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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.


  • Yeah there’s a lot of wishful thinking in this article. They still have a shit ton of cash, a lot of smart people, an incredible ad engine they can deploy onto any internet property. The metaverse was a complete wank but they still have more to work with than just about anyone out there.

    Even if this article is right, and their arc has finally turned downward, it’s because they’ve finally hit the peak of an absolutely epic run. Stink of death? I hate them as much as anyone, but yeah… no.






  • Here’s that last paragraph. Microsoft’s finding actually sounds like it does have the disruptive factor: people are trained to use AI and then it is removed. And finally, finally in the very last sentence of the entire article we get the one piece of information that’s been missing the entire time: doctors perform better with AI help, but then worse than ever without it.

    My conclusion? Let people have AI and perform better with it.

    Carpenters trained on power tools will suddenly perform worse with hand tools than carpenters who were never given power tools. But if they are given power tools, they can build homes faster.

    No shit?

    The findings are also in line with a study Microsoft published last yearthat looked at cognitive decline among knowledge workers, which found that the more people lean on AI, the worse they perform when asked to work without support. It also echoes a study out of Poland, which found that while doctors are better at spotting cancer risks with AI assistance, they perform worse than the no-AI baseline once that assistance is removed.







  • Ah yes, “synthetic users.” This is being pushed at my job as well. We’re supposed to use AI to design the next feature for our website, then ask AI “users” what they think of it.

    That’s not our entire vetting process - it’s supposed to replace someone just writing down an idea and saying “I think this is good.” And I agree that just firing from the hip like that is dumb. We want our product managers to do more research into their ideas before they get greenlit to be built.

    The question is whether AI “synthetic users” add anything of value. The team that put this tool into service noted it has a “positivity bias,” aka “you’re absolutely right!” So we feed it an idea we think is good, and it says oh yes it’s very good.

    It’s read every customer email we’ve ever received and every user research report ever conducted by our human UX researchers. But it’s still just not that useful. I think AI is very useful for summarization, searching, and collation of information, but this goes beyond that, asking AI to imagine it is a person and then come up with things to say about an entirely novel concept. And AI is not good at that.


  • Just because you can think of ways out of enforcement doesn’t mean all enforcement is impossible. If there’s a plumbing truck parked at the movie theater, management is going to damn well know if plumbing work is occurring. I know it makes us feel smart to think of loopholes but we don’t need airtight enforcement in order for a law to make sense. There are tons of laws on the books that aren’t actively and exhaustively enforced, and they exist to give authority to those who would take action in situations where they can.






  • Well in part it’s just being perceived that way. The car will decide if you’re drunk somehow becomes government surveillance. The App Store will ask for proof of age: government surveillance. And so on.

    I’m not saying that this is a false interpretation but certainly it’s leaned on extremely hard in the way people report on and talk about these things. Hence why you get the sense that everyone everywhere is suddenly completely about government surveillance.

    I think we could have a whole conversation about drunk driving and the efficacy and fairness of this kind of measure without even cracking the lid on government surveillance. But no one wants that. Nope, if it isn’t a direct descent straight into Fascism, it doesn’t get clicked on.