When it comes to video my guess is that the main part isn’t even the shortening / “summary”, but the transcription. Specially in your friend’s case - given they’re likely dealing with the same set of contextually similar situations (client makes new request, client complains about something, etc.), and people can be really bad at conveying what they want when speaking. (Including me.)

Immediately bookmarked it. Way better than my current approaches:

• if I care about the person, I mention a few experiences with LLMs: how ChatGPT constantly invents RimWorld mods that don’t exist, how Bard (now Gemini) told me potatoes are active and oranges are passive (because potatoes can roll and need to react to their environment), etc. Or internet lore, like “eat a rock per day” and “put glue on pizza”.
• if I don’t care about the person*, I superficially agree with them. Then I mark them mentally as “braindead trash” and consider avoiding them as much as possible - because this is a symptom of worse character flaws, like being gullible.

Small note:

What kinds of things might they be good at? // Summarize this for me

Kinda. It doesn’t really summarise texts; it picks chunks of them together. Sometimes changing meaning.

In this aspect, LLMs are only good if you wouldn’t otherwise read the text in question, or if you’re looking for a specific topic.

Note the pattern behind the other examples: things where there’s no harm if it’s wrong, because you’re checking it anyway.

*EDIT: relevant to note that by default, I care about people. Until they give me signs I shouldn’t.

Rename USA in the maps to Northern Mexico. Keep calling it “Gulf of Mexico”. Problem solved.

…on a more serious note, the article shows what’s up here:

But it also proved to be an early test of how institutions would — or would not — stand up to unilateral presidential action without precedent. Google, Apple, and Microsoft all got in line. But news organizations, for the most part, did not.

Or perhaps it’s that the information ecosystem still has a little institutional wherewithal. When Trump cast the AP out of the Oval Office — and took unprecedented control of who gets to cover the president when — the White House press corps didn’t exactly rise up united in rebellion.

Those were the main part, really: the tiny-dicked kinglet was testing the waters on which entities would fight back, and which would do as told as a sign of loyalty.

As a silver lining I’m really glad to see the sheer amount of vitriol people are directing towards GAFAM.

It’s nice to see a business getting rekt on its attempt to use copyright laws for censorship. But what worries me the most is the big picture.

How many people get silenced through copyright bogus claims, for each person who’s able and willing to fight back (like McNally did)? Even if we pretend copyright laws are good (they’re trash), those businesses abuse copyright claims all the time, because they know they get away with it.

Recipes online have been going to hell for a long time, due to SEO. AI is like the cherry on the cake.

• avoid English language content when possible/reasonable to do so.
• focus mostly on a few sites I know to not be enshittified to hell.
• if I try the recipe and I like it, I store it in a simple .txt file, available across all devices in my household through the LAN.

Plus going analogue more, like you are doing. I’ve seen myself exchanging recipes with neighbours and relatives way more often.

But I suspect allowing AI would allow pollution from commercial to non-commercial.

That’s possible. Thinking on it, maybe you’re right and we need walls against both. Even then I think the main issue is commerce, not AI itself.

could you make a network of, eg, .net/.org (non commercial) sites?

My take would be a federation of simple web pages, using a new markup format (more complex than gemtext, but still way simpler than HTML+CSS), and where people were collectively able to kick hostile entities out. I’m not sure on how to do it, though, specially in a way that wouldn’t be weak against Sybil attacks.

No, it’s just you.

I am clearly talking on general grounds (“humans”), not about any specific individual (like myself, or anyone else).

All my content is CC BY-SA. I don’t care if its reshared or who reshares it

Unless you were able to show that your approach is so typical that it contradicts my claim (you weren’t), sharing what you personally do is simply attention seeking.

“Don’t kill me”? You will not be spared! /jk

Serious now: IMO the wall we need isn’t against AI itself but against corporations. Once you take commercialisation out of the equation, generative models stop being a big negative to become either a non-issue or a small positive.

People talking about dead internet usually focus on the larger amount of machine content. I’ll focus on the opposite:

I have no data to back this up, but I think AI made humans share less worthwhile content with each other.

Let’s say you’re a decent writer or visual artist. And you used to share bits of your content on the net, for free. You got some people to smile; you like it, right? “Wow thanks this is awesome ♥” fills you with good feelings. And there was no reasonable way to misuse your content for commercial purposes - you aren’t a charity; you’re fine playing dove if others are doves, but not if there are nearby hawks.

Now, they’re making a commercial product out of your content, without your permission. That product makes some people screech how AI will replace useless trash like you - you’ll become obsolete, Soon®. Social media feels as fake as a three euros bill, due to the sheer amount of bots, so you don’t even care about the people (are they actual people?) who might be sharing it any more. You’d think twice before sharing your content online for free. Why bother? If you’re really good you might gatekeep your content behind a paywall, otherwise you’ll simply do something else.

In other words: in the internet, there used to be an implicit social agreement, roughly “share it for free, others are doing the same, everyone benefits from it, including you”. And those megacorporations feeding your content into their models abused this social agreement so much people aren’t as eager to play along it any more.

And the worst part? This isn’t even an intrinsic issue of the technology itself. It’s all about how who controls it.

It contains NSFW content, it gets tagged as such.

My bad, edition error - I initially wrote “AI”*, but then because translating drunk what you often say is a PITA for some reason replaced it with “AGI”. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll fix it.

I agree the current lack of truly intelligent systems is a good thing.

*as in, the generic label used nowadays towards those systems, regardless of being actually intelligent or not.

No shit.

As I often joke: the only people who genuinely believe AGI AI is intelligent now or soon are the ones lacking themselves intelligence.

This reminds me a bunch of dumb jokes in Portuguese between “RAM” and “rã” toad. Including questions about “memória sapo” (toad memory).

Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

To be frank this sounds pointless; I don’t expect veggie burgers to be “disguised” as beef burgers, to the point a clueless customer might buy one when they want the other. So it isn’t protecting anyone. (It isn’t harming anyone either, really. Call it “veggie patty” and it’s still the same.)

On the other hand, I do expect people to put a lot of random stuff in burgers - such as cheaper / non-beef meat, fillers, etc. - so that would be better grounds (pun not intended) for legislation.

It’s amazing (and sad) how much Microsoft goes out of its way to seize control over the users’ machines. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if it had remote kill switches and took your data hostage.

Yeah, but imagine Wine was infested with adware and slow as fuck.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

In my country this sort of bet has become quite popular, too. I wish it became illegal.