If it has started successfully responding to negative requests that could be kind of interesting since that’s been a bottleneck in AI’s effectiveness for so long. It makes me wonder if there might be a new development of some sort under the hood, though of course not exactly a world-changing one.

I suspect some people would have also tried to do stuff like that in the 90s if they had the technology, though in a more confrontational and ironic way.

It's definitely worthwhile as an eye-opening read! I also found it raised interesting questions when thinking about the perspective of urbanism and how our built environment contributes to social isolation as well.

This passage of Chapter 13, which appears after the author's discussion of evidence for increased TV viewing correlating with reduced social participation, feels particularly jarring to me. I never watched that much TV, but this is exactly how I feel when I use my phone.

It’s good to hear it was open in the beginning; I feel better when I hear that accounts are open at least in some ways to opportunities for engagement with varied and unfamiliar perspectives, I guess because that was something I got out of using social media back when it was a newer medium.

YIMBY should include allowing replies to threads too. (Since the original thread does not.) I know it’s a contentious topic but it still feels slightly contradictory.

Hadn’t heard of that movie. From a quick search it looks like it must have had a sluggish release.

Yeah, I guess for me the critical angle didn’t quite add up in terms of escaping its overall surrounding context, though I can see how it was there.

But I can definitely see it being of more potential relevance now that humanoid robots are a real possibility outside the realms of science fiction.

Yeah, it was certainly informed by tech culture, though I haven’t thought very much about the movie because (this is an unpopular opinion) for some reason I kind of couldn’t stand it. I guess its portrayal of a gendered AI somehow bugged me in some subconscious way that other movies like Her didn’t.

That raises another question of whether movies made with recent AI tech awareness will tell different stories than in the past. AI as a one-dimensional oppressive villain goes back at least as far as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that’s different from it being used in many different ways by dif people.

I was going to mention how Her now seems way ahead of its time considering recent news stories about people developing relationships with chatbots, but that was ~11 years ago before AI capabilities made major breakthroughs. What does a movie informed by current technology look like?

The origin of that thought: the use of AI images in the ads for the Civil War movie randomly popped into my head again. That was a slick marketing move to connect the movie to a recent new controversy, but it made me wonder what a movie that *really* looked like a generative AI world would be like.

ok one last post -- oldheads are always going to "why is the web dying.... how can we get the kids invested in the free and open web"

bro the kids can't read. that's why the web is dying. first things first

Interesting. I think I’d heard that before but not consciously remembered it. They still seem less likely to fail compared to a cooler with a flexible hose, though I know those failures are rare.

Yeah. I guess I'd find it more understandable if it was an especially rare or valuable book (I just looked and there's a used copy for sale for $18). There's plenty of books like that which you can go freely browse in a bookstore, and I don't think libraries need to be that much less accessible.