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You didn't answer my question. I barely spend more than 15-20 mins a day on HN, so how does it matter if I am reading something useful or not. This is just an i

by gsatic 4y ago

You didn't answer my question. I barely spend more than 15-20 mins a day on HN, so how does it matter if I am reading something useful or not. This is just an imaginary problem like the problem of having 100 million vids of how to boil and egg on youtube. Once you get the info you need from one vid who sits thro the rest. People just tune it out. Like traffic or bar conversations.

ben_w 4y ago
Odd flex, but ok. Assuming the question was > How much time in day, do you think you spend reading what random people you dont know are saying? Rather than "so what?", which I will come back to later: For me, probably several hours per day. It's not just here, or twitter/fb, though that's probably an hour by itself, it's also: • Blog authors (parasocial relationships!) • Newspaper writers • Wikipedia editors • Review writers on Amazon, Google maps • Question and Answer writers on Stack Overflow • The first few comments under some Youtube videos • Comments sections on news stories (Technically also book authors given the way you phrased that, but that's a different issue and current generation text generators make no difference there anyway). Now assuming the question was "so what?", because that dovetails into the rest of your spiel: The problem is not usefulness to you, it's "can this be used to automate convincing you?". Make a half-decent sales pitch personalised at whoever for whatever: "Boiling eggs? Yeah that's easy, but I find organic is the best and well worth the cost", or "Oh, you're visiting Berlin? Yeah, I had a really great time at $insert_restaurant_here" or "Don't fall for the Lib Dems, they keep saying they can beat the Tories but look what happened when they got into power. That's why I vote $insert_uk_political_party_here". All personalised to just you, in the form of a friendly looking and natural response that probably seems more natural than any of my examples, because chatGPT is only reliably worse than domain experts and I'm not a domain expert in sales. Also: You replied to me, and I'm a stranger, so we both know you engage with strangers on the internet, QED there's a place where you might get a bot trying to sell you a product or idea while pretending to be human. Don't make the mistake of thinking the status quo is a good reference point here: Current advertising categorisation on social media sucks (easy way to find out: make GDPR request to FB or Twitter for all the data they have about you. They think I'm interested in languages I can't speak and politics of countries I don't live in).

by gsatic 4y ago

ben_w 4y ago

Odd flex, but ok. Assuming the question was > How much time in day, do you think you spend reading what random people you dont know are saying? Rather than "so what?", which I will come back to later: For me, probably several hours per day. It's not just here, or twitter/fb, though that's probably an hour by itself, it's also: • Blog authors (parasocial relationships!) • Newspaper writers • Wikipedia editors • Review writers on Amazon, Google maps • Question and Answer writers on Stack Overflow • The first few comments under some Youtube videos • Comments sections on news stories (Technically also book authors given the way you phrased that, but that's a different issue and current generation text generators make no difference there anyway). Now assuming the question was "so what?", because that dovetails into the rest of your spiel: The problem is not usefulness to you, it's "can this be used to automate convincing you?". Make a half-decent sales pitch personalised at whoever for whatever: "Boiling eggs? Yeah that's easy, but I find organic is the best and well worth the cost", or "Oh, you're visiting Berlin? Yeah, I had a really great time at $insert_restaurant_here" or "Don't fall for the Lib Dems, they keep saying they can beat the Tories but look what happened when they got into power. That's why I vote $insert_uk_political_party_here". All personalised to just you, in the form of a friendly looking and natural response that probably seems more natural than any of my examples, because chatGPT is only reliably worse than domain experts and I'm not a domain expert in sales. Also: You replied to me, and I'm a stranger, so we both know you engage with strangers on the internet, QED there's a place where you might get a bot trying to sell you a product or idea while pretending to be human. Don't make the mistake of thinking the status quo is a good reference point here: Current advertising categorisation on social media sucks (easy way to find out: make GDPR request to FB or Twitter for all the data they have about you. They think I'm interested in languages I can't speak and politics of countries I don't live in).