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Ooh, thanks for the reminder! Mine expires next year. Best renew it now before they fuck that up, too.

And who is likely to nominate an antivax, anti-science lunatic with brain worms to head the dept of Health and Human Services?

And who is planning to eliminate the department of education and NOAA?

Previous administrations have done damage through incompetence and/or malice, but the plan this time is on another level. They’re going in with the goal of breaking everything.

Paying bills is for poor people. Rich people don’t need to do that. How would they stay rich?

Have you tried doing this? I have, for *nearly a year, on the more ‘advanced’ pro versions. Yes, it will apologise and try again – and it gets progressively worse over time. There’s been a marked degradation as it progresses, and all the models are worse now at maintaining context and not hallucinating than they were several months ago.

LLMs aren’t the kind of AI that can evaluate themselves and improve like you’re suggesting. Their logic just doesn’t work like that. A true AI will come from an entirely different type of model, not from LLMs.

e: time. Wow, where did this year go?

Kinda brilliant to disguise malware as a captcha, though. I won’t be surprised.

They’re not required here. You just plop your child in your regular car with no changes whilst they’re learning. It’s insane. I bought a magnetic sign to warn people though, because that seems nuts to me.

I was making a joke tho.

Little Bobby tables learns to drive.

This is smart. When my son was learning, I put a magnetic ‘student driver’ sign on my car, too. More people should do this. It’s just polite.

And yet they managed to obliterate a poorly-specced launchpad, causing massive damage to a nearby town and wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem.

I can’t remember NASA ever doing that.

Oh, thanks for pointing that out.

I was formulating an angry rebuttal in my head, then saw your comment and realised I hadn’t noticed the username. Of course it’s Musk. That’s rebuttal enough.

Right, but I wasn’t talking so much about my own experience, rather my experience with other people during that time, because I was tech support for literally everyone I knew, so I knew what they all thought. Because they told me.

AOL was what most nontechnical people had during that time. There’s a reason for those AOL disc memes. It’s made fun of a lot, but that was how the internet became mainstream. They mailed them to everyone and their grandma, and their success was it was FREE** and the discs installed and configured everything for you: the browser, the ISP settings, and even their home page. You stuck the disc into your cup holder, and it gave you a friendly icon on your desktop to click to access The World Wide Web™ (or AOL’s private version of it – most people didn’t know better). Most people would never have discovered the internet otherwise.

eta: and yes, internet society was actually that divided in the early years. More so, if anything. AOL was so ubiquitous and marketed, they made a blockbuster movie out of it. You likely can hear the tone in your head, even if you never used AOL in your life. Few brands have attained that social status, or held it for long. Oscar Meyer, Disney, things like that. And it didn’t last a hundred years; merely a few. /e

It wasn’t just the discs – if you bought your computer from the furniture store it came set up that way. Non-tech people just clicked that icon and didn’t know any better. Keep in mind that accessing the real internet was difficult and required a lot of knowledge many people neither had nor wanted at the time. The computer was for spreadsheets and solitaire, and it was a very expensive luxury.

I doubt you’ll get the response you’re looking for, because the people you’re talking about are the same people you’re decrying today. I’m saying that idealised demographic didn’t really exist, and I’m not speculating about them. I was embedded deeply in a world of those people. I remember them very clearly. I made it my career to understand them.

I strongly believe you’re seeing them through a heavy fog of nostalgia.

eta: and back to the original point, I strongly believe that people who feel the internet has fallen short of our expectations don’t remember what our expectations really were.

I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.

I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.

I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.

I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.

If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.

I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.

According to Pliny, a creature with a horse’s body, deer’s head, elephant’s feet, lion’s tail, and one black horn two cubits long projecting from its forehead

That’s a pretty good description of Elasmotherium.

Pliny should have missed the last Elasmotherium by like 100,000 years, though, give or take a few years.

You seem very excited so now I have to check it out.

e: holy shit, it does

Isn’t that true of pretty much everu technology, though? I remember in the late 70s there’d occasionally be a loud pop and a puff of smoke from the television, and I’d tag along with my dad to the tv shop to buy new vacuum tubes, then we’d remove the back of the television and do minor repairs. Everyone knew how to do that.

My television today is a magic black box.

Socrates said books were dumbing down humanity because, since people could just look things up in books they wouldn’t have to memorise information anymore, and that made their brains soft.

Ever since society began, some people have been convinced the next generation’s technology was going to be society’s downfall, whether it was Socrates’ books, the telegraph in the 1800s, radio, the (land line) telephone, dishwashers (women will become lazy and unsuitable wives and mothers), screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes), comic books would rot the brains of the youth, then music, then video games… it goes on and on.

So far, those predictions have never been true. Every older generation freaks out when the ones after come of age. It’s like societal growing pains.

Yes they are. We’re now learning many animals are just as emotionally developed as we are, with well-developed empathy and complex social lives. We don’t like to believe that because we eat most of them and that makes us feel bad, but it’s true.

Research animal psychology and sociology a bit and it will blow your mind.

Food for thought, though: we thought the same thing about all other animals until only a couple of decades ago, and are still struggling over the topic.

That’s how I’ll get ‘em. Kill me gently, daddy. UwU 🥺😩🙀😽😻💦

And then I’ll sneak out the back whilst they’re doing whatever’s the robot equivalent of vomiting. It’s foolproof.

People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?