These days they hit the ground running the second the last election is over.

Man I collect library cards. At this point I’m a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we’ve got left in this country. Go get a card man!

I don’t necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don’t think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.

Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it’d introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified “web browsers” exist it’s incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from “download this program” to “download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.”. That’s a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it’s a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn’t going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.

I legitimately can’t tell anymore what even they think their trying to do.

Like… yall are monsters who think government shouldn’t help people, yeah, I get that. But… like… if you want to speed-run violence in the streets, artificially fucking with the food’s a great way to do it.

And… again… I’m just perplexed. Do you want the violence? If you wanted to invoke the riot act or whatever there’s easier ways to do that that don’t involve blowing up half the economy along with it. Is this a “principled” stance? Do you believe government shouldn’t help people so much that your willing to stand ten toes on causing hunger riots? Or is this desperation? Do you want to loot that discretionary fund so bad that your willing to risk sparking a revolution to do so? Is the money even still there? Or are you fighting this hard against SNAP because it was stolen long ago?

On top of all of the rest of the anger and outrage, it’s frustrating that there’s likely no answer to these questions. Or as many answers as there are right wing chuds with their boots on the nation’s throats. At least in movies the villian have a devious master plan. Here in reality it feels like we’re speed running accelerationism and it’s hardly even intentional. Just equal parts malice and stupidity.

Yeah, I think this is more valuable to her as conservative bonafides than anything. “I stood up to libral, woke, Disney and won!” will probably play great fox news and the other rocks these folk thrive beneath. It’s a further step in a career in the rightwing culture-war bullshit sphere, not back twords Disney.

I mean, we kinda already ended up there with the Ashley Madison hack in 2015. Problems with that site aside, I feel like it’s kinda the blueprint for everything wrong with companies that retain personally identifable info on folks. If a company collects details like your driver’s license, it’s not a question of if it gets out but when. There’s just no way to collect that sort of data and truly keep it safe.

But, it seems like we’ve kinda forgotten how to learn lessons in the modern day, so I’m sure this was an isolated issue and we’ll never see it’s like again.

(/s on that last part, just in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious.)

Obviously this is all stupid and you’ll find problems anywhere you choose to look.

The problem I’m finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don’t know how much of the “engagement” your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can’t use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.

Personally I’m rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don’t really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh… seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.

Yeah, fucked up though it might be, I think that within the moral framework she’s chosen to operate in she’s “doing the right thing”. That framework is monstrous and should be disqualifying for a position on the judiciary. But I think she’s got no moral qualms and would treat the morality that most of us have with a mixture of confusion and hostility.

I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.

Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?

I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.

I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.

It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.

…But how can I click on it? All of the hyperlinks are gone.

I’ve also ran into some issues simply accessing youtube through my vpn, but that’s been going on for a while.

Absolutely. So much of the right wing media space is inhabited by, funded by, and glorifies grifters that they’ve created a constant chunk of their audience that is vulnerable to their tactics. Values or policy prescriptions don’t even really need to come into it, if you are a grifter it’s just a smart business decision to start drifting to the right. It opens up those audiences to you because you are “one of them”.