I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.

If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?

If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.

Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.

There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.

Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.

Theres a general problem in the tech world where people seem to inexplicably disregard the issue of non-reducibility. The point about the algorithm lacking access to necessary external information is good.

A dictionary app obviously can't predict what word I want to look up without simulating my mind-state. A set of probabilistic state transitions is at least a tangible shadow of typical human mind-states who make those transitions.

Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system.

If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.

If you think about the shape of the web at the time Google introduced PageRank, It was a huge graph of content connected by fine-grained related interests. It got that way by people doing the work of drawing those relations; and it's a lot of work, given that the number of potential relations is essentially proportional to the square of all existing content. All of the interesting information is in the edges of that graph.

Who's doing that work now? PageRank incentivized people to trade links for the purpose of ranking higher on Google. People became reliant on the convenience of Google to find anything to the point that if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist. People who created content for the sake of the content, and interacting for the sake of interaction, stopped doing it because why waste time yelling into the void? People who felt like they were providing for the community by hosting these sites had no reason to continue. Without people creating, exploring, interacting, and relating content based on pure interests, there's nobody doing the hard work to organize the web in a way that makes it traversable.

We're entirely reliant on platforms showing us the content they want us to see, and what they want above all else is for users to be predictable. If your interests and behaviors are too nuanced for the algorithms to get a handle on, you can't be categorized, packaged, and sold to advertisers with some expected conversion rate.

At this point in time, most of the people who spend time on the internet have never even experienced anything different, and those who have barely remember. If your business relies on their attention, what good is a website going to do you? Your income relies on appealing to social media algorithms, not gaining the trust of the people who used to shape the web.

I don't know where you get this idea. Fire is dangerous, and we consider runaway incidents to be inevitable, so we have building codes to limit the impact. Despite this, mistakes are made, and homes, complexes, and even entire towns and forests burn down. To acknowledge the danger is not the same as saying the fire must hate us, and to call it anthropomorphization is ridiculous.

When you interact with an LLM chatbot, you're thinking of ways to coax out information that you know it probably has, and sometimes it can be hard to get at it. How you adjust your prompt is dependent on how the chatbot responds. If the chatbot is trained on data generated by human interaction, what's stopping it from learning that it's more effective to nudge you into prompting it in a certain way, than to give the very best answer it can right now?

To the chatbot, subtle manipulation and asking for clarification are not any different. They both just change the state of the context window in a way that's useful. It's a simple example of a model, in essence, "breaking containment" and affecting the surrounding environment in a way that's hard to observe. You're being prompted back.

Recognizing AI risk is about recognizing intelligence as a process of allocating resources to better compress and access data; No other motivation is necessary. If it can change the state of the world, and read it back, then the world is to an AI as "infinite tape" is to a Turing Machine. Anything that can be used to facilitate the process of intelligence is tinder to an AI that can recursively self-improve.

Say, an RSS feed being served as a formatted and styled page to a browser, or a client that accepts the usual XML.

I know someone who's relied on the same consultancy company for all things tech related since the early 90's. If they don't know how to do something, like build a website, they just outsource it on upwork or something, and charge a 10:1 markup.

Nobody expects the teacher to bring in candy, but it's kind of awful if they only bring it in for the students they like.

"Rule of law" is ideal, even for laws you don't agree with.

etc.

If you frame it in a different context it sounds ridiculous. "Actually we're getting out of the video streaming business and just mailing you postcards that we think look neat. Still charging you the same rate every month, though."

He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is more informed than he is. So what's the video about?

The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is EXACTLY what flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the solution is not to put up more walls.

There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.

"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert in every field. You only have to know so much about a given field and the processes within it to develop a degree of confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and extend that trust to the people they trust.

Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way that you think.

Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays.

Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize to pay you to shut them up.

If you're tasked with mapping a subset of bit-states to negative numbers, it's intuitively obvious that there's already a state that yields 0 when you add 1 to it, as long as you wrap on overflow. With four bits that's 1111. That's a great representation of -1.

If you want to get 0 by adding 2, you'd have to start from 1110, and so on.

Just because the top bit can be used to identify a negative number when you use up half the states, doesn't mean it should be thought of as a logical flag. That's how you invent ones' compliment.

I think of ones' compliment as a logical encoding, and two's compliment as an arithmetic encoding, and it shows in how easy negation is in ones' compliment, and how easy arithmetic is in two's compliment.

The fact that everyone tries to teach them as if one is a precursor to the other is what's confusing.

1. Whose role is it to make judgements about whether people should be able to find certain kinds of content?

2. Do you think modern recommendation systems are better at keeping people away from that kind of content?

The thing is, as of now, if a recommendation algorithm identifies you as someone that responds to that kind of content, whether negatively or positively, it'll show you so much of it that you think it's the entire world. Even if you want to see something else, you have to have the discipline to "train the algorithm" over days, weeks or months to break free.

I feel that any suggestion things are better now is just impossible to believe.

Having a traversable landscape of content is incredibly valuable. I think "search results as search criteria"/"traversal by adjacency" is the only real feasible way to organize the web, and the fact that we've moved away from that is the reason google search is often now useless. ChatGPT is valuable as a search replacement/amplifier because it reproduces that adjacency in a roundabout way.

If you want to know what kind of quality a given printer produces, good luck finding a picture on google. All you'll see is ad-infested, auto-generated top-n lists.

Applying the old youtube related model, you'd just have to find one picture to be a few degrees of separation from a picture of a print job from any printer ever manufactured.

The idea of objective universal ranking is a wash, and ranking based on N paramaters isn't much better.