Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.

“I’m glad you changed your last name, you sonuvabitch!”

I don’t know if I fully agree. After 9/11, the conservative movement was attempting to change the consensus(Evil brown foreigners are coming to kill you and your family). The fact that a black man won the Presidency not once, but twice speaks to a failure to meaningfully change it.

“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Their healthcare plan is this:

Got injured on the job? Can’t work anymore? Well, that’s okay. We have a nurse’s station behind the woodshed out back. Just stand there and face the wall, and soon your injury won’t be a problem.

“Too old to perform? Well, just come back here behind this woodshed and face the wall, and we can discuss our retirement plan.” The HR rep says as they pull a revolver.

Of course, I’ve already seen this future. As soon as you have a meaningful amount of labor value to extract, it’s straight to work for you. You work until all your labor value is extracted. “Oh, you’re ready to retire? Well, alright. If you’ll just come back here behind this woodshed and face the wall, we can discuss your plans.” Your boss says as he pulls a revolver…

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.

To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.

If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.

Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.

This. Without regular people, they have nobody to exploit. They could exploit more robots, but robots don’t have the same needs as humans. They could program them to have the same needs, but then that would just be going back to square 1, because then they’d have to pay the robots so they could buy the things they need.

First, I want to ask about these price-tracking websites, do they update in real-time? Do they get their information from confidential data or public data? Do they alert to changes and, in the case of say, applying for an apartment, time the application submission at exactly the right time? Do they collaborate with each other? See, I just learned about algorithmic price fixing and how companies in nearly every industry, every facet of life, give their algorithms access to vast amounts of data, both public and private, and these algorithms share their data with each other, allowing companies to indirectly collude and fix prices without human intervention. What can we common folk do against that?

I’m just saying, you’re mentioning search engines, and the author says

You had Google and a spreadsheet if you were organized.

So, how can I, with my spreadsheets and my search engine, possibly stand up to Big AI? David and Goliath was a nice fable, but now Goliath is back, and has friends, and laws protecting them, and all David has, is a sling and a single rock.

I’ll say one thing for this post and the resulting discussion, it’s caused me to fall down the rabbit hole that is AI price fixing. How else can it be that available residences increased but so did rent? And so did everything else?

Also, so what if algorithms cost a lot of money? That’s not really an argument for why LLMs level the playing field.

It’s not just the money. It’s the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all. It’s knowing how to ask the algorithm for the information you want in a way that it can understand, in knowing how to visualize the data points it gives. As you said, there’s an entire field of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization. Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff. I sure don’t, but damn if I am tired of having to rely on “Zillow and a prayer” if I want to get a house or apartment.

Yeah, idk, I’m pretty sure the author meant “SAP”, but then why SQL?

I don’t really think that’s true, because, again, idk why people here think this is all a bad take. It’s real simple. For decades, corporations and institutions have had the upper hand. They have vast resources to spend on computational power and enterprise software and algorithms to keep things asymmetrically efficient. Algorithms don’t sleep, don’t get tired, they follow one creed ABO, Always Be Optimizing. But that software costs a lot of money, and you have to know all this other stuff to know how to use it correctly. Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you’d talk to another human, and you get what you ask for.

Wow. Don’t even know enough to elaborate, so you just use 2-word sentences like some asshole.

Is it, though? Consider that many organizations both private and public have been using algorithms since the 1990s, long before anyone knew what an algorithm was. They had entire departments dedicated to running optimization algorithms. Amazon has algorithms deciding what products to show you, what prices to charge, and how to route packages. Airlines have algorithms that adjust ticket prices hundreds of times a day based on data you didn’t even know existed, and health insurance companies have actuarial models that process millions of data points to decide your rates. And what have you got? A web browser with multiple tabs open, a spreadsheet program, and Google Search. Seems like a rather one-sided fight, no?

I, for one, would love to make friends with a White House staffer or intern, perhaps make friends with a couple. Not to pump them for anything as droll as classified Intel or state secrets. No, I want the hot goss, the tea, the interpersonal drama.

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries all hate each other. This, I know to be true. Their interns must see and hear a lot of it, I’d love to be in on it.