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I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do feel a lot of this.

In the 1980's, computer software was sold in catalogs and magazines. Users had either of three platforms: A Macintosh, a PC-Compatible (probably x86), or a Commodore/Amiga. So these are the three categories were there to help you order the correct version of oregon trail. They were really a name for the operating systems, not the specifics of the hardware, at least back then they were.


And Atari…


I never saw Atari software for sale in the same magazines, but I'm sure it was available somewhere.


That's late 80s.

Early 80s very different.


fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.


I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.


AdGuard as a local VPN also bans unskippable Ads without the pesky legal enforcement baggage.


seems like blaming the users is the appropriate thing to do. just like blaming users for how they misuse guns and or photoshop.


Grok is a hosted service. In your analogy, it would be like a gun shop renting a gun out to someone who puts down "Rob a store" as the intended usage of the rental. Then renting another gun to that same client. Then when confronted, telling people "I'm not responsible for what people do with the guns they rent from me".

It's not a personal tool that the company has no control over. It's a service they are actively providing and administering.


I think a better analogy would be going into a gun shop and paying the owner to shoot someone. They're asking grok to undress people and it's just doing it.


Would you blame only the users of a murder-for-hire service? Sure, yes, they are also to blame, but the murder-for-hire service would also seem to be equally culpable.


A prediction market is a murder-for-hire service. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8e4QNySp4LjvdBstx/how-predic...

Shall we ban prediction markets?


yeah, probably. life was fine without them


That link claims to be a "case study" but I don't see any case being discussed?


yes. It's obscene that they exist.


Yes, please.


Except in this case someone else owns the gun and they allow anyone on the planet (with an X account) to ask for someone else to be shot at will.


it was a PR stunt. I think it was probably largely well-received except by a few like this.


Somehow I doubt it. Getting such an email from a human is one thing, because humans actually feel gratitude. I don't think LLMs feel gratitude, so seeing them express gratitude is creepy and makes me questions the motives of the people running the experiment (though it does sound like an interesting experiment. I'm going to read more about it.)


Not a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.


I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?


I love projects like this. finally someone found a new use for those dot matrix printers.



'defect' only applies to prisoners dilemma type problems. that is just one, very limited class of problem, and I would argue not very relevant to discussing AI inevitability.


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