Yeah like all those external pressures that have kept private mega corps from polluting, monopolizing, pervasively surveiling, brutally exploiting labor, and generating false "science" that maintains their dominance even in the face of huge global negative effects... Oh, wait...
In comparison to what? The pristine environmental record of the soviet union, north korea, cuba, venezuela, communist east europe, cambodia, vietnam, china etc...
Ah yes someone always rolls out the false dilemma of "the only options are completely unregulated capitalism or completely top down command economy communism".
It'd be shorter with the same meaning if you'd just scream "traitorous commie!!!!1111"
Talking about and analyzing the problem might lead to mitigating or even substantially fixing it, which would remove its usefulness as a rhetorical attack on attempts to solve social problems.
Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is completely worthless
There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be prepared to iterate on our efforts".
This forum seems to be filled with (comments by) people who love the "there's no perfect solution so we shouldn't try because trying might infringe on my libertarian liberties". I need to stop reading the comments.
But note how all the examples were private companies or enterprising individuals who weren't controlled somehow, but simply wanted to protect their profits.
The political right uses multiple deca-billion-dollar megaphones to talk nonstop about this problem as it relates to the government while dramatically underrepresenting the extent to which it happens in the private sector so that they can lobby for privatization as a silver-bullet. I think it's fair for the article to shore up the complementary point of view. No less fair than what the right is doing, at any rate.
Private ownership of land and capital is also enforced at the barrel of a gun, lol.
When monopolies are common, every business school student openly aspires to rent-seeking moats, and regulators snore more loudly every day, the claims that the private market is checked by competition frequently ring hollow. The big difference between public and private sector is that the private sector has literally entitled themselves to this rent seeking behavior, while it's only a metaphor in the public sector.
Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a brilliant principle and I think markets are the place to make it happen, I just think that strong anticompetitive forces are common natural occurrences in free markets and I think that the government should play a stronger role in checking them.
This is going to turn out to be the new phrenology, completely flawed, but it won't stop phobic types from using it to "prove" their antisocial theories.
I think the implication is it doesn't actually work well. Running hard-to-explain models on brain scans has a history of producing papers which fail to reproduce, there were a bunch of bunk results in fMRI research a few years ago.
While skepticism is healthy, I don't understand how you can say with certainty it will not work.
A hypothetical technology that could very accurately determine the sex of a brain would seem to be a boon for transgendered people. Early detection could mean better treatment and less suffering with fewer cases of desisting.
Your positioning it as "entitlement" is gross. Expose yourself to "ads" that are intrusive and tracking you, deliberately deceptive to drive clicks, spread lies and bigotry because nobody curates the content, and sometimes malware vectors if you want, but it doesn't make you morally superior, it makes you stupid.
Do tell me, what are these incredible ads that users would be okay with seeing?
These incredible ads that make money to the company paying for the ads, so they must be visible, yet somehow not intrusive.
These incredible ads that are always relevant, thus never annoying, despite the fact nobody is going to buy 1 chair for every time they see an ad about chairs, and they will see 1000 ads for every 1000 pages they visit.
Do tell me what are these magical ads that people wouldn't have a problem with.
Because I'll tell you: even if such amazing ads existed, people STILL would feel entitled to getting free content without the ads!
It's just how it is. Users will never be okay with ads because ads will ALWAYS be bad UX. If you think it's possible to make good UX ads, you will revolutionize the marketing world. People who stand around distributing pamphlets will be thrilled to learn how they can hand people pamphlets and spread a message without being obnoxious and handing it to the right person 100% of the time instead of handing it to 1000 people and getting it right only once.
It's the problem. There is not a more important problem on the web.
All that crying about google results deteriorating? It's them trying to filter out exponentially more noise being generated every time unit. LLMs made it so much worse.
You want people to stop caring about something? Flood the web with plausible and crackpot arguments about it from both sides and watch people walk away from the topic in resignation. It used to cost something to pay a legion of trolls, now it takes a couple racks of GPUs and a manageable electricity bill, especially if you're a state actor.
Noise kills utility of any information channel, twitter, HN, google, the web, you name it, it suffers. He probably couldn't have predicted LLM jammers, but I worry the internet's information capacity is about to peak.
Sure, but that’s huge. And probably the reason some (or at least me) are becoming so disillusioned with the web. It’s why I find it hard to believe/trust what I read from news to health advice to product reviews. The noise numbs us to the point where it all starts to feel worthless. This may be one reason ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They get rid of the noise. Of course, they are all built on the back of that noise.
> This may be one reason ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They get rid of the noise.
I think I disagree. LLMs are much better at increasing the noise than they are at getting rid of it. Worse: they are really good at making it look like they get rid of the noise.
To me, LLMs have the potential to break the Web. Instead of search engines crawling the Web and allowing people to search its content, we may have to go back to trusting people: "I read this blog because I know who writes it". The day we can prove that LLMs were used to add tens of thousands of mistakes in Wikipedia (with a political agenda), will we still be able to trust Wikipedia the way we do today?
LLMs have the potential to systematically and automatically destroy the Web.
Wikipedia policy will hopefully prevent LLM generated garbage from corrupting it because some random web site is not a "reliable source" to add "facts" to articles. Today's Wikipedia is also remarkably effective at enforcing its policies. Most of its incorrect information scandals and notable long term vandal incidents happened in the 00s when it was still new.
That's the positive side of its policies. The negative side is that it often reflects the biases of its "reliable" sources meaning it often gets the same things wrong that the mainstream media and academia get wrong.
I was being specific when I chose an LLM product like ChatGPT, not LLMs generically. I do so because it is a product like ChatGPT that boils away the noise to the end user, for better or worse. That is, to grossly simplify my point, it provides a single answer / response, instead of a long list of potential garbage for which I must dig, ponder, assess etc.
Yes most of what is on the web is not trustworthy so a Google search will not show trustable sources.
Thus I look at known trustworthy sources e.g. traditional media where their biases are known. Or places like here which get some known reputation.
Reviews long established places like Consumer Reports and Which . Reviews on sites I assume most are false - but I look at negative ones and see if there are some common problems that seem reasonable.
I assume all influencers are liars or at least advertorials.
One good rule is looking how the site/author gets paid for doing what they do. If not obvious assume that it is getting clicks.
Except pre-web you didn't have to do that, at least not to the same extent. You don't think you're affected by the noise, but the reality is you've adjusted your behavior to compensate for it. The noise changed your whole outlook.
I believe that happens, but have you looked at it and seen the mechanism in action? Is there something else going on too? I'm really intersested in what people's direct evidence is.
I don't find that unusual at all. Doesn't that explain most social media - it's engineered for that excitement. Doesn't that explain HN?
It's not just middle schoolers. Our primate ancestors love to socialize; we've been doing it for seven million years. That's what social media sells. It's certainly not utilitarianism!
