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X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

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Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#281

Post by FloorEgg »

intended wrote: post #268
FloorEgg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades I have continuously studied physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, management science, market research, economics, religion, finance, and computer science among many other things. I study for 4-5 hours on average every day, and the rest of my working hours are spent practicing my craft. The reason I say this is that blind hope and informed hope are two different things. Media has always relied…

I applaud your efforts! You stated: > I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. The ratio of total hours of human attention available to total hours of content is essentially 0. We have infinite content, which creates unique pressures on our information gathering and consumpt…

It feels to me like everyone responding to that comment is irrationally pessimistic. However I keep noticing little mistakes in my own wording that alter the meaning away from my intention, and I can't help but think it's my own fault for not making my point more clear.

> I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention.

What I really meant is that I hope that the economic pressures on media don't naturally also apply to AI. I do think it's naive to hope that AI won't be used in media to compete for attention, I just don't think it's naive to hope that's not the only economic incentive for its development.

I also hope that it becomes a commodity, like electricity, and spills far and wide outside of the control of any monopoly or oligopoly (beyond the "tech giants"), so that hoping tech giants do anything against their incentive structures is moot. I hope that the pressures that motivate AIs development are overwhelmingly demand for truth, so that it evolves overwhelmingly towards providing it.

If this hope is naive, that would imply the universe favors deception over truth, death over life, and ultimately doesn't want us to understand it. To me, that implication seems naive.

The Bloomberg terminal is an interesting example and I see your point. I guess the question is what information is there a stronger incentive to keep scarce. The thing about Bloomberg terminals are that people are paying for immediate access to brand new information to compete in a near-zero-sum game. Most truth is everlasting insight into how to get work done. A counter example are textbooks.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#282

Post by ceejayoz »

stressback wrote: post #195
ceejayoz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. We're on a thread about widespread fake/inauthentic users on Twitter right now. I see very little reason to trust those numbers.

Is it any more trustworthy than you saying above that "one side has largely left X"?

I like to consider myself more trustworthy than Musk, yes.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#283

Post by maxlin »

Can't beat X. Such a great feature to see which accounts might be trying to astroturf. Already accounts like Republicans For Trump, and several (mostly no-name) US flag -toting accounts were exposed for not even being based in the US.

Now if we could have other platforms do the same, and not just accidentally like with the Reddit case lol

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#284

Post by dehugger »

mlrtime wrote: post #253
brookst wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN. It’s ironic but also completely typical. Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.

It seems a little self evident? A heroin addict might say they love it and never want to quit, at the same time say it's harmful, should be banned and nobody should ever try it.

Your analogy is equating homosexuality to heroin addiction. Was this intentional?

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#285

Post by maxlin »

FloorEgg wrote: post #107
CalChris wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.

Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth. AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions. Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the pap…

Good take. I think someone said (might've been Elon) that building an AI but limiting its training material to material from 1870-1970 would avoid a lot of this, as arguably that was the period of greatest advancement of humankind that is not spoiled by bad data, with no social networks and everything having printed having needed to have had more meaning behind it as it took more effort.

It would be VERY refreshing to see more than one company try to build an LLM that is primarily truth-seeking, avoiding the "waluigi problem". Benevolent or not, progress here should not be led just by one man ...

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#286

Post by sagarm »

Barrin92 wrote: post #188
samrus wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else

a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby. A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so. Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designe…

I think it's quite clear to anyone paying attention right now that sharing a polity does not mean sharing values and culture.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#287

Post by smnthermes »

api wrote: post #266
lazide wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like. And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.

Good point. The same thing happens to heads of state. Putin thought he could take Ukraine in a few weeks because he is surrounded by yes men.

If Putin was that stupid, he'd already have been ousted.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#288

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

lazide wrote: post #141
api wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.

When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like. And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.

The most valuable use case for AI might just be to roast billionaires surrounded by sycophants

Instead they built better sycophants

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#289

Post by FloorEgg »

maxlin wrote: post #285
FloorEgg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth. AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions. Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the pap…

Good take. I think someone said (might've been Elon) that building an AI but limiting its training material to material from 1870-1970 would avoid a lot of this, as arguably that was the period of greatest advancement of humankind that is not spoiled by bad data, with no social networks and everything having printed having needed to have had more meaning behind it as it took more effort. It would be VERY refreshing t…

To me it looks like there are many people working to make AI truth seeking, and they are taking a variety of approaches. It seems like as time goes on opportunities to build truth seeking AI will only increase as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and accessible. Like if the costs of training a GPT-5 level LLM drop 10,000x.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#290

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

bawolff wrote: post #147
rzerowan wrote: post #138

On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something li…

I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.

You can definitely buy cellphone location data but afaik it's anonymized with an mobile identification #.

But there may be ways to link those records to a platform's users

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