On the contrary, there's no need whatsoever to even deal with this since it already happens everywhere else, it's not some niche, subtle matter, it's probably the most talked about subject in the last decade.
That doesn't really resonate with me because you could make that argument about anything, _especially since_ most of the items that are posted here are links to other websites. There's no need to talk about it here - you could just talk about it at the relevant site(s) comment section.
No. I'm not saying "There's is some other place", I'm saying "This is everywhere already", and for that reason there is no need for it to be explicitly here. There is by no means whatsoever any shortage of places in which those discussions could take place.
The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
> The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
The argument is that it should be here, and that is a very reasonable stance. There is no shortage of places where anything can be discussed; that's not the point. "Here", there is a certain expectation around how to comment which makes this place a more interesting discussion forum, no matter the topic. That some topics bring out the worst in some people is not a good reason to make the topic verboten, but instead a reason to be more critical of the commentary under those topics.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
That doesn't say "no divisive topics" for a reason. The topics are not what make this place interesting, but instead the rules of engagement are.
For all that it's worth, from the outside it looks to have undergone a real, notable improvement. The feeling is exacerbated by the dumpster fire at bluesky insisting that it was the worst thing ever and because after the fact, about every default subreddit (which already were in a bad state) are now terminal with politics brainrot.
On the contrary, if I learned something from the Rittenhouse case is that there's a type of person who, when stuff like this happens, doesn't care about video at all, they just grab the narrative and go with it.
I'm as liberal as they come and when I watched all the Rittenhouse videos, I thought it was pretty clear that he defended himself in a reasonable fashion when he was being attacked by a mob
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
CSS has gotten much, much better, which is why it doesn't suck so much these days, but come on now, using a div with a background image was a common practice. There were like, what, 3 different hacks to center an element inside another?
People don't just opt for a plethora of different tools to deal with it "just because".
Humanization and responsibility issues aside (I worry that the author seems to validate AIs judgement with no second thought) education is one sector which isn't talked about enough in terms of possible progress with AI.
Ask about any teacher, scalability is a serious issue. Students being in classes above and under their level is a serious issue. non-interactive learning, leading to rote memorization, as a result of having to choose scaling methods of learning is a serious issue. All these can be adjusted to a personal level through AI, it's trivial to do so, even.
I'm definitely not sold on the idea of oral exams through AI though. I don't even see the point, exams themselves are specifically an analysis of knowledge at one point in time. Far from ideal, we just never got anything better, how else can you measure a student's worth?
Well, now you could just run all of that student's activity in class through that AI. In the real world you don't know if someone is competent because you run an exam, you know if he is competent because he consistently shows competency. Exams are a proxy for that, you can't have a teacher looking at a student 24/7 to see they know their stuff, except now you can gather the data and parse it, what do I care if a student performs 10 exercises poorly in a specific day at a specific time if they have shown they can do perfectly well, as can be ascertained by their performance the past week?
> now you could just run all of that student's activity in class through that AI. In the real world you don't know if someone is competent because you run an exam, you know if he is competent because he consistently shows competency.
But isn’t the whole point of a class to move from incompetent to competent?
Sure, and the exam is to test that happened. There is no need to perform that test at one point in time if you continuously check the student's performance.
Ah, now I’m getting it. You’re basically measuring the derivative of competency and getting a decent idea of where they are at the end of the course without needing to do a big-bang final exam.
Isn’t the poor performance on those exercises also part of their overall performance? Do you mean just that their positive work outweighs the bad work?
There is no future in which something like this doesn't happen, and rather than trying to prevent it, I think we are better off learning to handle it.
Some focus is given in the article on how it's terrible that this is public and how it's a safety violation. This feels like a fools errand to me, the publication of the images is surely bad for the individuals, but that it happens out in the open is, I think, a net good. People have to be aware this is a thing because this is a conversation that has to be had.
Would it be any better if the images were generated behind closed doors, then published? I think not.
This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
> This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web [ ... ] 2008 happened and normal people got online.
Some of us remember Eternal September, roughly 15 years early than 2008.
