t3rmit3

5

Art doesn’t help much if you’re starving to death.

And being well-fed doesn't help much if you're contemplating suicide because your life has no joy in it. And art is not the only source of joy, but it is one of them (and one of the most common).

7

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 4d ago

You keep using the word "useful" in a way that suggests you've narrowly defined it in your head to exclude art. Life without art quickly results in a whole lot of death. Even the poorest humans throughout history have created music and art, because it's a fundamental part of human life. Just because art is less critical to immediate survival in most cases than eating doesn't make it any less necessary than it; shelter being more or less critical than food in a given situation (deadly sub-zero blizzard, more critical. Temperate area with no dangerous weather or predators, less critical) also doesn't make it more or less necessary, it's just a varying order of necessity. Being anti-Capitalist is important, but I feel like you've written off "professional" art as the domain of Capitalism rather than another victim of it (which food is as well, for that matter).

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t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 5d ago

I mean... You can. You can train and run models yourself. Lots of people and orgs do.

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 5d ago

something something WMDs in Iraq...

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 6d ago

American == Fascistic == "Make America Great Again"/ Manifest Destiny == Settler Colonialist... viewpoints

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

Yes, and if there had been significant military resistance I think people would not be side-eyeing her so hard. Given how quickly they located and secured Maduro, however, and the extreme lack of military response to the attacks, it's seeming pretty likely that Trump made a deal with her (as he's claiming) to get Maduro.

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

immoral people existing is not the problem here

True. The profit motive is. People pushing harmful content are doing it because it makes them money, not because they're twirling their moustaches as they relish their evil deeds. You remove the profit motive, you remove the motivation to harm people for profit.

the difference is that there isn’t an algorithm that acts as a vector for harmful bullshit

The algorithms boost engagement according to 1) what people engage with, and 2) what companies assess to be appealing. Facebook took the lead in having the social media platform own the engagement algorithms, but the companies and people pushing the content can and do also have their own algorithmic targeting. Just as Joe Camel existed before social media and still got to kids (and not just on TV), harmful actors will find and join discords. All that Facebook and Twitter did was handle the targeting for them, but it's not like the targeting doesn't exist without the platforms' assistance.

Said bad actors do not exist in anywhere near the same capacity. Imo the harm of public chat rooms falls under the “parents can handle this” umbrella. Public rooms are still an issue, but from experience being a tween/teen on those platforms, it’s not even close to being as bad.

It wasn't as bad on those... back when we were teens. It absolutely is now. If anything, you'll usually find that a lot of the most harmful groups (red-pill/ manosphere, body-image- especially based around inducing EDs- influencers) actually operate their own discords that they steer/ capture kids into. They make contact elsewhere, then get them into a more insular space where they can be more extreme and forceful in pushing their products, out of public view.

If it was the case that it was just individual actors on the platform causing the harm and not the structure of the platforms incentivizing said harm, then we would see more of this type of thing in real life as well.

I'm not saying it's all individuals, I'm saying the opposite; it's companies. Just not social media companies. Social media companies are the convenient access vector for the companies actually selling and pushing the harmful products and corollary ideas that drive kids to them.

I struggle to think of a more complete solution to the harm caused by social media to children than just banning them.

Given that your immediate solution was to regulate kids instead of regulating companies, I don't think you're going to be interested in my solutions.

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

They won't be once it's just Trump (or his endorsed appointee) doing what Maduro did but as a puppet government. This isn't the dismantling of a criminal racket, it's just a takeover.

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

Naw, shoot him into the sun, please.

2

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

To be fair, if she actually 'signed off' on this, there's no way she could admit that and remain in power. No matter what, we shouldn't trust anyone that Trump endorses (and certainly, who he puts in power), no matter how much they protest his influence.

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t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 1w ago

despite how harmful it is for society as a whole, and especially children

If you don't understand that the motivation is to target kids with ads and influencer content designed to push products, you're not going to solve anything. Kids have to have spaces to communicate with each other in order to develop healthy socialization skills. Locking them in a proverbial box is not healthy, and guess what, we killed off 99% of third spaces that welcome kids.

If social media is banned for under 16’s, then children would have to communicate with normal chat apps.

I feel like you are envisioning "chat apps" to mean "text-only", but chat apps have been multimedia/ multi-modal, and multi-user (i.e. not 1:1 messaging) for a long time now, and can be just as easily infiltrated by the same actors targeting kids on social media.

at some point some systemic problems are better served by systemic solutions

This is not a solution, this is a band-aid that doesn't attack the root cause whatsoever.

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t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 2w ago

You can.

You just don't want to either a) put in the legwork to do so, or b) be the 'bad guy' to your kids for doing it, so instead you just want the government to do it for you.

What's stopping you from setting up pihole or configuring your home router to block social media sites at home, or turning on parental controls on their phones and blocking the sites and apps?

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 2w ago

I've said before that I want a little mini bioreactor/ meat vat on my desk that you push down a lever on to dispense cultivated meat, sorta like a soft-serve machine, but with heating filaments to cook it as it ~~sluices~~ sloughs out so I can have infinite, instant hotdogs. Maybe someday we'll have Star Trek-style replicators, but this seems like a fair transitional technology on the pathway there.

2

t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 2w ago

I just started using Trilium on my homelab. It's got a lot more than just markdown, but also supports markdown.

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t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 2w ago

Yeah, it's very well written and 'easy to read'. I've seen his posts a couple of times on HackerNews, but I don't think I ever read a long form blog post of his before. This was really good (even if I think a little naive).

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t3rmit3 @beehaw.org 2w ago

Capitalism gonna Capitalism.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth.

This could have been written about the War on Terror.

I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

I'm not sure why he thinks morality is a factor in market movement. You'll not find the stock market negatively reacting to money being spent on genocide in the Middle East or murders in the Caribbean, or to Palantir expanding into a mass-surveillance apparatus either.

Analysts that do not sing the same tune as everybody else are marginalized, mocked and aggressively policed... By not being skeptical or critical you are going to lead regular people into the jaws of another collapse.

Yes, market collapses are actually loved by large wealth holders, because unless the entire currency itself collapses, the people with the most currency are the ones best-positioned to benefit from the collapse. Investors will ride the economy off a cliff so they can salvage the scrap at the bottom. Sam Altman literally opined about 'redefining' the social contract when AI collapses the economy in his White House presser.

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in.

Because major news, analysis firms, and banks are all owned by the oligarchy, and no one is being punished for using that power to manipulate the market. They know that if they're a big firm and they say, "this stock is amazing!" it will go up, and since they own that stock, they get richer.

When it happens, I promise I won’t be too insufferable, but I will be calling for accountability for anybody who boosted AI 2027, who sat in front of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei and refused to ask real questions, and for anyone who collected anything resembling “detailed notes” about me or any other AI skeptic.

It's sad to me that Ed lived through 2008 and still thinks there will be accountability in this system. At some point you have to accept that the purpose of a system is what the system does. Our system cyclically collapses, economically, in order to enrich billionaires. It happened during the DotCom bubble, it happened in 2008, and it happened during COVID, and that's just in my short lifespan.

I realize I’m pearl-clutching over the amoral status of capitalism and the stock market

I really don't think you are. You haven't even begun to reach the bare minimum level of disdain and disgust-inducing realism one should have about capitalism, nevermind anything being remotely close to pearl-clutching.

t3rmit3

@ t3rmit3 @beehaw.org

Posts

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3 yr. ago

He / They

t3rmit3

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