It's an incredibly striking piece of technology and really shows which way the future winds will likely be blowing. A particular exchange I had with it left a mark on me, in which I requested it to behave like a used car salesman attempting to close a deal with a hungry customer. It proceeded to repurpose idioms, make dad-jokes and sling double entendres about the shared joy of cars and hamburgers and how they both are simple, dependable and iconic in my way of life. I sat there for a minute reading over it, nearly in disbelief.
I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on. But to see it do such lingustic gymnastics with a very non-concrete request was humbling. It's given me a lot of pause about the way I absorb digital information and the varying degrees to which I have implicitly assumed the reliability of that information; site A slightly more trustworthy than site B, et cetera. To me, that old trust heuristic I relied on, one I have honed thanks to unfettered broadband for two decades, is now completely upended. It probably has been for some time to be fair, but my time with ChatGPT really cemented that feeling.
Every freshly written statement that comes to me through an internet connected device now gets a side-eye by default.
I've been talking about this for awhile now, but I used to run a marketing service that streamed all reddit content in real time and did text analysis and bot detection. It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot. I am entirely convinced that there are large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites like reddit to simulate "consensus" in online discussions and thus gently sway public opinion.
> It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot.
A scary number. I wonder about a per-subreddit distribution, though. I imagine the primary subreddits have slightly worse human-to-bot ratio, niche subreddit somewhat better, with non-political, non-easily-monetizable subreddits having the best.
Did your analysis also attempt to identify troll farms? Would the content produced by protein bots be grouped in the ~65% of bot content, or the remaining 35%?
It's wild how low quality so many of the comments are on reddit, to the point that it makes me wonder "Why did this person comment something so empty and non-contributing to a post that already had 3000 comments?"
I don't know whether to believe people are so wasteful of their own time or whether this is just low-effort bot posting to build consensus. Combined with how harshly and instantly main subreddits like /r/politics and /r/news shadow ban accounts, it's basically impossible to dissent
>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on
On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?
I certainly can't see us humans as anything other than that. But if that's true, us human machines seem to have a large number of "low level programs" running in the background that serve to blur the boundary between us and the machines we build and help us to elevate ourselves to a special typing in the universe that very well may not exist.
I feel I think too much about mundane things and sometimes about wondrously confusing things often to my detriment. And at least a few times a week I would swear I run into a person with the opposite problem. Their behavior, choices, preferences. Their thought processes (at least what they share with me) come off as closer to machine than human.
Something in my gut tells me we are more similar to some of the things we build than we might care to admit.
We are heuristical which may not be logical, but it makes sense from an organism perspective.
For example since the world is uncertain and chaotic we seek either to conserve or expend for future gains. This can explain many stock trading behavior, despite often being a non optimal viewpoint
I echo the feeling of a lack of capacity to change things. Given my income level and current situation I resorted to the penultimate form of not tipping: No longer going out to eat, by and large.
It sucks, for sure. We do not have any no-tip restaurants in my area. But price transparency is something that is very important to me and I will stand by my principles on that matter. And since not tipping a person you are face to face with carries a social weight that renders such a move untenable I just don't go out for food at places that ask for tips in any capacity. I'm sure there's an argument one could make about my choice being harmful for tip-heavy employees that use that money to live on. But I have never chosen to subsidize businesses whose practices I don't agree with and tipping has hit a point where it has fallen squarely into that category. I'd like to think if more people thought like me, the market for tipping restaurants would begin to shrivel, but I have little reason to think such a thing will happen in my area at least.
Does this mean maybe we have a glut of restaurants operating in a preferential-to-the-business economic environment, and some might not survive such a change, maybe yeah. Does it mean those employees will have to look for work in a changed market if that does happen, yes. But I want everyone who works to be paid a fair, predictable, agreeable wage for the work they do and continuing to support places that are (I feel) diametrically opposed to that principle does not work towards that goal.
So cast iron chicken and rice pilaf at home it is!
