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A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#181

Post by tharne »

webspinner wrote: post #174
tharne wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker. Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people.…

I do not believe generative AI has any benefits whatsoever! If it does, I have yet to discover them. It may be a benefit to everyone here which is great, but i would say that it's better to spare it.

The more I use AI, the more I'm convinced you're probably right.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#182

Post by cloverich »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #156
cloverich wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are com…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848504 206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title. Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?

HN discourages jokes, memes, and flags divisive topics. They don't support images. They frequently down rank topics that aren't generating meaningful content, especially if its getting, in effect, too much (divisive) engagement. That algorithm is the literal opposite of all the top social media sites these days. Yes, it is quite a bit different!

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#183

Post by brailsafe »

webspinner wrote: post #173
brailsafe wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destination…

Sure thing, sometimes it's fun! I suppose that's because I'm a thrillseeker. Let's see how fast it gets up to is a test. That wouldn't be the case if I were driving.

In the wheelchair? Do you bomb hills in it?

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#184

Post by cheikhcheikh »

zjp wrote: post #178
nekusar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/ There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And…

>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (e…

Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#185

Post by cheikhcheikh »

Sammi wrote: post #177
skinnymuch wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better way to think of it is that the western “left” isn’t part of the global left. Using tankie unironically is a classic example.

The massive sympathy for Russia in the Ukraine war among the far left makes it pretty clear that tankies are alive and kicking.

Can you share any evidence of this massive sympathy?

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#186

Post by zjp »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #184
zjp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (e…

Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him

>What policies did the Democrats actually implement over the years?

Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.

You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.

Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?

Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#187

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

zjp wrote: post #178
nekusar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/ There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And…

>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (e…

Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…

To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.

And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#188

Post by everdrive »

Alex2037 wrote: post #140
everdrive wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. For social media, I think you can point to directly social media with regard to the Arab Spring as well as the Rohingya genocide, and many, many mass shooting events. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head. Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily…

>LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. okay, call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.

>call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709

Well in this case, this definitely happened to this one kid.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#189

Post by Fuhrmanator »

spicybright wrote: post #63
sssilver wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!

I refuse to use reddit with it's modern UI. Once old.reddit.com dies I'm hanging up my spurs

I built my private version of Infinity for Android. The steps were 90% automated. They were in a Reddit thread like this one (I just pasted the first thing I found now), although I don't know if the build process still works. https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/1izm7c... -- you have to side-load the app, which is a little tricky because you have to load it onto your phone. I think put it on a private Google Drive.

Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?

Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#190

Post by noAnswer »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #93
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them. I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discu…

I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are 1. Car crashes 2. Street/bum fights 3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails) 4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything") 5. Ant…

When I visit Youtube in a privat tab from my German IP all I get is "be afraid of the other" alt right "vote for AFD", "chemtrails are here to get you" kind of videos. Not a singel "cute cat" or "interesting science fact" in sight. :-(

It's almost as if they like the population to be afraid.

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