Piggybacking off this to add more lightbulb jokes.

The best joke I’ve ever heard was delivered by a German friend with an incredible deadpan delivery

How many Germans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

!“One. We are a very efficient people”!<

Another one!

How many emos does it take to change a lightbulb?

!None. They all just sit in the dark crying.!<

(I should clarify that I find this one funny because when I first heard it, it very much applied to me. I felt mildly attacked, but not in a hurtful way)

Piggybacking off your comment to leave a pirate joke of my own.

“What’s a pirate’s favourite letter?”

(Ideally, the audience will reply “Arrr!” this this. It works best if you prime them for this by doing a bad pirate impression earlier in the conversation, or tell a joke such as “What’s a pirate’s favourite animal? An aardevark!”)

“You might think so, but a pirate’s true love be the C (sea)”

Bonus joke! What’s a pirate’s least favourite letter?

!Dear Sir or Madam, your IP address has been recorded downloading infringing copyrighted material on…!<

Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.

I’m mostly making this comment because “verisimilitudinous” is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.

The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

An extended story that I recently read (or rather, listened to) was “There is no Antiemetics Division”, by qntm. The channel J&V SCP archives have an excellent audiobook-style reading of it, if that’s your thing. It’s not especially scary (though it does have its moments), but stumbling across it really reignited my enjoyment of SCP.

I’m younger than you (born 1995), but I share some of your feelings. The internet today is so different from how I remember it as a kid. I am immensely grateful that I got to experience some of that period of rapid change.

The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.

I know that the dead internet theory doesn’t say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.

However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it’s hard for me to gauge whether we’re actually at the point of “dead internet”.

In all likelihood, my answer is “no”, because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I’m a utopian at heart.

Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I’m here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. “Dead” is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can’t reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.

This is a dangerous way of thinking. It’s not far off from the logic that Israelis use to justify the killing of children, who they argue are predisposed to become terrorists.

There is nothing intrinsic to IDF soldiers that make them capable of perpetrating a genocide. The vitriol that fuels them is built up over years of sociocultural conditioning, and no-one is immune to that. It’s important that we recognise this if we want to avoid creating a world with more people who think like this.

I’m intrigued by solo TTRPGs. Is there a particular one you can recommend?

Glad you’re still with us!

I remember seeing a post of yours elsewhere where you mentioned about difficulty mustering the energy and mental strength to go out beyond your home (possibly linked to your parents being quite overprotective? I may be remembering wrong). Regardless of the specifics, I think that factors like that can worsen relations between family members. My brother and I don’t get on well when we’re living in the same house, for instance. That’s made worse by my mom being a difficult person to live with.

But I think you’re right also, that there is a significant component of the grass being greener on the other side. I know plenty of people who are only children, who wish they had siblings, and people with siblings who wish they were an only child.

In that case, the finished product would be of pretty mediocre quality, in my case. That’s because most of my projects are things that I actively want to learn, and I tend to be overambitious when setting aims. Despite this though, even when I completely botch it up, I struggle to think of a time where I have regret my endeavour. I like the learning

No. The main reason I do projects is for the learning. Any useful items I produce as part of the process are just happy side effects.

Something that I’m super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn’t last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren’t keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn’t enough to get anything that they’d consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).

As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my “normie” friends, because they’re one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I’m trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.

(A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn’t expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

That’s sad. Regardless of whether it’s one of the reasons for Microsoft’s nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually do much work, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one.

It really seems like a hollow existence.

Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.

Yeah, this really was an excellent answer. I’m impressed by how he used this example to illustrate the wider strategy without it feeling like a weird kind of “we will cut programs like this and then everything will be fine”. It gives the sense that this is being used as an example because it’s simple enough to be at the top of a large pile of potential savings, which will take time and work to dig through.

To put it a different way, his answer abstracts away the right stuff. He doesn’t pretend that everything will be as simple and easy as cutting this one program was.

Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it’s humans who need to clean up the mess.