It's hard to say. I would argue that yeah, that baseline tip %age is creeping upwards in the US at least, though the rate at which is hard to quantify. There seem to be a lot of social factors at play that are continuing to put upward pressure on that number. I was taught 15-20% a decade or more back, but that feels to be closer to 25-30% now.
Delivery app tip culture is a fascinating rabbithole in and of itself. /r/doordash is a great repository of posts to look at. You can get a sense of expected order pricing/tip amounts/driving distances sufficient to compel a dasher to pick up your order. Much like with the restaurant industry you will notice that quite a few (I would say a majority of posters there) take issue not with Doordash but with the delivery recipient as the cause of their low earnings. Tips are the name of the game, and any fervor to change or push Doordash into changing their payment models are hushed by the collective din that laments "stingy customers".
Whether it was planned or a happy coincidence, that mentality is a sociocultural win for doordash as a company. The customer, who themselves can make no guarantees how much of that tip a driver will receive if paying digitally, is to bear the burden of blame more than the company that contracted that service to a driver when said driver feels underpaid. It feels me with a sense that's hard to describe. Disheartenment maybe? That new markets and services appear and the tipping culture we crafted for ourselves comes in with them, absolving some companies of paying market wages and sometimes shielding them from certain wage laws.
I wish we in the US could collectively agree that this culture of tipping is (imo) a net negative for everyone involved. But with an economy looking over an uncertain horizon, and the recent bottom-to-top wealth transfers facilitated by the chaos of covid, I think the simple act of throwing a few bucks to the service worker will remain the average American's daily act of "helping the little guy" regardless of how real that benefit truly is.
> It's hard to say. I would argue that yeah, that baseline tip %age is creeping upwards in the US at least, though the rate at which is hard to quantify.
I misread this at first and thought that it was saying the recommendation was to tip at a percentage equal to your age, which I found intriguing. It's certainly a lot easier for me to afford a 29% tip right now than it would have been ten years ago when I was 19, and that trend probably holds for most people, but age isn't _that_ accurate a proxy for wealth given that everyone gets old, but most people don't become rich.
> I wish we in the US could collectively agree that this culture of tipping is (imo) a net negative for everyone involved. But with an economy looking over an uncertain horizon, and the recent bottom-to-top wealth transfers facilitated by the chaos of covid, I think the simple act of throwing a few bucks to the service worker will remain the average American's daily act of "helping the little guy" regardless of how real that benefit truly is.
I strongly agree with you that tipping is overall worse for both workers and customers compared to guaranteeing proper compensation and then adjusting prices to reflect this in lieu of tips, but even as someone looking to "help the little guy" it feels like I don't have any significant ability to improve the situation, and I ultimately don't think it's right for me to withhold tips to try to pressure companies to pay their workers better. It just doesn't seem like it should be my choice to weaponize someone else's misfortune, even if I think it might help things in the big picture.
I'm in full agreement with you about the tactility benefits with a physical camera versus a smartphone.
I'm in a phase of life where I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing or even what I'm very good at. But I do have a camera and I can write passable amounts of code, so I've been preparing a website to host my work while I strongarm friends and family into taking pictures with me. Most of them have a nice phone with a good camera and so we often end up talking about what the benefits are of a dedicated set of camera hardware versus using a phone's camera. I like those discussions because it makes me think critically about my camera and why I'm using it.
The physical inputs and muscle-memory laden experience is what I've kept relying on as justification and it's nice to hear I'm not the only one. For those of us who have used guns, it almost feels like holding a rifle. The entire process is subconscious and the more I use it the faster I become, as well as the more finely-tuned I can set up the camera during that subconscious movement. It equips me to image things that, if constrained by time or scene stability, I straight up would not be able to do with a phone camera.
