They manufacture a significant portion of the transport hardware that makes up the backbone of the internet. They also just acquired Infinera who had another sizable chunk of that market.

How is a school going to regulate what kids do outside of school property? They could ban cell phones on campus but that’s not going to change what happens after hours.

Funny how that kind of thing only works for rich people

Why would capitalists give a fuck about any constraint? We’ve conditioned them for a century to believe they can do anything they want with impunity.

LLMs work in some limited use cases with good data to draw from. Most companies, especially large corporations, have shit data. Current AI cannot fix bad data. They will never do what these guys are promising they will do.

You don’t have to have a total lack of self control to be prone to overconsumption. That’s a caricature you have in your mind that’s main function is to make you feel better about your own habits which keeps many from examining their habits in any detail.

No you’re not. Advertising, propaganda, and overconsumption impacts everyone.

Come back to what you’ve posted here in two years and read it again. You’re trusting people with data that you really shouldn’t. Perhaps that’s an acceptable risk to you but you should be sure that you can live without the privacy you think you have because that is a really bad bet.

I’m not going to touch the ethical and emotional minefield that is flirting with a chatbot but I will say that those conversations are definitely not private. That whole industry is based on stealing other people’s data. Do not do anything with an LLM that you can’t handle other people finding out about because there’s a very good chance that they will.

I don’t recall if this is where I originally heard it but it gives you a place to start: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes-authoritarianism-and-how-do-they-want-to-change-their-government/

Well statistically about 30% of people worldwide don’t mind fascism so that’s hundreds of millions of people too. I’m not sure I’d be willing to say a lack of loving relationships is the primary cause of that but I doubt solving that problem would hurt.

You said what I said using more words. Call it different if you must be contrarian but the conclusion is the same so why bother.

Don’t try and rationalize what Trump’s plan is. Whatever you think he’s doing, it’s not that. Your brain and his operate in fundamentally different ways. Logic can’t help you understand the intrinsically illogical.

If it’s Putin’s fault then no one in the US can solve the problem. If that isn’t the case then there’s no plausible way to avoid accepting that this is our problem to solve internally. Some people aren’t ready to face that reality so they choose the comfortable oversimplification instead.

It must be nice to have the capacity to care about everything, everywhere, all the time. That sounds like the height of privilege.

Yeah well, that’s pretty much where the whole world is at right now. It’s easier to lie than explain the truth

That’s fair. I suppose a better wording would have been “let people articulate their weird positions in their own words”. I think that’s a good thing in conceptual form. However, as you noted, it doesn’t really work if you aren’t equipped to push back and make them address the counter arguments. That’s where Joe is lacking. He’s good at getting people talking and asking layman’s questions but that’s as deep as he can go. He needs to book the guys who can give the rebuttals either on the same show or immediately after.

I’m conflicted about Joe Rogan, or at least the concept he had at the start. Clearly he’s fallen down the right-wing rabbit hole but the original intent he had of letting people defend their weird positions is a good one imo. One could argue that the reason the right-wing funnel exists is because there isn’t really space to talk about some of those things on the left.

For example, it’s not crazy to ask questions about vaccines and how they work. However, when people do that those who are educated on the topic will largely assume ill intent by default and treat the people asking questions as if they’re stupid or malicious. There’s some good reasons for that but such an approach is pretty alienating for those who are genuinely seeking information. That leads at least a portion of those people to listen to more right leaning information because they feel like that is the only group taking them seriously.

We need to do better at meeting people where they are instead of assuming they are trying to spread misinformation. Yes it’s true that all the information you need to develop an informed opinion about the vast majority of topics is available on the internet, but finding and understanding that information does take skills and time that not everyone has. In order to understand why a statement or belief is incorrect or misinformed you have to create a space in which it can be discussed without fear and shame driving people away.

Based on the limited amount of his older podcasts that I’ve been exposed to, I do think that Joe genuinely tried to do that, he’s just not particularly well equipped to handle that kind of environment. Over time he fell victim to the same kind of radicalization that he was intending to subvert by letting people share their actual thoughts instead of assuming he already knew what they were going to say.

I don’t know that I would say “as intended” but it is better than live TV, especially in the educational department. Neil Degrasse Tyson’s yt channel is better than anything on the discovery channel these days. Countless podcasts are better than anything on the history channel. I don’t think they even try to do history anymore. They just air pawn stars reruns 24/7.

Which I’m not so yeah, it was pretty easy.