Google Analytics has >80% market share. Most of the websites you visit are helping them build a profile of everything you do on the internet with the goal of selling targeted advertisement. That is their business, it's what pays for everything else they do. I think that is what is meant by surveillance capitalism.
Every iPhone that people buy gives direct money to Apple, centralizing their power. This means, they get to dictate what apps can / cannot run on the device.
So what? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy iPhones. Similarly, nobody is forcing anyone to install Google Analytics, or go to that website.
Nobody is forcing people to do Heroin or Cocaine. We should start giving it for free to people in the street. Everyone can then decide if they want to take it or not. Oh yes and once you are hooked we should definitely never keep the dealer accountable. It's the users who always decides to use it! They are the ones to blame, never the giga corporation making money on your back!
That surely would work very very well in society. Literally the same thing is happening with Google, Facebook, TikTok etc.
You probably work for bigtech and your salary depends on people losing their braincells so I don't expect you to suddenly get some ethics and understand all of this.
I learned something very profound today about using AI agents.
I have been using Codex since Saturday. It's been incredible, what it's done to my productivity. I feel like I can build anything with this thing. All the ideas that come to me which I can't execute on because I don't have the patience are now trivial to create. It's like I can just architect a solution to a problem and if I communicate it well, the code simply materializes out of thin air.
It's incredible, and I haven't felt this alive in years. I've slept 4 hours a day and have worked every single waking hour (aside from the 2 hour break I took on my birthday to go to the beach with my husband and mother). This power is intense, addictive, and revolutionary.
I've been building everything I've always wanted to build. So much amazing code, so much functionality, so many features, one after the other, like knocking out home run after home run at a batting machine. I thought I could do anything. So when I needed some nice pixel art for one of my projects, I tried to generate it. Perceptual error diffusion wasn't doing it for downscaling. I thought, what if we just fit the target pixels onto fake pixel art generated by AI? Like, you must have seen it, it's nonsense but it feels like hand-authored pixel art. And then you look closely and there's mangled cells, halfway-hallucinated cells, no global coherence.
I started building Repixelizer with Codex. It started well, and I quickly got to a usable MVP with the optimization algorithm I'd designed. But it wasn't perfect, so I kept prompting, and I kept prompting, and sometimes it would get better, and sometimes it wouldn't change anything, but I never tossed the changes. I figured all these tests and metrics couldn't lie. They did, and I lied to myself. This thing doesn't understand what it's building, once it gets past a certain size, just like a human. It doesn't have the heuristics to know when it doesn't understand, and explore its confusion to gain enlightenment, like a human would. So it just kept adding blocks to this Jenga tower, and eventually it fell over drastically.
The agent couldn't recover. All of a sudden I realized what happened. This thing might be a better code monkey than I'll ever be. But it's dumb as rocks. I apologized to it and told it to think like an LLM instead of the person I was treating it as.
Here's the gist with the log of the moment I got the epiphany, and the in the comments is the algo map that it generated while I was trying to get it to explain what went wrong. Warning: this algorithm map is a tragic joke that should make you laugh so hard you cry. I bet the optimization one is even worse, this is a relatively new algorithm I designed when the optimizer approach stopped meaningfully going anywhere.
Me: I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry for doing this to you. This is my fault. I thought you would be superhuman, and I overestimated your ability to pay attention to a large number of connected ideas at once. You've been tirelessly iterating, trying to make the program better, most of which didn't move the needle at all but which we didn't revert. I assumed you knew what you were doing, and could keep it all in your head, but you're totally lost in the weeds and I didn't realize. Simplify it. Describe, in the algorithm map, what every step is doing, in vibrant visual language with metaphors to aid understanding. Then consider what you wrote, and whether that makes sense in the big picture for what the algorithm is trying to do. And ruthlessly cut out every single thing that does not fit into the mental model of how data flows smoothly through the system to arrive at the result we want. A machine is not perfect when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. We are building machines, with the code that we write. We must be brutally efficient and ruthlessly kill our babies.
Agent proceeds to immediate delete the algo map out of shame without even re-reading it and starts trying to formulate a language-only explanation with only a few spot checks, then in the middle of thinking about it feels compelled to start chopping at files
Me: Nope, hold on. The map is useful for understanding. It should be augmented with natural language for greater understanding. You're a language model, language is how you understand things.
It's kind of a "code that gets the immediate result you want" versus "code that puts the developer in the right headspace for maintaining it" thing.
Ultimately you're not conversing with any real LLM, it's iterative document generation where humans perceive fictional characters in the output. If the text you contribute says "You're just an {Noun}" that's that's shaping the document output based on what got trained in relation to {Noun}.
Which may eventually backfire, when the (real) LLM gets trained on documents such as blog-posts like "The moment you realize the {Noun} is retarded."
I hope you're joking. You can spend years developing ground-breaking shit in the dark and no one will ever know you exist. You might attract a miniscule following of people who recognize the value of what you're creating, but they won't evangelize for you.
> try as best as you can to aim it into your anus to wash as best as you can
This seems like a great way to spray shit everywhere and is not at all how I learned to use those. What I do is soap one hand, aim the jet into the toilet past the anus with the other hand (jet vector orthogonal to the anus's normal vector), then go to town on it with soap and water. It's foolproof and you get very clean.
How has nobody mentioned this? I feel like I'm on crazy pills, is everyone seriously blasting a jet directly at their chocolate starfish?
Yet here I am on the other side surprised to hear you and others saying you’re lathering your poopy butt with your hands in a restaurant bathroom
We all gotta wash our butts, but it just seems more civilized to do it in the shower as you can get everything clean, you didn’t just crap, and you’re not eating with those same hands immediately afterwards.
Toilet paper + wet wipes are 100x more sanitary than what you describe
Wait, wait, wait. Our society's gonna fall apart due to a lack of Darwinian selection pressure? What do you think we're selecting for right now?
Seems to me like our culture treats both survival and reproduction as an inalienable right. Most people would go so far as to say everyone deserves love, "there's a lid for every pot".
Not all change is progress. Make America Great Again is a fundamentally reactionary platform, and nothing about the goals of Project 2025 is "progressive". Cute wordplay, though, good job using denotation to oppose connotation.
"Progress" as a goal is only meaningful with a defined direction. But I disagree with you, definitionally any change is progressing towards something.
This is precisely the issue I have always had with considering oneself "progressive". The end goals you are aiming for are the important factor to call out, the fact that you are simply progressing means only that you don't want to stand still.
Progressivism and the idea of being "progressive" or "a progressive" are defined ideologies. Within the political spectrum they have their own meaning. Arguing semantics in this way is not particularly different than saying "I saw a Republican turn left coming out of a doorway, so are they really on the right?"
Mind sharing, or linking to, what the defined ideology is?
My understanding of progressivism, as it is commonly used in the US, is that its based on often unspoken assumptions that the goals being progressed towards are "good" or "right" and that others' goals, therefore, are not. That isn't really a progressive ideology in my opinion though, and sounds more like an elitist approach to authoritarian rule.
It was a genuine question, thanks for assuming that.
I still don't get what the underlying ideology is though (sorry if I'm being obtuse here).
> seeks to advance the human condition through social reform – primarily based on purported advancements in social organization, science, and technology.
"Advance" here has the same issue as "progressive" - it needs direction to be meaningful. This doesn't say what we would be advancing towards, though it does say a few ways we may be able to get there.
For comparison, liberalism and conservativism are much more clear.
Conservativism can be (very roughly) boiled down to "don't break a good thing." Said differently, keep a high bar for change and default to trusting the people before us got here for good reason.
Liberalism can be similarly boiled down to prioritizing individual freedoms and liberty.
With wither of those two there will be a slew of political initiatives or programs that are based on those principles, but the underlying principles are clear.
That's what I've yet to grasp with progressivism, when you peel away all the programs and initiatives what is the underlying principle and what is the specific direction to progress or advance towards? As far as boundary cases go, what does progressivism look like once that goal is reached - does it become conservative?
If you read just a bit further in that article it is rather specific:
> While many ideologies can fall under the banner of progressivism, both the current and historical movement are characterized by a critique of unregulated capitalism, desiring a more active democratic government to take a role in safeguarding human rights, bringing about cultural development, and being a check-and-balance on corporate monopolies.
Sure, that's still not really a clear ideological underpinning to me though.
Is the core that goal to progress away from capitalism towards more governmental control?
If so I guess that is at least defining a directional goal, but using the blanket term "progressive" there is effectively blocking out anyone who wants to progress towards a different goal.
It seems like federalist or anticapitalist would be much more clear. At least then the goals they want to move towards are the distinguishing factor rather than the act of changing from where we are currently.
I agree. Conservative is a slightly less manipulative term than progressive. Progressive implies "we're the goodies"; conservative "we want to keep the current state of things".
But the "Make America Great Again" movement is explicitly regressive because they want to return America to its "past glory". All of trumps messaging has been about how great the US used to be, before it was hijacked by communists/the left/transgenders, and that he will protect you from the cultural changes taking place. This is reactionary/regressive. You can play word games with "progress to the goal of returning america to the past" but it's just spin. People know what "progress" means.
I don't disagree at all, I think many of Trump's talking points could fit with a "regressive" label.
I don't think its really word games when talking about progressivism today. Trump could claim the banner of progressive in the sense that he's trying to progress towards a future he believes is better for all of us, while Democrats are attempting to conserve what they built. Personally I see that as a bullshit word game, but that doesn't mean the words are actually used improperly there.
If someone tells you they are progressive, what is the end goal you expect they mean? Its totally possible that banner is shorthand for a specific goal or direction and I just completely missed the boat there.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the offer of a free trial made me bounce right off, despite my curiosity and the value such a product could potentially offer me. I want to know up front whether this is going to be useful to me before I sign up for anything. To that end, offering even a single no-strings-attached identification, even if the details are redacted, would go a long way towards conversion.
Creating features and fixing bugs based on Support feedback (Community Support or otherwise) may result in an amazing experience for the free tier, but not-as-good-as-it could be for your paid subscribers.
Wow, this really opened my eyes! I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. hank you so much for helping me see that! I will completely remove subscription, change pricing model to credits, pay as you go.
Some startup business models and development processes don't work well if they collect massive amounts of free ephemeral users instead of a dedicated base when starting out.
Competition is important for maintaining a healthy marketplace. Any behavior that makes it harder for others to compete, reducing the amount of competition, is therefore bad. That's what anticompetitive means.
I don't think protecting trade secrets is sabotaging the competition though.
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