There's also the social benefit that comes with it. I've found that when I'm using my camera and rapidly fiddling with controls and settings, people around me get the sense that I am a professional (I'm not) who knows what he is doing (I don't). "Everyone" has a phone so those "every" are common to see holding up a flat slab to a scene but dedicated camera users are increasingly rare. My tools and my physical control over them grants me this silly air of authority. And honestly that authority presents me with fresh opportunities for impromptu shots; just recently I was at a live music event and started wandering into places and standing on things to get the angles I wanted. Nobody said a word to me, nor did I think twice about doing it. We all kind of understood, "that guy has a camera and he's using it well. I suppose we should let him work". Kind of interesting.
I don't know about "professional", but what I've also found is that if you want someone to hold a pose, they're much less likely to tire and stop if you take ages to fiddle with your smartphone.
How long were those prices elevated? I seem to recall the beginning of the upward creep in mid 2017-early 2018 but it's hard to recall. It certainly feels like it's been 4-5 years.
I enjoyed checking the secondary market prices of my 1060 3GB every few months during those years as a repeatable source of shock. GPU prices had incredible staying power for a while there. But now? Now it's time to jump back in, helllooooo RTX
In my moderately sized southern city of 200k, we logged/censused 576 homeless a few months ago. Of course these individuals were the ones able to be counted; there's likely more. So roughly a quarter of a percent per captia.
As with most US cities of this size and economic demographic we have a few areas where those without housing tend to congregate. Pains me and I wish I could help more than I do. And from what I have seen in my many decades of living here, these areas are totally devoid of this "open air drug market" characteristic. Not to say transactions don't happen they most certainly do, but that's true of every square foot of any US city, and the people in these places shield their behaviors from public eyes as well as anyone else that procures such things. My city is experiencing a staggering increase in violence this past year at a seemingly disproportionately faster rate than other nearby metro areas if my napkin math holds true and yet none of that violence is noted as occurring at these areas I'm describing. I think that's worth noting too.
The interplay of homelessness, mental health, drug dependency, economic struggle and societal rejection is a very complicated and interwoven problem. It's disappointing to hear that there are individuals who feel so self assured in the sources of these problems when it's evident that the qualities of these problems widely differ from place to place.
Could I trouble you to a link to Rhodes's statement if it's still available/if you have one? I wanted to see her claims myself, but I couldn't turn up anything after a few minutes of googling or looking at her twitter.
I had a similar experience. Higher resolution netflix on my T-Mobile prepaid data line with warp installed.
Additionally I did the bog standard TTL modification, installed warp and probably one or two other things I can't recall. For whatever reason those changes allowed me to tether unlimited 4G speed data rather than being throttled down to 3G after a few gigs. This was true for T-Mobile, US Mobile's "verizon" tower mvno service as well as US Mobile's "t-mobile" tower mvno service. Can't say I was upset about it.
That's how it generally happens from what I understand. A local or isolated investigation is started and during the process they may uncover a reasonably high-level source of the product. Should they be lucky enough to get a warrant to scan an email server that has plaintext business contents, they might come across a trove of tracking numbers. From there the three letter agency will disseminate tips and intel to more local police forces and field offices and innumerable people start getting love letters, visits, surveillance.
I also recall hearing that the USPS tracking info page is quite complex under the hood and logs a lot of your device/connection information when you enter a tracking number. No idea how true this is, but it wouldn't surprise me at all and I hope people behave as if it is.
Agreed about the wasted 20's on the internet. No doubt I could have better spent my time. But there was some incredible and wild stuff going on out in the wires.
I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on. But to see it do such lingustic gymnastics with a very non-concrete request was humbling. It's given me a lot of pause about the way I absorb digital information and the varying degrees to which I have implicitly assumed the reliability of that information; site A slightly more trustworthy than site B, et cetera. To me, that old trust heuristic I relied on, one I have honed thanks to unfettered broadband for two decades, is now completely upended. It probably has been for some time to be fair, but my time with ChatGPT really cemented that feeling.
Every freshly written statement that comes to me through an internet connected device now gets a side-eye by default.