Reddit is one of the most potent places where opinion-shaping has been happening. I've been getting ads for Reddit everywhere recently (even thought I've been a reddit user for about 20 years).
r/worldnews is pretty tightly controlled, it's a default subreddit meaning 50+ million people see the posts submitted in this subreddit, and most critically, the ensuing conversation in comments which goes only in one direction. Frankly I'm impressed this all was pulled off so seamlessly.
"controlled by zionists"
Interestingly, every place Qatar doesn't pour billions into spreading propaganda sewage suddenly becomes "controlled by Zionists."
This post from today on r/worldnews was hilarious -- all the top comments where deleted (and their authors probably permanently banned) because they didn't hold the party line:
And a lot of lead-generating subreddits are gatekept by admins/mods, sometimes for money. Also, there are russians offering services to promote (spam upvotes and fake comments) your product, and for some of our competitors it's very obvious when that happens, somehow reddit doesn't notice.
Same about twitter, somehow super tight checks for normal users while some spam is somehow unfiltered. Social media is a destructive force.
People here miss the value of a tightly moderated walled garden: I don't have to worry about downloading things that are misleading or are chock full of dark patterns, because it has been vetted by an App Store that I trust. And when I download an app with a subscription through App Store, I can see any time how much it costs, I can cancel it any time no fuss: https://www.iphonelife.com/sites/iphonelife.com/files/styles...
Meanwhile, any subscription I sign up for through another channel, I have to wade through a sea of dark patterns to reach a cancel screen.
This is why I choose to have an iPhone, because the garden is walled and I can relax. If you want freedom to have multiple different app stores, Android is a better option for you.
I'd rather another one not exist, because then it would become a game of incentives... app owners might only make their apps available on THAT App Store, resulting in App Store's value being diminished. I would like that the one App Store be the one and the only one in a KISS principle. Apple so far hasn't failed me, and so I continue to trust it and its judicious management and curation of apps.
Folks who care about having any app they want through alternative stores I wish would just opt for Android systems.
Ah, the Highlander principle: there can be only one. The complete opposite of a "market", of course, which is why the rest of us are gearing up the non-market mechanisms against it.
This applies in reverse, of course. The existence of the Apple store makes certain apps only available for the Apple store (iOS only), so therefore us Android users need to have it banned so we can continue to have choice.
I think a switch happened inside me roughly 5 years ago, that I went from eschewing walled gardens to now valuing them more and more. Too much of my life has been wasted fighting through dark patterns, finding cancel screens, or being had by manipulative subscription arrangements wherein there are cancelation fees or complex terms of service that somehow make cancelation difficult.
When I paid 1k-something dollars for an iPhone 16 a few months ago, I did not pay for a general purpose computing device, no, I paid for a device that can take pictures, and has certain apps that I like which I know how much I'm paying for, and I know that with ease I will be able to active/deactivate its subscription with zero struggle. That's what I paid for, a device made by a company whose discretion I trust and support, and I pray it continues being this way.
And people like you will continue to have access to this curated experience. But developers who decide that access to you is not worth the platform fees will be able to pursue an alternative.
Why wouldn't your bank remain on the App Store? Does the app store really lack that many dark patterns? (Billions spent gambling every year)
Again: There is nothing to stop the walled gardens from being build, but they should be built within a competitive market!
> app owners might only make their apps available on THAT App Store
Because it's better for them and they have that right. If YOU need a safe walled garden, shouldn't YOU be the one who supports the process and incentives for developers?
Is one store not just a different game of incentives? One where instead of going off to a different platform, your experience will be as enshittified as it can within the bounds of the one and only?
Bottom trawling in particular seems horrendous. Here is Attenborough narrating about the horrors of it and how it affects the ocean floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXp3jo_uGOQ
Slam Harvard? Trump is slamming them because they are a known name that is resisting him.
Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
Many of Trump’s supporters and conservatives generally. Harvard is the beating heart of liberal theology, and going to the Supreme Court to defend racialism has earned it plenty of enemies.
>Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities.
Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized.
They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA.
They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward.
Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
> Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
Conservatives are a minority in the U.S., but conservative-to-moderate populists are a majority. According to Vox, Trump would have won by almost 5 points if everyone had voted: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202.... And don’t forget that the populist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly love Harvard either, as the beating heart of borderless neoliberal elitism. A large chunk of the party is in it for the Obamacare.
Heck, the Democratic Party as it exists today would not be viable at the national level without first or second generation immigrants. It’s reliant on the people who have the shallowest roots in and least understanding of america, who can be most easily be manipulated through ethnic machine politics.
