5 ms·

I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed w

I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with. So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.

tkiolp4 10mo ago
I think it’s easier than that. We can literally start the revolution from our beds: 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too” 2. For every social media account you have: close it. 3. Profit
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too. I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
  - Dilettante_ 10mo ago
    >How are we going to know when the news is lying to us? On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do. You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.
    - bdangubic 10mo ago
      give me an example of anything you can ‘P’rove and I’ll easily ‘P’rove that you are wrong
      - Dilettante_ 10mo ago
        I exist.
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        I see no proof of that but I’ll believe someone telling me that you do ;)
        Dilettante_ 10mo ago
        I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge. And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
        __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
        The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me. You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        hehehehe exactly :)
        Dilettante_ 10mo ago
        That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous). Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun. But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too” Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media. If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    << Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything. I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
    - __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
      Necessary maybe, but insufficient. Shame other plebs all you like, the predatory tech isn't going away until we start ruining rich people over it.
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      Saying something in a social setting when someone is behaving inappropriately for that social setting is reasonable. Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
        I honestly disagree. I would like to think I planted some seeds today.
- no-name-here 10mo ago
  Is Hacker News considered social media, or only sites like x/twitter/mastodon/bluesky?
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
  - nottorp 10mo ago
    Everything seems to be social media for a certain age group. Even stuff that I'd call messaging applications.
lll-o-lll 10mo ago
:-D I do love the image of hurling GPU’s into the sea! My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  I don't think history is on your side there. Disengagement might be a small first step, but for no rebellion worth mentioning was disengagement in any way ultimate. Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
cons0le 10mo ago
I'd love to lobby for "the right" to opt out of AI features. When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers. When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics. I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center. I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states. Got the exact same answer. These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
  - cons0le 10mo ago
    For me, google searches are defaulting to "AI mode" I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices. The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald". One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare. Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers. You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time. Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
Dump advertising into the ocean. The motivation for maximizing engagement on social media is to maximize ad impressions for revenue. Every algorithm, every dark pattern, every UX tweak, is aimed toward that sole end. The issue cannot be fixed by regulating social media itself; it is the enormous monetary incentive that is the root of the problem and until the flow of money is choked off, corporations will still doggedly pursue that revenue.
- no-name-here 10mo ago
  So what exactly are you proposing - that we encourage all users to only pay for ad-free versions of every service they use, instead of choosing an ad-supported version? Try to outlaw adverting globally? What is an ad - a sign for a company? A company’s circular? A sign for company with a logo next to it? (To understand what should be forbidden.) > every algorithm … every UX tweak Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
  - __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
    A good start would be to make it a criminal offence to sell the right to execute code on somebody's device without their consent. And to tax into oblivion any service that can't function without such consent. We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
    - no-name-here 10mo ago
      > without their consent If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS), would that count as consent? Would a GDPR-type banner also count? Although I guess GDPR banners generally need JS to execute, so that wouldn't be allowed - I guess a GDPR-like interstitial page would be needed before accessing most websites? Or what would consent mean? > the right to execute code on somebody’s device 1. Would that include serving text, image, and/or video JavaScript ads? 2. Would this mean that JavaScript or anything beyond text/images/videos would generally be forbidden on the web, without 'consent' (also depends on the question above about what counts as consent)? Regardless, if we did do away with most ads, do you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away? Become paywalled? Something else?

tkiolp4 10mo ago

I think it’s easier than that. We can literally start the revolution from our beds: 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too” 2. For every social media account you have: close it. 3. Profit

__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too. I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
- Dilettante_ 10mo ago
  >How are we going to know when the news is lying to us? On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do. You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.
  - bdangubic 10mo ago
    give me an example of anything you can ‘P’rove and I’ll easily ‘P’rove that you are wrong
    - Dilettante_ 10mo ago
      I exist.
      - bdangubic 10mo ago
        I see no proof of that but I’ll believe someone telling me that you do ;)
        Dilettante_ 10mo ago
        I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge. And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
        __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
        The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me. You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        hehehehe exactly :)
        Dilettante_ 10mo ago
        That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous). Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun. But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
Aurornis 10mo ago
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too” Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media. If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
  << Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything. I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
  - __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
    Necessary maybe, but insufficient. Shame other plebs all you like, the predatory tech isn't going away until we start ruining rich people over it.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    Saying something in a social setting when someone is behaving inappropriately for that social setting is reasonable. Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
      I honestly disagree. I would like to think I planted some seeds today.
no-name-here 10mo ago
Is Hacker News considered social media, or only sites like x/twitter/mastodon/bluesky?
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
- nottorp 10mo ago
  Everything seems to be social media for a certain age group. Even stuff that I'd call messaging applications.

lll-o-lll 10mo ago

:-D I do love the image of hurling GPU’s into the sea! My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.

__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
I don't think history is on your side there. Disengagement might be a small first step, but for no rebellion worth mentioning was disengagement in any way ultimate. Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.

cons0le 10mo ago

I'd love to lobby for "the right" to opt out of AI features. When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers. When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics. I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center. I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.

Aurornis 10mo ago
> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states. Got the exact same answer. These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
- cons0le 10mo ago
  For me, google searches are defaulting to "AI mode" I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices. The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald". One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare. Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers. You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time. Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.

ThrowawayR2 10mo ago

Dump advertising into the ocean. The motivation for maximizing engagement on social media is to maximize ad impressions for revenue. Every algorithm, every dark pattern, every UX tweak, is aimed toward that sole end. The issue cannot be fixed by regulating social media itself; it is the enormous monetary incentive that is the root of the problem and until the flow of money is choked off, corporations will still doggedly pursue that revenue.

no-name-here 10mo ago
So what exactly are you proposing - that we encourage all users to only pay for ad-free versions of every service they use, instead of choosing an ad-supported version? Try to outlaw adverting globally? What is an ad - a sign for a company? A company’s circular? A sign for company with a logo next to it? (To understand what should be forbidden.) > every algorithm … every UX tweak Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  A good start would be to make it a criminal offence to sell the right to execute code on somebody's device without their consent. And to tax into oblivion any service that can't function without such consent. We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
  - no-name-here 10mo ago
    > without their consent If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS), would that count as consent? Would a GDPR-type banner also count? Although I guess GDPR banners generally need JS to execute, so that wouldn't be allowed - I guess a GDPR-like interstitial page would be needed before accessing most websites? Or what would consent mean? > the right to execute code on somebody’s device 1. Would that include serving text, image, and/or video JavaScript ads? 2. Would this mean that JavaScript or anything beyond text/images/videos would generally be forbidden on the web, without 'consent' (also depends on the question above about what counts as consent)? Regardless, if we did do away with most ads, do you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away? Become paywalled? Something else?