OpenStars

Probably b/c if they can’t monetize your data, then they choose to profit from you in other ways. :-(

por queue no los dos? :-P

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice

Okay but… I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.

It knows…

They would if it makes their food tastier. Yum… infants.:-)

deleted by creator

I don’t follow you. They are BOTH the capitalist party, though not equally so. Also, voting for one side vs. the other does not mean that you agree with EVERYTHING that they do - in fact it is more common these days to vote against the other side and ignore what your own might plan or actually do. Nor is it true that avoiding voting - e.g. for mental or physical health reasons - means that someone does not care at all about what happens as a result of the election. Plus, a rather ENORMOUS fraction of people in the USA could skip a particular vote and it would not make the tiniest iota of difference, due to the electoral college system, though that heavily depends on where you live, and also trends to be more true the larger the region impacted (federal > state > county), whereas local elections could turn on a dime and also make a huge impact regardless of what goes on in upper levels - e.g. federal sends monies to help people but locals turn that aid away b/c “reasons”.

Unpopular opinion alert: I dare to say that many people who should NOT be voting - especially those who do little to no research beforehand - would vastly improve the outcome of elections by NOT voting, and thereby contribute more that way than they do now, by actually voting, where they tend to just magnify the votes of whatever the TV & radio talk show people (or more recently, pastors behind the pulpit) tell them to do. The latter makes the USA even more of a plutocracy than later, when the votes get ignored and the rich get whatever they want regardless of who got elected does.

Yup, sounds about wrong.

I take issue with your wording: “crimes” are the things that the OTHER side does, while when WE do it, it is ah… something else. (I am also being facetious, but only a little, unfortunately)

In the wild, it is rare to see a predator before it strikes. Have you ever seen one of those games where there is a picture and you are supposed to find it… but you can’t, even zooming in and scanning every section, and then even when the answer is shown you can barely make it out? In the wild, prey aren’t supposed to evade death - the entire food chain is predicated on that fact. Ofc the predator still has to cross the distance between it and the prey, but lulling it into a sense of complacency is the first part of its successful strategy, then it waits for the prey to turn its head, and only THEN does it pounce. Sorry if this is upsetting but it’s very relevant I promise you, and in no way shippable for this conversation.

So in the wild, if I ever were to see this large fat orange buffoon, bumbling around while making wild hooting noises, actively trying to get noticed by saying whatever manages to get the most reaction from everyone around, I think I would be wisest to run away. Crucially though, not from the orange thing - which has no obvious teeth or claws or anything at all harmful - but from whatever it is that may be following it (whether the orange thing has any knowledge of that or not), waiting to take advantage of the distraction that it provides.

Whether any particular person wins the next election or not, there are always more willing to step up in their place - more Republicans, more Democrats, etc. - and a smart predator is ready to take advantage of whichever side wins in order to get what they want.

Sorry if you thought I was building up to some point worth knowing about - I have found no solutions, only more layers of problems the further deep you dig into these matters.:-( I will say that often when you meet Trump supporters irl, they can be very kind people - they are mislead, but aren’t we all? It is the system that is broken, not solely them (obviously outliers exist, on both sides, and no they are not remotely close to being equal \KKK, but nor is the problem uniquely on one side vs. the other either, plus the whole division between “sides” is working out VERY well to Putin’s benefit, hence making me question just how much involvement his agencies have with the recent Civil War style divisionist thinking that is currently fashionable).

I think all we can do is question what we see, and compare it against what we KNOW to be true. Which not everyone is capable of - e.g. who has the luxury of that kind of time? A great place to start, imho, is to recommend watching https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs.

Counterpoint: the rich want to get richer, and the lapdogs want their bribes, and the lazy folks in the middle can only be motivated by fear (not even greed works anymore, e.g. for retirees who already got theirs), so to break out of this cycle would take… … …

I have no clue.

Human is stressed out bc of the implications the numbers show to the real world (maybe they are trying to solve climate change?).

AI just laughs regardless of what nonsense it spits out - it was built to resemble the form of answers, not actually make them. :-P

I might be guilty of misinformation here - perhaps it was a forerunner to ChatGPT, or even a different (competing) chatbot entirely, where they would read an answer from the machine before deciding whether to send it on to the end user, whereas the novelty of ChatGPT was in throwing off such shackles present in an older incarnation? I do recall a story along the lines that I mentioned, but I cannot find it now so that lends some credence to that thought. In any case it would have been multiple generations behind the modern ones, so you are correct that it is not so relevant anymore.

Learning about the philosophy of the Stoics (which frankly was not enough for me), plus this quote (which also was not, but the two together… that did help!:-D), something to the effect of: “Strong societies beget weak children, who then grow up to create weak societies, which then beget strong children, who then grow up to create strong societies” - and the cycle continues. i.e., Boomers mainly did not fight in the wars, just grew up hearing how Great America was, without having to experience first-hand the blood, sweat, and tears that made it that way (to the extent that it ever was that way ofc). Well, now things are changing in the direction that they were ALWAYS going to have to changed in - b/c evil people gonna evil it up, no doubts about that - and eventually, sheeple will get sick & tired of being sick & tired and rise up, to change things. Until then, we suffer, but not needlessly.

In other words, we’ve gone through the stages of denial (climate change / economic downturn / wage slavery / cultural insensitivity / whatever is NOT happening), anger (okay so it’s happening but what are you going to do about it), bargaining (he tells it like it is and big daddy will fix everything & make it all great again! ironically this holds true for both Obama and Trump, loathe as I am to have ever uttered such a sentence), and now we are into the depression era.

Next comes acceptance, and that’s when the healing - and the beginning of lasting change - can truly start.

Yes, and the fact that the quality suddenly declined awhile back - e.g. that article I linked to explained more - tracks along with those lines as well: when humans were curating the answers it took longer, whereas now the algorithm is unchained, hence able to move faster, and yet with far less accuracy than before.

ChatGPT was caught, and I think later admitted, to not actually using fully automated processes to determine those answers, iirc. Instead, a real human would curate the answers first before they went out. That human might reject answers to a question like “Computer: what is 1+1?” ten times before finally accepting one of the given answers (“you’re mother”, hehe with improper apostrophe intact:-P). So really, when you were asking for an “AI answer”, what you were asking was another human on the other end of that conversation!!!

Then again, I think that was a feature for an earlier version of the program, that might no longer be necessary? On the other hand, if they SAY that they aren’t using human curation, but that is also what they said earlier before they admitted that they had lied, do we really believe it? Watch any video of these “tech Bros” and it’s obvious in less than a minute - these people are slimy.

And to some extent it doesn’t matter bc you can download some open source AI programs and run them yourself, but in general from what I understand, when people say things nowadays like “this was made from an AI”, it seems like it is always a hand-picked item from among the set of answers returned. So like, “oooh” and “aaaahhhhh” and all that, that such a thing could come from AI, but it’s not quite the same thing as simply asking a computer for an answer and it returning the correct answer right away! “1+1=?” giving the correct answer of 13 is MUCH less impressive when you find that out of a thousand attempts at asking, it was only returned a couple times. And the situation gets even worse(-r) when you find out that ChatGPT has been getting stupider(-est?) for awhile now - https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/07/ai-supposed-become-smarter-over-time-chatgpt-can-become-dumber/388826/.

You are (currently) more profitable alive than dead so… no, now get back to work!

Is that… 6 hobbits, or 1 hobbit 6 times?!?

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)