After the U.S. nearly banned immigration in the 1920s, the foreign born population slowly shrank, reaching a low of under 5% by 1970. Italians and Irish lost much of their separate ethnic identity and began voting as individuals free. Between 1972-1992, Republicans then won 4 presidential elections by landslides over 5 cycles. That’s what happens when the electorate comprises mostly assimilated americans.
I was recently banned from r/worldnews over a comment which I thought was relatively innocuous. Anyway, that made me start investigating and smelling things and suddenly when you see it, it's hard to ignore. r/worldnews is completely, unmistakably compromised. It's the third largest subreddit with about 50 million subscribers. The situation is so vivid and clear that it's unthinkable that owners are unaware that it is compromised, from moderations to the dominant commenting user base. So what in the world is happening and how did it come to be this way? Spez et al were compromised? How?
The most charitable and perhaps the most rational explanation is that the 'propaganda' effort is impressively, surprisingly, exhaustively grassroots [1] and that's why reddit's overlords cannot simply contain it -- after all, it's real people, very committed and very real indeed. Although I would think that even if this were true, were reddit's operators uncompromised, they'd at least feel compelled to investigate the moderators of the subreddit which has a readership of 50 million, because even if the activity is organic, what's going on crosses a certain threshold of what should be permissible, if only for the richness of debate and discussion. I won't approach the complex topic of whether grassroots led propaganda effort constitutes something that is illegitimate and whether it warrants management, moderation, or some sort of penalty.
I'm not extremely educated about the complex history of Israel and jewish people, though I'm trying to learn more these days. Knowing what I know so far: It is a unique group of people for sure, and 2000 years of oppression, I think, has resulted in a special kind of cohesion that even when scattered throughout the world, they partake in strong self-advocacy. In my experience, this kind of self-advocacy doesn't exist with any other group.
I apologize if my comment reads prejudiced or inappropriate, please tell me if it does, certainly and obviously it is not meant to be.
I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?
It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to.
And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.
I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own.
This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app:
I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course.
The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.
My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom
I can appreciate this argument comes from folks who frequent this forum, who can discern scams from legitimate things.
But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.
Interested in reading more about this, that symptoms are more aggressive in the morning, can you refer to studies if you were thinking of some in particular?
Unfortunately I don't have specific studies at hand right now. However depression was classified as melancholic and atypical. Melancholic depression is marked by pronounced diurnal mood variation among other things. There was one study that measured negative and positive affect in MDD and healthy controls. It was shown that the mood variation is related to positive affect in MDD.
That pattern inspired a short term treatment for MDD where sleep is limited or completely omitted. That has a very pronounced antidepressant effect in many and can even trigger mania.
Also, I have seen lots of cases among friends and family that show that behaviour.
EDIT: To clarify: This is true in a subset of patients. It is not a necessary condition.
It's really hard to believe, but OpenAI kind of did Apple a bamboozle.
I use advanced voice mode in ChatGPT, and I had a bit of a eureka moment. It is the first time ever that an AI chat /actually works/. I've tried Siri, Alexa etc extensively for years, but AV mode in ChatGPT is the first AI voice chat thing that /actually works/: I can comfortably interrupt it, I can misspeak, and I can rely on it to have continuity in the context of a conversation... and the responses I get actually answer my question, most of the times. It all just works...
But for whatever reason, whatever OpenAI is giving to Apple in this Apple-OpenAI partnership, is more or less worthless. They're not giving them the keys. I wish AI voice chat would be relegated or commoditized to being just a feature (and I hope/think recent OSS advancements make that be the case), but until then I have 'Action button' set to start voice conversation with ChatGPT.
Curious to see Apple's next move though, with the recent changes in this landscape.
I happen to have Gemini Pro or whatever, because it's somehow bundled or free with some other Google thing I have (I don't care to ask.) Although it is a bit weird talking to a computer as if it's actually a person, I did try Google's equivalent feature in Gemini a couple of times and it seemed to work extremely well. I'm not sure how exactly it compares to OpenAI but it holds a natural conversation very well in my experience. I reckon this bodes well for Apple. It seems to me their OpenAI deal is mostly an admission that they couldn't build out their own technologies fast enough, but they certainly don't lack the capital or ambition to do it if it truly is going to be important for them in the future.
Google successfully fooled everyone into thinking that "Gemini Live" is the same as Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT. It's not, Gemini Live is a "stupid" speech-to-text and text-to-speech and not multimodal like AVM.
