The real decline started after Edward Snowden and all the information that came out about the NSA. It really sparked distrust in the government. Trying to get people to respond to surveys was already hard, why would those general people believe the Census Bureau is actually keeping their data safe? Doesn’t matter when it comes to laws and the constitution, if you work for an Agency. You are the government. Response rates keep going down, now we have attacks from the President on statistics about the economy. I’m a little cynical and I just assume they will continue to shrink the statistical agencies and make the statistics more useless (which is what this recent policy change does), and they will shift to the private industry. Even though the private industry cannot do the work in the Field that the government does.
I’ll take the under on that bet any day. Maybe around 75% is where I would feel more confident. 25% of a country is more than enough to meaningfully shift perception.
I buy the argument that a functioning democracy requires the populace to believe that the government is honest, competent, and working in their interests. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Vietnam war (respectively) undermined those notions. As of ~2016, half of the US voting population had come of age after those events.
Solid read especially for someone not in this field. While everything I’ve learned about LLMs has been pretty interesting, all I can say for sure is that I’m more and more skeptical about wide scale adoption. Consumers are being pushed almost to the level of coercion to utilize LLMs. Especially in the case of the government, who in most cases will get a free pass for a year to help build that addiction before the real bill comes due. I’m sure people will object to LLMs being considered statistical bullshit generators, but I cant stop seeing that they just generate bullshit. Bullshit can be believable, sometimes bullshit is truthful. But the public is generally accepting that LLMs churn out truth, and they trust them blindly. I truly don’t see the upside, and the argument being pushed by the dealers is that we need to keep using. The real breakthrough is around the corner. It’s my believe that the tech bros are the new robber barons, they’ve moved on from crypto and NFTs and found something that is pretty impressive but a far cry from the GenAI that wish for. I just feel that technology was supposed to free us and also connect us, but instead it’s all things addictive and consuming.
I’m kind of amazed when I read comments like this, but I have to remind myself that I work in an industry which use these tools at the cutting edge and see what they can really do. In the space of 18 months I changed from skeptic to the belief that our world is going to RAPIDLY change, and soon.
I sense that statistics and benchmarks and research and statements from the world’s greatest academics won’t sway you, so maybe I’ll give you a personal anecdote. I have suffered from a condition my whole life called bile acid malabsorption. It caused chronic diarrhoea, pain, arthritis, dehydration, insomnia, and more. I spent decades searching for an answer. Dozens of different tests. Eventually doctors just said I was depressed and prescribed me antidepressants. They didn’t help. On the bad days I considered ending my life.
In desperation I turned to ChatGPT. Over months I described my symptoms, triggers, diet, timing, etc. We “sparred” with each other over assumptions and ideas. I gave it all my medical history. All the tests. Eventually it concluded that BAM was likely (plus another few options). So I pushed my doctor for a specialist referral. The specialist agreed to a scan based on the symptoms. It was confirmed. I’ve been taking some cheap medication each day now and it has changed my life.
I know others for whom ChatGPT has changed their lives in similar ways. Research shows LLMs are better than doctors already in many cases at diagnosis. They are improving at an exponential rate.
I have no doubt there are similar stories to yours or to a lesser extent. And while I’m glad you have gotten some relief, what price are we paying as a society? I’m not just talking about the environmental impact alone, what about the societal impact? Social media has not been around too long but it seems to be a net negative for society. I’m sure there are plenty of anecdotes to the contrary, but the studies are showing more and more of the detrimental impact to kids/teens. The stories and testimonies of how it was engineered to be addictive. Yet we’ve mostly moved on and allowed money more social media to get owned (and now traditional media) and controlled by the rich. But your statement is right, I doubt I’ll get swayed easily. Anecdotes and proclamations work when thinking short term. But taking the long view or looking at recent history I don’t see a positive. We have the hype being brought to us by the people that gave us the dot com bubble, crypto and NFTs. But hey, go fast, break things and never ever think about if what you are doing is really beneficial to society (after us, they are not us.)
I think most of the nuance in your first argument was undermined and overshadowed by your fairly categorical assertion that LLMs are bullshit generators and not actually useful.
When you got a reply illustrating how incorrect that claim from your first argument was, you shifted to focusing on the other argument (the one I actually happen to agree with - the cost to society of hitching increasing dependency on big tech will make the social media harms look like childs play).
I think your argument will be better received if you focus on the very valid concerns of societal harms, and acknowledge the ways LLMs are tremendously capable, without downplaying that.
I'm with the person you replied to in seeing how capable LLMs can be when you spar with them appropriately. They confabulate, but that's your job to catch as a sparring partner. But they do bring useful knowledge of thousands of PhDs into conversations - and even if you're among the most erudite humans on the planet, this is still an asset in intellectual search for truth on many topics.
Back to the genuine problems, and they are many: this power, concentrated in the hands of big tech, is a multiplier on the power already concentrated there, with many new capabilities - especially scary being the capabilities for subtly influencing and manipulating both individual and group behavior - for profit or otherwise - by the companies or their customers, or governments, or... The possibility space of harm and abuse is large..
