Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.
Great, let's just require biometric identification before posting online, what could go wrong.
Dead Internet Theory
451–460 of 735 posts
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#452My 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’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.
Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.
Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#453Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…
It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change? If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). T…
I configured my system to treat caps lock as compose, and also set up a bunch of custom compose sequences that better suit how I think about the fancy characters I most often want to type. My em-dash is `Compose m d`.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#454I enjoyed this post, but I do find myself disagreeing that someone sharing their source code is somehow morally or ethically obligated to post some kind of AI-involvement statement on their work. Not only is it impossible to adjudicate or police, I feel like this will absolutely have a chilling effect on people wanting to share their projects. After all, who wants to deal with an internet mob demanding that you dispr…
IMO the idea of providing more in OSS usually stems from various third parties who use that code in production but do not really contribute back to it. The only sensible thing the person publishing code online needs to do is to protect their copyright and add a license. This weird idea that somehow you become responsible for the code to the point that you need to patch every vulnerability and bug, and now identify the use of AI is wrong on so many levels. For the record I’ve been publishing OSS for years.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.
That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact. I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.
>That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.
Yes, that is more or less what "hot take" means.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people really do want to be outraged No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry." But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry.…
If you think for a bit on what you just wrote, I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with what they wrote. You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.
I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.
My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.
But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#458Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…
Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.
Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are absolutely right — most internet users don't know the specific keyboard combination to make an em dash and substitute it with two hyphens. On some websites it is automatically converted into an em dash. If you would like to know more about this important punctuation symbol and it's significance in identitifying ai writing, please let me know.
Wow thanks for the enlightenment. I dug into this a bit and found out: Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.” En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150. Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151. And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not do…
If you have the compose key enabled it's trivial to write all sorts of things. Em dash is compose (right alt for me) ---
En dash is compose --.
You can type other fun things like section symbol (compose So) and fractions like ⅐ with compose 17, degree symbol (compose oo) etc.
https://itsfoss.com/compose-key-gnome-linux/
On phones you merely long press hyphen to get the longer dash options.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#460>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former typ…
> I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall
5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother.
Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.