Sure, I’ll just sell my car so I can buy a pair of fucking shoes.

If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.

And you’ll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.

The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.

And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?

Personally, I’d just use one of the many good markdown / JS presentation frameworks (reveal.js et. al.) out there, a local HTTP server and a browser.

Those are some excellent points. The root cause seems to me to be the otherwise generally positive human capability for pack-bonding. There are people who can develop affection for their favorite toaster, let alone something that can trivially pass a Turing-test.

This… Is going to become a serious issue, isn’t it?

Look, I realize the frontal lobes of the average fifteen year old aren’t fully developed, I don’t want to be insensitive and I fully support the lawsuit - there must be accountability for what any entity, corporate or otherwise opts to publish, especially for direct user interaction - but if a person reenacts Romeo and Juliet with a goddamn AI chatbot and a gun, there’s something else seriously wrong.

Anxious, but in a titillating sort of way.

Bonus! She’s totally done it too, and we all know it.

Ah yes. That’d be luck. And sometimes, just seeking refuge in audacity. Just stare the doctor right in the eyes and say: “What? Don’t pretend you haven’t done it too.”

Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. He’ll pretend it is - if he knows what good for him.

Okay, I’m gonna be honest here: That’s one thing that’s never happened to me.

Lots of other… things, yes. But not that one.

You too, buddy. Maybe some day we’ll have a chance to drink an excellent Irish stout (which is obviously ‘all of them’, though my personal preference is Murphy’s) together. That’d be lovely, and not just because of the stout.

No worries, I wouldn’t dream of holding it against you; if anything, you have my respect for owning up to making a simple mistake, which happens to everybody sooner or later - me very much included. Kudos!

This might surprise you, but that didn’t help clearing up anything. If you have an argument to make, make an argument. That way I can either agree with you or retort.

No, I don’t consider listing countries or regions an argument. Denmark, Belgium, French Polynesia. Now you might wonder where I’m going with that, but I’m not going to tell you. I’ll just expect you to read my mind. That’s communication, you see.

I’m sorry, but I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Who’s robbing what land? Are we talking about Ukraine or Ireland?

Because I’m here talking about Ukraine and the UK.

Sure, but to my mind the question is: How does robber #2 pointing out that robber #1 is himself a robber excuse the actions of robber #2?

Ah yes. Whataboutism. Suppose a robber acts in defense of a person about to be robbed. That may or may not make them a hypocrite, but it certainly doesn’t make them wrong.

Or would you say it would somehow be more right for the robber to stand back and allow the robbery “because they’re in no position to point fingers”?

For me it’s not even about gender identity or role playing. If I’m going to spend 200 hours in a 3rd person RPG looking at a character’s ass, that ass had better be female.