I wonder if this is a response to someone jailbreaking all kindles ever the other day

Fuck kindles, get a different brand of ereader that just runs stripped android

Short links are bullshit anyway. Don’t obfuscate where you’re sending me, that’s sketch. That’s phishing email behavior. Just because you don’t want me to erase all the tracking bullshit from url. Soon I won’t be able to anyway because most sites are starting to embed it into the url anyway. Fuck you and fuck the internet

Another space where they avoid offending advertisers, who are the real thing that ruined google search (along with seo bullshit).

Like if the only change to google search was the ai blurb I don’t think people would care nearly as much. They care because the actual results are heavily weighted to be sponsored results above all else for the entire first page, and the second page is designed to redirect you to images or other things that push you to start a new search (thus seeing new sponsored results). What you wanted to find is meaningless, it’s solely about shoveling products and services down your fucking throat

Bad article. Weak, had a chance to put actual offenders on blast with their platform but just softballs it with “general concepts” they feel are shitty. Aside from google stuff like search that is the most softball answer. And more likely google isn’t one of their advertisers

phew

“The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don’t get too persuasive.”

Fingers crossed, trust us bro

It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.

Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then

oh cool, tackling the key issues facing us right now

lmao when have tech companies ever given a semblance of a shit about consent. It’s an industry that has deep roots in misogynistic nerds and drunk frat bros

The headphone cable is excellent for sure and I will never ever buy another set of wireless headphones again.

I have one set of wireless earbuds (Sony XM3) for when bigger headphones are impractical and for the price the battery life is shit. After roughly 2ish years of moderate use the battery life is cut noticeably and after 3 they barely last 30 minutes. Thankfully changing the battery is fairly simple (go sony!) although the battery used is a weird proprietary cell that cannot be purchased through legitimate channels and is fairly expensive (boo sony). But whatever, $30 on batteries is better than tossing earbuds that cost $250-300 a few years ago.

That said I have moved on from phones with headphone jacks. I still have a few sets of proper ass headphones that are pretty nice. If I want to use them with my phone I don’t fuck with dongles, I have a Qudelix 5K DAC/AMP. This allows me to use my wired headphones with any Bluetooth thing really. The only thing that could improve it is a user replaceable battery, and they made that: the Qudelix T71 although I haven’t tried that. And frankly I’m pretty sure I can figure out swapping the battery on this whenever it croaks. I’ve sourced and changed a lot of batteries in my time.

It’s not as nice as my proper setup for listening to flac or vinyl but it’s pretty indistinguishable aurally for the most part when listening to flac on my phone (vs flac on my home server via my better dac/amp which again is pretty aurally indistinguishable unless you’re a buttsniffing audiophile type. And if you are I dare you to double blind test it)

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings