Depends where in Europe. Lots of Europeans suffer so other Europeans can prosper. Add to the fact that Europe still benefits from imperialism and that Europe is facing an existential crisis, I would take be the average American long-term.
So cool. One reading is “complexity is not what you believe it is”. Another is “complexity is”… “not what you believe it is”. Seems similar but the difference is subtle. Even the “please try listening” line changes in both versions. One is confrontational, the other is empathetic.
I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
Why is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop.
Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.
Basically, I want to set boundaries in a healthy frame of mind, and have that default respected when my self control is lower because I’m tired, depressed, bored, etc.
It’s because content curation is inherently impossible to reach the same level of relevance as direct feedback from user behavior. You mix in all kinds of biases, commercial interests, ideology of the curator, etc, and you inevitably get irrelevant slop. The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.
And that is why these algorithms needs to be regulated. People don't want to pick the algorithm that makes them spend the most time possible on their phones, many would want an algorithm that optimizes for quality rather than quantity on the app so they get more time to do other things. But corporations doesn't want to provide that because they don't earn anything from it.
I have YouTube Premium. They should be doing the opposite. Getting me off the platform as quickly as possible so they get to keep a bigger cut of my fixed payment.
I just don’t think that the addiction is exclusively due to the algorithm. There’s really a lack of affordable varied options for learning trade and entertainment. We say in Portuguese: You shouldn’t throw the baby away along with the water you used to bathe.
I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"? For example, lets say there is an option to only recommend videos from channels you subscribe to, that would be much less addictive, why isn't that an option? A regulation that forces these companies to add such a feature would only make the world a better place.
>I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"?
consider air travel in the present day. ticketing at essentially all airlines breaks down as: premium tickets that are dramatically expensive but offer comfortable seats, and economy tickets that are cramped and seem to impose new indignities every new season. what could be the harm from legislation that would change that menu?
the harm would be fewer people able to travel, fewer young people taking their first trip to experiencing the other side of the world, fewer families visiting grandma, etc.
As much as people hate the air travel experience, the tickets get snapped up, and most of them strictly on the basis of price, and next most taking into account nonstops. This gives us a gauge as to how much people hate air travel: they don't.
this doesn't mean airlines should have no regulation, it doesn't mean monopoly practices are not harmful to happiness, it doesn't mean that addictions don't drive people to make bad choices, it doesn't mean a lot of things.
I'm just trying to get you to see that subtle but significant harm to human thriving can easily come from regulations.
I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that? I believe we’re out of ideas. TikTok’s crime was just be firmly successful because of good engineering. There’s no evil sauce apart from promotional content and occasional manipulation, which has nothing to do with the algorithm per se.
And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
> I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that?
Governments saying "if you are a social content platform with more than XX million users you have to provide these options on recommendation algorithms: X Y Z". It is that easy.
> And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
And some people want to turn off that pushed discovery and just get recommended videos from a set of channels that they subscribed to. They still want to watch some tiktok videos, they just don't want the algorithm to try to push bad content on them.
You are right that you can't avoid such algorithm when searching for new content, but I don't see why it has to be there in content it pushes onto you without you asking for new content.
I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.
But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.
4chan is only outdone by 8chan. “It’s only concentrated on certain boards” is the same lame excuse Reddit used to ignore /r/thedonald and now /r/conservative.
4chan doesn't use algorithms to push users to certain boards afaik, makes it better than the others in its design. I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.
Facebook and Twitter are far worse sources of extremism. There are entire groups dedicated to genetic comparisons between races, 'who would you do' groups that do nothing but photos of young women in bikinis farmed FROM facebook/ig.
4chan is where you go too far. 4chan users typically don't foster extremism, they are the extreme. They don't post pictures of young women, they post addresses and walkthroughs of their apartments.
Yes, I feel like it's far less harmful than the other sites for this reason. These bad parts of 4chan aren't the majority of the site either, a large minority maybe, but the site in general is much smaller. Users are also attracted to the image of 'extremism', 4chan in the far past didn't have this as its main audience of newcomers in its early stages.
It's easy to control for governments compared to facebook/reddit/... because it's just some boards, way better than massive amounts of posts creating a personal zone for everyone.
>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.
4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.
I'm not sure if most of 4chan was actually so on board with the whole gamergate thing and all the things which followed. pre-/pol/ 4chan was a whole different thing. It was outsiders joining 4chan which did most of the posting, twitter and facebook were the ones which allowed this to happen.
Internet starting with a 1000 4chans wouldn't create what we have today (you'll just get lots of small fringe groups), internet starting with a 1000 facebooks/twitters/... will always end in extremism of a big portion of the population.
And — this is really shocking — Jeffrey Epstein caused /pol/ to exist, which makes him indirectly responsible for almost all stupid internet politics of the last decade.
I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…”
Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.
At the risk of going off on a tangent about that maxim; I feel like it's just misusing the word "purpose".
Maybe it would be cleaner to state that a system has no purpose (at least not until it is sentient), instead it has behaviors. Then one can observe that the purpose of the designers or maintainers of a system simply happens to be at odds (or as AI safety researchers would say, are "out of alignment with") the behavior of the system.
That all of course presupposes that one can accurately deduce the purposes of the designers/maintainers.. In the case of TikTok, I'd bet that we are all in agreement that their purpose is nothing more nor less than maximal value-extraction from people wishing to express themselves with videos multiplied against an audience of people who wish to view videos multiplied again against advertisers who want to insert propaganda into eyeballs.
A use case I’ve been working through is learning a language (not programming). You can use LLMs to translate and write for you in another language but you will not be able to say, I know that language, no matter how much you use the LLM.
Now compare this to using the LLM with a grammar book and real world study mechanisms. This creates friction which actually causes your mind to learn. The LLM can serve as a tool to get specialized insight into the grammar book and accelerate physical processes (like generating all forms of a word for writing flashcards). At the end of day, you need to make an intelligent separation where the LLM ends and your learning begins.
I really like this contrast because it highlights the gap between using an LLM and actually learning. You may be able to use the LLM to pass college level courses in learning the language but unless you create friction, you actually won’t learn anything! There is definitely more nuance here but it’s food for thought
I once approached an Israeli tech company (Gloat) when I was doing market research for a product I was building. The response was… interesting to say the least. It led me to do more digging behind the actual product they were building, what kind of positions they were hiring, and what customers they actually had.
All engineering positions were based out of Israel (nothing wrong with that), they had numerous high-profile clients and seemed very connected, but honestly the tech and their vision was pretty disappointing. At first I was shocked how, with such a rudimentary system, they could be so widely in use by these huge, reputable companies! I was naive. All in all, what disappointed me the most was the amount of resources that obviously went into this company and the presumptions that reeked from it; but in my opinion, there was no deserved substance to back things up. You can argue this is the case for many American VC companies but at least to their credit, they need to put the money where their mouth is a some point or another (whether that means making a viable product or generating more hype). With this company, the vibe I got from resources I interacted with, was that they were almost “owed” this market penetration in the industry and it was very discordant to me growing up in the US tech industry where you really needed to prove yourself, at least initially, and stay growing, open-minded, always hustling.
I think reflecting on it there is probably a lot of state protection of this company and state connections between private US and Israeli individuals that guarantee clients as long as the work is as at a certain level (and yes not saying they have developed some horrible suite of software, just… small-minded). And maybe with this breathing room, it allows the role play of being a cutting-edge tech company without the risk which makes it a dream job and therefore a political asset in the polarized state. And maybe at the end of the day it’s less about building a tech company that is the best but developing Israeli institutional knowledge and collecting data, building connections, everything that isn’t software and above my pay-grade. I’m not sure.
To contrast this, I met with an Irish tech company in the same space a couple weeks later called Teamwork, I believe. The CEO himself met with me, discussed my work, even jokingly offered to hire me. Despite this guy founding a successful company, at no point did I feel “erased” or made to feel beneath him. To take a step back, I’m not making the point that “non-Israeli tech company” better than Israeli tech company. Thinking it through, I’ll say that, it seems like Gloat and the other Israeli tech companies I’ve read about, are more existentially-driven. Like doing their work, building their business, and developing their tech is predicated on surviving… which makes sense when you think it through. At the same time, from a tech focus, I think it holds them back since it’s a form of egocentrism and if you’re not the best, you need diversity of opinions to be the best.
Here is my tech angle: AI disinfo is already out in full force but the non-techies cannot even conceptualize. This is not some superiority complex but the fact that even navigating the UI of a simple app like Reddit can be daunting for newer users, let alone understanding the level of manipulation that goes on at even the smallest level in these programs (many, multiple full-time smart people on this stuff). I feel that this is one of the few places on the English-speaking internet (public that is) that really understands how far-reaching AI disinfo is and why discussion is important to happen here. Despite as you mention with, maybe some tampering by HN (though I truly believe HN does a good job walking that line) but look at places like Reddit with institutional moves after moves to push towards a low-trust environment that fundamentally fragments the socialsphere and makes people more scared and confused (with botting, algorithms, government oversight, etc. [where is your transparency report now?]). Call a spade a spade.
To add a more personal opinion here which I also think is correct, all of this is intentional and deliberate and I'm sure there are people "in the know" who this is so obvious to but I'm only 25 and I only start wrapping my head around this stuff by the day. The admin clearly shaped conditions for something like this to happen but also create plausible deniability. You take people who aren't properly-vetted, and want this job, you know what will happen. Especially when you do it at scale, for a long enough time, it's an inevitability. What's the reason? Well the most scary thing I've noticed is how it's drawn a line. The other side, they're human and maybe find themselves trapped in a position but the chips are coming down. This is forcing people to take a stand that they might not agree with to remain in their community, their families, and even keep their careers, to take the step themselves of being ok with cold-blooded murder.
All this to say, for the "bad thing" to happen, it doesn't just happen, it needs to be tested and proved and honestly, no one knows exactly how to get there (though we have some historical examples to look at). So the administration is testing, proving, prodding, deliberately to shape things so the conditions for the "bad system" can arise. A bit the breaking the seals in revelation except the seals are our moral composure as a society and the rule of law. This is a big step in that direction of badness and viewing r/conservative on Reddit (very botted), you can see how dire the party line has become. That's my theory at least.
The militia that DHS has deployed in search of immigration law violators has spilled over into confrontations with US citizens partly because of the lack of accountability, transparency, and training. By making these newbie teams of gung ho militia anonymous and independent of any oversight, the DHS administration has lit a fuse for an inevitable explosion.
I don't know what was said between the agents in the moments before events unfolded that lead to Renee Nicole Good's death on camera(s). I do suspect (and speculate) that a spontaneous decision was made, inside the cab of the officer's vehicle, by one of the three officers involved (who was in charge?), to exit the pickup, move forward to demand immediate compliance, to exert force under a sudden assertion of authority.
To me, watching the videos, it appeared that in that critical moment of deciding to prosecute the Good woman, the agents had exhausted their patience with the scattered crowd of citizen 'observers', annoyed by the entire exercise of locals with their camera phones and their ignorant application of so-called civil rights. The impatience and aggression is clear and visible in one of the videos, which show the sudden exit from the pickup, the aggressive approach to the driver's side door, the three commands from one officer to "Get out of the car!" (with the third command adding an emphatic expletive).
This emotional behavior exhibits the result of explicit psychological conditioning, the development of mistrust and hostility towards citizenry which imho is purposefully encouraged to unify the team. The team is coached to make the militia into a cohesive unit that will hold itself elite, empowered, enabled to enforce retribution for whatever slight a team or team leader may perceive.
They have been told they are righteous in their mission. They have been told that they bear the full authority of the federal government, and that they have the right to detain and/or arrest anyone who they perceive is obstructing them in performing their duties. They have been coached and prepared for battle, not just focused on the criminal illegal immigrants that are their purvue, but for anyone who appears to be in their way.
Without accountability, and without interview access to the agents involved, we'll never know what was said and decided between those three officers. Only they know how and why and when they decided to take down the Good woman, instead of moving on to the next task in their team's agenda. Only they can speak to their intentions, what they thought their probable cause was, or even if they considered probable cause, arrest, prosecution.
Maybe they only wanted payback. Maybe they were just frustrated and thus determined that the team's morale needed lifting with a good old application of force under the auspices of authority. Maybe yanking a woman out of her vehicle and taking her into custody in full view of all these citizen journalists would help spread the word that ICE is not to be messed with.
But we'll never know, because the entire apparatus of the federal government is no longer to be trusted, not to investigate and report on itself.
Donald Trump wants a national police force accountable to no one but himself.
Well here in Chicago we learned that you CAN interview the agents and they'll just deny saying and doing the things their own cameras proved them to have done and said.
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