On net, I think we should all be pushing to educate everyone around us on the pros, the nuances, the risks, and the big cons, and working to try to build a future of offline models rather than subscription service dependency..
I actually didn’t say that aren’t that useful. I would argue that I don’t think the payoff is worth the cost. The areas investing unholy amounts of money and passing it among the largest companies are seeing plenty of cash, me and in general the public will only experience the squeeze when the huge profits aren’t realized to offset the immeasurable amount of money “invested”.
A potential example that comes to mind would be you have a Studio Display in your house that you use for remote work with a beefy MacBook Pro, and then maybe a family member has a MacBook Neo that they’d like to plug into a monitor occasionally.
Tbh if you have a studio display you are probably used to most things not working with it. I get that it's apple, but the lack of a HDMI or Displayport input on the monitor is insane.
As far as I could tell, there is no passive adapter that converts Displayport to usb-c, you can only go the other way. The only way to use a non usb-c device is to use a capture card to capture the HDMI/Displayport signal and retransmit it over usb.
There are two ways to carry video signals over type-c: DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt. DP Alt mode can work in either direction with a passive adapter or cable: a monitor with a Type-C DP input can be driven by a graphics card with a regular DP output connector, because it's all DisplayPort signalling either way.
Thunderbolt encapsulates the DisplayPort data in Thunderbolt packets, so both endpoints of the link need to be full-featured Thunderbolt devices.
It's easier to justify removing stuff when it's very bulky and expensive. But a single HDMI port on the back of a desktop monitor would take up relatively no expense and space. HDMI has a fairly long life left yet, so much that even Apple backtracked on removing it from the macbooks. Which is far less of a problem since you can get a usb c to hdmi adapter but the other way is significantly harder.
Additional ports would complicate the user experience. The Studio Display has no buttons on it, but if you added additional inputs, you would also need to add a button for input switching at least. And potentially other buttons for brightness and volume settings.
It may not sound like a big deal, but I have an LG monitor that uses a remote for input switching and volume controls, and a BenQ monitor that uses buttons, and both provide a noticeably jankier experience.
The Studio Display provides a very clean user experience when paired with a Mac. You plug it in, it turns on, and all other functions (volume, brightness, colors, camera, etc) are controlled via MacOS. Personally I'm happy for Apple to optimize for that experience, at the cost of not working with non-Apple devices.
Sure, having two inputs does require some ui to switch inputs. That said, you could get the same user experience by simply only plugging one device in to a monitor even if it has multiple inputs.
If it was possible to use adapters, this problem would be much reduced, but as it is, it's pretty much impossible to plug in a desktop or game console in to the Apple monitors. And at least for me, having a joystick on the back of the screen for input switching is less problematic than a monitor which only works on some of my devices.
There are certainly some news outlets that operate like propoganda. I mean Fox comes to mind, if you ever watch you’ll notice they carefully craft their statements and rarely talk about facts, mostly feelings. News is at its core a business, and they know they get eyes on things by scaring people or talking about things that seem shocking at face value. NYT and other outlets that do long form articles (Wired) have invaluable information. But we live in a world where most people (especially perpetually online people) just browse the headlines and take what they want from it. We’ve lost nuance, and because of that in the US one party is using that to their advantage.
Fox (and the right-wing media more broadly) act as boosters for the right and negative partisanship generators for the left. They protect republicans from accountability. They manufacture scandals about the opposition.
And it's so effective we couldn't even collectively manage to banish from public life the guy who nearly murdered congress and his veep on television. Truly scary.
I’m in the same boat. My Boox Go 10.3 is collecting dust. I used it for a while, but I just find it easier to flip back through paper notes as opposed to tapping or swiping through files. I don’t want to connect to work WiFi either on it. So now I’ve found pens I enjoy writing with and decent notebooks with paper I like and it’s great. I actually spend time journaling on paper. But I do have both a Boox Palma for reading and also a Kobo Clara.
In college I always took notes in class then I would rewrite them and at the same time organize them. In my study groups people would always copy my re-written notes. There was certainly something there aiding in learning, more than just sending a document of notes and just reading it.
That’s been my personal experience. Spend plenty of time looking at all kind of options to optimize my ir my teams workflow. Then just fallback on pen and paper or some very simple excel spreadsheet. Something thinking about being more productive makes you feel productive.
Sounds similar to playing video games: the rules are simple, so once you understand them, you can feel mighty and powerful simply by accomplishing banal tasks. Makes for a great dopamine rush.
I have memories of going to the library in the 90s to read MacWorld. Then learning that if I did a few clicks and maybe keystrokes you may unlock something with the processor. I can’t totally recall what it would unlock but it was for the Apple IIci and it’s 33mhz processor.
My favorite was dragging a text clipping of "secret about box" to the desktop in System 7.5 and it would spawn a breakout game with the dev team's names as "bricks" :) fun times.
You have to demonize the government in order to come in and start trashing the place. Obviously there is going to be some waste to trim. But instead they came in, asked zero questions and started arbitrarily cutting contracts and jobs. In the end all the cuts will just make the government dysfunctional and cost us more than it did before.
reply