Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one uses em dashes
Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.
Dead Internet Theory
351–360 of 735 posts
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers
Is this really true though? Don't they have ways of tracking the returns on advertising investment? I would have thought that after a certain amount of time these ad buys would show themselves as worthless if they actually were .
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the i…
No one uses em dashes
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's common for people to be bad at a second language Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all. There might also be two effects at play: 1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is…
>is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? It makes sense in English, however: a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising. b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs) If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func…
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.
That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.
Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#356My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…
I fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hadn't heard that saying. Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive. Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace. In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available. (Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't le…
[flagged]
I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?
Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.
On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.
Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.
So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?
Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#358My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…
I fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.
It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop.
There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up.
And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment for anyone trying to figure things out.
It isn’t the same staying the same. Nothing has ever stayed the same. “Staying the same” isn’t a thing in nature and hasn’t been the trend in human history.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not aware of anyone bothering to create bots that can pass the checking particular subreddits do. It'd be fairly involved to do so. For licensed professions, they have registries where you can look people up and confirm their status. The bot might need to carry out a somewhat involved fraud if they're checking.
I wasn't suggesting the people answering are bots, only that the verification is done by the mods and is somewhat opaque. My concern was just that these well-meaning people might be wasting their time answering botspew. And then inevitably, when they come to realize, or even just strongly suspect, that they're interacting with bots, they'll desist altogether (if the volume of botspew doesn't burn them out first), whi…
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#360My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…
I fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.