions like “what was your essay about?” and “what were the three points you made in your essay?”. I’m sure llm proponents will offer some bromide about “tools aren’t inherently good or bad”, but it seems like the reality in college is llm tools are used for cheating.
I think when most people say something like “technology is making the world worse” they mean the technology as it actually exists and as it is actually developing, not the abstract sense of possible futures that technology could feasibly deliver.
That is clearly what the author of the piece meant.
If the main focus of people who develop most technology is getting people more addicted to their devices so they are easier to exploit then technology sucks. If the main focus is to generate immoral levels of waste to scam venture capitalists and idiots on the internet then technology sucks. If the main focus is to use technology to monetize every aspect of someone’s existence, then I think it is fair to say that technology, at this point in history, sucks.
Saying “technology is neutral” is not super insightful if, in the present moment, the trend in technological development and its central applications are mostly evil.
Saying “technology is neutral” is worse than unhelpful if, in the present moment, the people who want to use technology to harm others are also using that cliche to justify their antisocial behavior.
I’m no economist, but this seems like a really bad idea.
Federal Agencies make their own rules. That is how the Federal government works. Congress makes a law, usually with enough ambiguity that the federal agency charged with enforcing the law has to make specific interpretations. They make those interpretations, usually under some process that requires public notice and comment, and that interpretation becomes the law in effect. That interpretation can be challenged through a lawsuit, at which point a Judge could overrule the interpretation establishing a new interpretation through judicial review. Until recently, the courts gave a lot of deference to the agency’s rule making process because rules are usually written by a combination of lawyers at the agency, and subject matter experts. So, for example if a new law regulating factory safety was passed, and the enforcement of the law was delegated to OSHA, then OSHA lawyers and subject matter experts (like doctors or engineers working for the agency) would make a rule and solicit public comment.
Nothing about this EO can, or pretends to. usurp the power of the judicial system. The AG can make any interpretation they like, it can still be challenged in a Court. And after the Chevron court case, these rulings are easier than ever to challenge.
This does not extend to the Judicial branch. It only applies to the Executive branch. You can read the EO yourself to see that fact.
This is bad because it is trying to exert control over independent agencies, and pretty stupid because there is something like 5000 final rules and proposed rules in the Federal Register last year, so if this were seriously implemented, the AG and POTUS would just sit in teams meetings for the rest of their terms while potential rules get discussed.
This is bad because it undermines the independence of federal agencies, it does not actually impact the Judicial system however.
The repercussions are that all the grand jury materials are going to be released to the defense, which is extremely rare.
These materials will bolster one or more of the arguments for dismissal making them much more likely to succeed.
If these materials clearly demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct (which so far has not been proven) I think they could also be submitted as bar complaints against the prosecuting lawyers, making those complaints more powerful which could lead to career consequences for those lawyers.
This decision, which is part of the preliminary phase of a trial, is extremely unusual and very bad for the prosecution.