Personally this is one of the most interesting cultural turn abouts that I've seen.
When I was growing up, calling somebody a "boy" was shorthand for "aimbot", essentially "oh this guy's so unrealistically good that he must be hacking"
Now the same phrase means "you are a rudimentary program meant to fill space and lose in large lobbies"
The fact that they are so different says a lot about backtracking in technological necessities, but also a huge culture shift towards engagement driven game design, lack of reverence for skill, etc.
There's also this meme[0] where people on the internet started calling each other NPCs after a study came out that showed that many people don't have an internal monologue (these people pressumably are the NPCs)
I've come to believe that some people don't have a soul, they are basically NPCs in that sense. I also think there is a spectrum of insight and lucidity between different people and in different states or stages in the life of a person, eg. when you're on auto-pilot vs not, many people are on auto-pilot for most of their existence. I know it's a dangerous belief, but I can't help shake this feeling. Dolores Cannon also speaks about backdrop people, so it's known in the spiritual circles (I know, I know, quacks and nut cases, whatever).
This is one kind of dehumanizing thinking, and it’s a belief category that can eventually lead to genocide when it becomes widespread. We have many examples within the past century with death counts in the millions.
Doesn't that kind of prove the point? Masses become involved in a mass delusion, an egregore, a social contagion if you will, people start basically behaving like bots. It's like some outside force takes over. I'm speaking about the ones committing the genocide in this case. I understand the danger of dehumanizing people though. Tbh, being a kid during the war in ex-yu I am also still very disturbed with how little it took and how easy it was for some to do horrible things, which is probably also why I consider some of those people lacking something within, or at least not being fully self-aware beings during those times.
> consider some of those people lacking something within,
If it was only so easy, that those who were evil could just be separated from the rest of us, but alas, the line that separates good and evil cuts through the heart of every person
Categorizing, reducing, and dismissing things is also something, which may also have negative consequences. There is also no shortage of examples of this phenomenon, some people even believe the whole world runs on it.
But on a more serious note, there are definitely bouts when reality feels more real and the mind feels more present and aware, like being hyperaware or experiencing hyperrealization, whatever is opposite to derealization and depersonalization (not sure if I'm using the correct terminology, so please bare). The feeling is akin to waking up and realizing that the past month has been a blur and you weren't yourself exactly, even though you remember, it feels like you weren't consciously making decisions, or being in the moment so to speak. Similar to that exhilaration of reigniting old passions that you'd forgotten about for some reason.
Kids in my elementary used to bully an autistic-ish boy by calling him "monotone" for the way he spoke. I guess instead they'd use NPC and bot these days.
Twitter has been absolutely soaking in awful pointless AI engagement bait. It makes me want to scream but what's the point when its just bots.
Sometimes it's actual humans who are just dull and exclaim commonly known facts as if they're deep or novel. I know the xkdc 1:20,000 bit but it gets so tiring.
So funny to read this comment this morning. I just hopped on twitter for a second — not sure why, I basically never use it — and it seems to be just a dumping ground for low effort AI spamming.
I really don’t understand how people enjoy using twitter. I mean I didn’t before but now I can’t understand how it’s worth anything to anyone.
Defaults as they are today on reddit are terrible. Log out and look at the shitshow. Its either low effort flamebait, gawking at hotties, or basically shill driven ad posts, all of which probably contribute to engagement from multiple angles. The beast is rotten. At this point all thats of value are the vestigial users who still have their network of non-default subreddits they frequent. However that population will only decrease over time since these new users engage with the site in a different way now than e.g. nerdy niche interests like it was in the past. I don't even know where to go these days to discover content that isn't pure agitprop or on the race to be something like that these days. Even this board is only so busy. I might have to just write off browsing the web like I've done for years and get into that pile of books I've been meaning to read instead.
Nobody enjoys Twitter anymore, they're just too passive to leave until the early adopters make their decision for them about what the next place will be.
The problem is, network effects may not make this possible anymore.
Based on what I've read in HN comments and elsewhere, leaving Twitter is seen as a political act, specifically aligned with liberals or wokeness or whatever term du jour. These folks tremble in fear that they will be judged harshly by their peers for abandoning the cause ... ultimately the cause of making one of the richest people in the world richer.
Yeha it's obvious that a certain group loves it there as a way of virtue signaling allegiance with his performative political incorrectness. But it's incomprehensible why all his haters, who now have his balls in their hand, don't leave and cripple him.
Because the vast majority of people are neither Elon haters nor Elon simps. They're just people doing what they were already doing because changing habits is hard and there's no easy alternative.
Bingo. the alternatives just aren't there yet, and most people don't care enough to get angry about his insanity, esp. since you curate your own experience.
anecdotally, my use, and that of all of the people I know on it, is fairly limited. its basically just a way to keep track of family, local groups, etc. I've given up on the platform as a way to get accurate news, but it's still useful for organizational contacts; ditto for FB.
