The current social zeitgeist is that one is permanently responsible for everything they ever said, even has a child. All nuance is gone. People are looking for a reason to make someone the enemy, and if you're the enemy, violence is acceptable now. I wish it weren't like this, but it is, so I can understand why people want to stay out of the crosshairs.
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
> I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early.
It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
I'm not going to cast judgement. It's a preference. The people who bounce off NMS are the latter. NMS is a very fun sandbox. The story is secondary to making your own fun.
> It's the sandbox concept. Some people load into Minecraft and think, "AWESOME! I'M GOING TO BUILD A MALL!" Some people load into Minecraft and think, "WTF is this? Why is there no story? What the hell am I meant to do?"
It's not that, I lost hundreds of hours in Minecraft. I loved every minute of it. NMS is just too boring with horrible UX and boring planets.
I'm very close to selling my S10. I barely use it. All the features are sort of nice to have. The only one I really care about is heart rate monitoring during exercise and the AirPods Pro 3 do that.
I just assume everything in public is audio/video recorded. In most places that's perfectly legal (with some exceptions). I don't think people should expect privacy in public. We faced the same panic about photographs when mobile phones started getting cameras. With some notable problems, everyone accepted it and moved on. The utility we get from cameras in phones is worth far more than the privacy violations which occur. The same thing is going to happen with this technology (and smart glasses).
I don't believe it. Photography was invented by non-Big Tech, and was widely popular and useful before Big Tech adopted it.
Miniature cameras on your body, and summaries of every conversation you have which you can store permanently, are concepts from either spy movies or weird sci-fi. I think it's a big mistake to see this as a continuation and not as a very different trend.
We may have to accept that Big Tech people are weird and cannot be trusted with any of this. See the Valley people now feeding all their personal conversations to agents. They are creepy and they are creating products in their own image.
> I don't believe it. Photography was invented by non-Big Tech, and was widely popular and useful before Big Tech adopted it.
Cameras were invented before big tech. Big tech took cameras and made them better and more ubiquitous. Microphones were invented before big tech. Big tech is taking them and making them better and more ubiquitous.
To be clear, I agree that the leaders of these companies are weird and untrustworthy. I'm arguing that the utility they will offer the world is worth far more to most people than the privacy concerns. Because of this, most people will happily adopt this technology.
> I may be biased and somewhat off topic, but I see these incidents as some of the most significant of the past century. I genuinely don't understand why these companies aren't taking a smarter approach to them.
Humans tend to be terrible at being proactive, but we respond fast during disasters. I think Eric Schmidt's prediction is most likely: we won't take reasonable action to control access until there is some kind of disaster. We hope it's small enough to not kill too many people, but large enough to cause widespread panic. We hope that it happens soon, because if it happens two years from now, it's likely too late. AI will be so advanced that we have no hope of understanding its motivations. All reasoning will be completely opaque to us. It will be building newer and better versions of itself using moral frameworks it itself decides. We will be completely out of the loop, and potentially superfluous to its goals.
> But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
> Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
I think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.
Billions of people use Facebook regularly. It's a tiny minority of us who would not use a useful product because of privacy concerns. I think you are wrong. It's not they who are a "special kind of stupid." It is us who are a "special kind of paranoid." Justifiably so, I would contend.
This is exactly right and has been proven over and over again. People do not care about sharing their info. Lots of people particularly around these parts pound the table that they should but they are simply fighting the market.
Special kind of stupid was indeed unduly harsh but I think you could make the case "A special kind of unaware", Meta has frequently been in the news for many of the sketchy things they've done (most recently the big fine for harming kids).
That said the presumption on my part there is that most people read the news widely and based on conversations with the people I meet in life that may well not be the case.
Honestly, I think most people just don't care as much about privacy as you and I. I have many friends who are perfectly aware of all of the security and privacy concerns re Facebook, and continue to use it because they just don't care. Or at least, the value they derive is worth far more than how much they care about privacy.
It's easy to slip into the mindset of "if only I could enlighten these unwashed masses, they'd see how right I am!" I think the bottom line is that sometimes people just have different values.
> It is us who are a "special kind of paranoid." Justifiably so, I would contend.
It's not even that. The average HN user would gladly use it even if it was privacy-invading. Just like they use Gmail every day and have no qualms to upload gazillion private docs to OpenAI and Anthropic.
My problem isn't privacy or Meta spying on me. The product isn't useful.
My partner's algorithm gets more updates from my family than I do. Dunno why. "How did X do on the marathon?" they ask. And I go "X ran the what now when, huh?".
Same with all groups. Forums died, people moved to FB groups and now conversations are in an eternal September and impossible to follow.
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