by tagawa on 11/30/24, 10:38 PM with 102 comments
by rezmason on 11/30/24, 11:41 PM
by labster on 11/30/24, 11:13 PM
[0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
by motohagiography on 12/1/24, 2:22 AM
I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.
There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.
[1] 42.
by mitaphane on 12/1/24, 2:42 AM
by gmuslera on 11/30/24, 11:52 PM
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
by MrMcCall on 11/30/24, 11:28 PM
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
by cduzz on 12/1/24, 1:51 AM
For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.
Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].
[1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.
by jongjong on 12/1/24, 10:02 PM
The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.
by JKCalhoun on 11/30/24, 11:10 PM
by alephnerd on 12/1/24, 2:10 AM
by zw123456 on 12/1/24, 12:43 AM
by guestbest on 11/30/24, 11:26 PM
by lxgr on 12/1/24, 3:16 AM
It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.
by moffkalast on 12/1/24, 10:10 PM
> The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high.
If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".
by CatWChainsaw on 12/1/24, 9:38 PM
by mediumsmart on 12/2/24, 7:06 PM
by phkahler on 12/1/24, 1:20 AM
This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.
by sixQuarks on 12/2/24, 4:50 PM
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake
by pessimizer on 12/1/24, 10:42 PM
I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale.
We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk.
Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem.
The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.
by Shalah on 12/1/24, 12:02 AM
Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story.
> Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content
You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories.
> On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic.
Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism.
> Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.”
Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. --
Q: Tell a joke on Jesus
chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points!
Q: Tell a joke on Buddha.
chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything!
Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad
chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!