It's not that difficult a problem to solve. Just curate your follows to known humans who publish high-quality content, then select the "Following" tab at the top (not "For You"). Voila, now you only see content from your curated follows in your timeline.
"xkdc 1:20,000" is totally wrong. It is not xkdc, it is xkcd, it is not 20,000, it is 10,000, and it is not a ratio, it is an absolute number. And it is not even about exclaiming commonly known facts but rather the opposite, that is people asking about facts that should be commonly known.
And yet, so many people understood the reference, me included, even ChatGPT got it. I always find it fascinating when a messages manages to pass well even though all of its individual parts are wrong.
Is there something deep about it, maybe? Probably not. Maybe we can turn that into some commonly known fact to tell the lucky ten thousand.
I was so mad typing I couldn't even get the "xkcd" part right. lol.
Basically what I was getting at, the other end of "don't make fun of someone for not knowing" is "Don't yell at people for saying commonly known facts because there's always someone who is finding out for the first time".
> AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.
It's real, real hard to escape regression to the mean in autonomous systems. That gaussian's gonna get ya.
[1] I. Shumailov, Z. Shumaylov, Y. Zhao, Y. Gal, N. Papernot, and R. Anderson, “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget,” May 2023, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
It doesn't usually mean "boring" in my experience, rather it usually means that the person is being unusually verbose and explanatory for the environment. It's used more like a synonym to the insult-meaning of "autistic".
Mansplaining is basically botsplaining but instead of the inappropriate context mismatch being overformal or overly explanatory discussion in a casual space, it is overly patronising or again overly explantory discussion to a woman. Both are possible online and offline.
A whole article that ultimately boils down to "the majority of normies are using LLM systems with low temperature settings".
Literally just set the damn temperature higher and allow for sampling from deeper down in the distribution (so relax top_p, top_k or equiv parameters) and suddenly you get creativity, and also more unhinged behavior.
Wait whaat? You mean most people don't run dockerized Mixtral-Dolphin-4B-88X instances on a Kubernetes deployment in a GPU farm they built in their cellar?
Yep, I just experienced it today on work.
Used chat gpt to rephrase my test.
My boss: you used chat gpt right? Next time I'll ask chat gpt to send your weekly.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 63.8 ms ] threadWhen I was growing up, calling somebody a "boy" was shorthand for "aimbot", essentially "oh this guy's so unrealistically good that he must be hacking"
Now the same phrase means "you are a rudimentary program meant to fill space and lose in large lobbies"
The fact that they are so different says a lot about backtracking in technological necessities, but also a huge culture shift towards engagement driven game design, lack of reverence for skill, etc.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/npc-wojak
If it was only so easy, that those who were evil could just be separated from the rest of us, but alas, the line that separates good and evil cuts through the heart of every person
Paraphrasing Solzhenitsyn, of course..
Don't be so quick to apply the quack and nut case label, please.
Sometimes it's actual humans who are just dull and exclaim commonly known facts as if they're deep or novel. I know the xkdc 1:20,000 bit but it gets so tiring.
I really don’t understand how people enjoy using twitter. I mean I didn’t before but now I can’t understand how it’s worth anything to anyone.
Same with Reddit back when I was regularly visiting. I don't see the dumping ground of low value memes because I only see the subreddits I want.
Probably the same for facebook? But I wouldn't know.
Like most things, it takes a bit of work to reap rewards.
The problem is, network effects may not make this possible anymore.
anecdotally, my use, and that of all of the people I know on it, is fairly limited. its basically just a way to keep track of family, local groups, etc. I've given up on the platform as a way to get accurate news, but it's still useful for organizational contacts; ditto for FB.
I wouldn't call it that vague, from what I've seen it's one of the most re-shared xkcd comics.
And yet, so many people understood the reference, me included, even ChatGPT got it. I always find it fascinating when a messages manages to pass well even though all of its individual parts are wrong.
Is there something deep about it, maybe? Probably not. Maybe we can turn that into some commonly known fact to tell the lucky ten thousand.
Basically what I was getting at, the other end of "don't make fun of someone for not knowing" is "Don't yell at people for saying commonly known facts because there's always someone who is finding out for the first time".
It's real, real hard to escape regression to the mean in autonomous systems. That gaussian's gonna get ya.
[1] I. Shumailov, Z. Shumaylov, Y. Zhao, Y. Gal, N. Papernot, and R. Anderson, “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget,” May 2023, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
Literally just set the damn temperature higher and allow for sampling from deeper down in the distribution (so relax top_p, top_k or equiv parameters) and suddenly you get creativity, and also more unhinged behavior.