OpenAI's approach is certainly more technically interesting, and probably the way to go in the longer term, if the juice is worth the squeeze with this sort of technology. (After being relatively unmoved by LLMs for many other tasks, I found the voice assistant concept a lot more interesting, personally, even though I still don't have any routine uses for it.) That said, it doesn't really matter exactly how it works internally: Gemini Live accomplishes what it sets out to do, in that it feels very natural and works fairly well. I think it's clear there will be benefits to the multimodal approach of running voice directly in and out of a model for this sort of application, but if stringing together other existing technology can get you 80% of the way, it's not really a rush to get there. I don't really find this too surprising, since as far as speech recognition and voice synthesis goes, the state of the art today is very good, and most of the time computer voice interactions were greatly held back mostly by other things.
I’ve said this before a zillion times, but Siri is only good for imperative stuff. Commands. “Play this song”, “make a note”, “set this alarm”, etc.
And even that’s only barely true: it gets things wrong even within that very narrow set of use cases. But it at least kinda works most of the time.
Siri is absolutely not useful, and never has been, and likely never will be, when it comes to “conversational” use cases, like asking it questions or getting advice, etc.
The thing is, I only ever use voice for imperative stuff in the first place. If I want to know things or do research or have a conversation, etc, I’d much rather type into a real keyboard and read the results at my leisure. Or if I’m at a phone I can use voice to text to make it easier to do this, but it’s not really the same thing as a “conversation”.
So for me, I’m keeping Siri for the use cases it works for (home automation, timers, music, etc), because I really don’t think OpenAI will ever be good/useful for that sort of thing, even if Apple opened up the API’s to let it do so. An LLM is just too heavy-weight.
Siri can set a timer or reminder for me sometimes. The rest is utter trash and it’s embarrassing that the largest company in the world by value, and sitting on ungodly amounts of cash, won’t or can’t improve Siri. The usual set of events is I ask Siri something and her response is so non-sensical and bad that my girlfriend and I just laugh at it and shake our heads. Then I’m reminded again why I never ask Siri anything.
Looking at Apple's history in the field, it kinda makes perfect sense. They were not prepared for the seismic shift that AI was heading towards, and the hype for LLMs proved how wasted Apple's efforts were on NPU hardware. Their GPU designs are laser-focused on raster performance instead of GPGPU compute pipelines, and projects like OpenCL were abandoned under an assumption that Nvidia wasn't a real competitor.
Altman knew this was his PowerPC transition moment. He could come in there with a power-hungry, fast and attractive product that would lure Apple into a big investment to stay competitive. Apple's executives know they're beat as much as any of the engineers do, so they were probably eager to close any form of deal and reassure investors that the hype train was still very much on-rails.
Think Apple are well aware they got a bit of a raw deal with OpenAI but it was the only option on the table. Their weekness and pure stupidity with Siri became a massive elephant in the room the second chatgpt was released, and then once people saw the advanced voice mode it just made it all that more obvious how crap Apple were at AI assistants.
I dare say in 5 years time they'll be up there but for now they're heavily reliant on OpenAI to provide any guise of them having anything to offer.
this is still how I am with pretty much all genAI. People on this site say it's great, but a lot of people on this site have big incentives to hold that view. I have found the free models to be useless, and sufficiently useless that the paid models -- which are not cheap -- are not enticing.
Maybe I'd be more willing to pay per token if I could get a refund for all the tokens it outputs that are wrong?
Maybe my opinion of genAI will change if my employer ever allows us to use it and I am able to use a state of the art model on someone else's dime, but I'm not risking $60 or whatever to find out the performance is only moderately better than GPT3
claude.ai is free (there are limits per day per account). It's not a "free [tier] model", it's their best model and (on most tasks) imo the best all around llm. The worst aspect I'd say is how outdated its information is becoming. Anything post 2023 you likely need to provide source material.
using openai or anthropic to my hearts content, configured via api to my editor, i didn't go over $10/mo -- vs $20/mo for their regular product that hit me with rate limits
Banksy's identity is kind of an open secret, it's Robin Gunningham, people in the 'know' have known this for a long time. But we all every now and then partake in the effort of keeping it an (open) secret, for respect of the art and the mystique, and for the respect of the artist's very own desire.
r/worldnews is pretty tightly controlled, it's a default subreddit meaning 50+ million people see the posts submitted in this subreddit, and most critically, the ensuing conversation in comments which goes only in one direction. Frankly I'm impressed this all was pulled off so seamlessly.