Lvxferre [he/him]

If I need to prove something stupid and immoral, and it relies on the assumption that 2+2=5, then 2+2=4 is woke propaganda. Simple as.

And one of the muppets behind Reddit, kn0thing.

As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic, he’s tying a sinking ship to another. So both can sink together.

Musk said the combined company will “build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.”

The funniest part is that this might not be a lie - I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk genuinely believed that.

…let’s get real. xAI’s main product is Grok, a text and image generator. Twitter is basically a blog platform for the sort of people who whine “WAAAH! TL;DR!”. Merge both and you’ll get what? Automated shitposting!

Yup, pretty much.

And, as usual, advertisers are to be blamed: they’re the ones interested on “engagement”, and indirectly siccing platforms to artificially inflate their engagement numbers.

Why & When Is This Happening?

To make Reddit faster, simpler, and easier to use, we needed to unify our messaging platforms. This consolidation helps us focus on improving one system instead of maintaining multiple. Plus, Reddit Chat’s infrastructure is built for the future, unlike the PM system which is about as old as Reddit itself.

We’re sharing this change early because we want your feedback! We’ve spent months talking to mods, developers, and users to ensure this migration works for everyone (shoutout to u/RemindMeBot fans). But there might be scenarios we’ve missed, and we need your input to address them. You can share feedback directly with the team working on this project in the comments below.

My sides went into orbit. They aren’t even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?

• If the concern was to make Reddit “faster, simpler, and easier to use”, they’d ditch chat and keep DMs
• “muh futchure” fallacy (appeal to novelty)
• pretending that they want/care for user feedback

…I think that the reason is twofold: 1) it’s easier to plug advertisement into the new chat system, and 2) chat only works in new.reddit so they can use it as an excuse to deprecate yet another old.reddit system.

Which is also how Digg v4 ended up, the brands as content submitters.

Exactly. Almost like Reddit decision makers know how Digg died, and yet they’re unable to not follow its steps.

Cordwell and Barker expect user growth for Reddit to stall in 2025 and, as a result, see revenue growth becoming more reliant on making the platform’s proposition more attractive for advertisers.

This won’t be even remotely fun for the people still using that platform. Because “making the platform’s proposition more attractive to advertisers” boils down to either more ads or ads that are more obnoxious, more disguised as content, more targetted.

Etymologically “agent” is just a fancy borrowed synonym for “doer”. So an AI agent is an AI that does. Yup, it’s that vague.

You could instead restrict the definition further, and say that an AI agent does things autonomously. Then the concept is mutually exclusive with “assistant”, as the assistant does nothing on its own, it’s only there to assist someone else. And yet look at what Pathak said - that she understood both things to be interchangeable.

…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more. They’ve used those dumb text gens, gave them either a six-fingered thumbs up or thumbs down, but they’re generally aware that it doesn’t do a fraction of what they believed to.

I’m not surprised. And I heavily recommend people to ask questions about a topic that they reliably know to those assistants; they’ll notice how much crap the bots output. Now consider that the bot is also bullshitting about the things that you don’t know.

If a billionaire slapped someone’s face, I’d expect Forbes to narrate how the second person cruelly hurt the billionaire’s hand with their face.

If we (people in general) do it, we’re being filthy thieves and the reason why everything is bad. But when it’s a megacorpo, it’s suddenly a-OK?

Screw this shit. Information should be like the air, free for everyone. Not free for the GAFAM chaste and paid for us untouchables.

OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention.

Yes, that is correct. And perhaps it got the most attention because of all the ruckus Pigboy did over “his” precious data (i.e. users’) + because it made the whole thing hard to ignore.

Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?

Yeah. I was talking about this with my mum today - the chat started with my cat refusing litterboxes, then “if this was the 90s old newspapers would do the trick”, then on how you don’t really own books you buy from the internet (unlike pirated ones). But it’s the same deal with some physical goods, if someone can brick them from a distance they aren’t really yours.

[Sorry for the rambling.]

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

This process has been happening since ChatGPT was released. And it’ll only get worse.

And when are those corporations get that people hate this sort of system? Ask Clippy.

Initially I was thinking on how this is such a blatantly bad idea. I don’t think that it’ll attract chip makers to USA, but instead send the industries relying on those chip makers to other countries. Because as the text says it takes years to build a chip factory, and those industries downstream simply won’t wait.

Then it clicked me - government debt. He might be trying to find new sources of income for the United-Statian government. They only need to last four years - if they ruin the economy later on, it is not his problem.

Yup, something like this - but for the honeypot, not for the legit pages.

This looks interesting. I’d probably combine it with model poisoning - giving each page longer chunks of text, containing bullshit claims and “grammar of slightly brokenness”; so if the data is used to train a model with, the result gets worse.

We don’t need to lie about it; not even by omission.

In the best case scenario, Meta is employing an automated moderation system, it’s incorrectly tagging what users share as “spam”, and can’t be arsed to fix the issue in due time - note that this was already attested at least September 2024. That’s more than enough to blame Meta.

Given Meta tells the truth, but I don’t see any reason to doubt this.

I see quite a few reasons to not trust = be gullible towards what Meta says. Starting by the fact that it’s on its best interests to silence mentions to competitors.

Even if it was a honest mistake (is it? I have my doubts.), I don’t think that “we” (people in general) should give it a pass. On its best it highlights how unfair those automated systems are towards the users; plus Meta is in a position that it should be held responsible for what it does, regardless of its “intentions”.

Meta be like:

“Calling LGBTQ+ people «mentally ill»? No, we can’t remove that, it would be censorship.”

“Linking to a competitor that doesn’t ? NO, YOU CAN’T DO THAT! No, we aren’t totally censoring you, we’re, uhm, you’re totally spamming! Yeah, that’s it, you’re spam!”

I think that people can - and should - capitalise on Streisand Effect against Meta.

Thanks!