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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'

#141

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

nekusar wrote: post #129
anukin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that Lemmy is no substitute for Reddit. Majority of it is run by tankies and people professing extreme left views.

"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…

The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.

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

#142

Post by eboynyc32 »

bloppe wrote: post #136

The wishful cynic in me sometimes thinks this might actually lead to a partial reversal of ageism in the workforce. It's almost starting to look like the kids graduating from school with chatgpt are actually handicapped (painting in extremely broad strokes; there will always be prodigies) and those who graduated or worked before 2022 will actually become more desirable to hire. I'm sure this take is at best oversimpl…

Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.

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

#143

Post by ceejayoz »

Alex2037 wrote: post #138
ceejayoz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate? At least one already. I suspect your comment won't age well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook... > Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar. You could pro…

>Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar. "played a role" != "instigated". everything "played a role" there. their fucking government did it. >You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent. are you for real?

> "played a role" != "instigated"

You took out a pretty important word.

> are you for real?

Yes? Both sides of the conflict used social media heavily to justify their actions and generate support for continuing the conflict.

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

#144

Post by ge96 »

Funny I've been trying to quit reddit and I'm just like "what do I do with my time" I usually have two windows: reddit on the left and YT on the right. I work 7 days a week and haven't made anything for myself code/hardware wise in a while.

I think of this concept living second hand through other people's lives (social media) it's not living your own

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

#145

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #90
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1. > I guess I use my real life friends and family for that. In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth thr…

> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittificati…

> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads

And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.

Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.

You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.

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

#146

Post by Nightloaf »

tharne wrote: post #62
sdwr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker

That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are. I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English…

The ideas seem fairly clear to me. They're working on projects that are much more complex than what they were able to approach before, and they're able to dive into topics that were previously out of reach because of AI assistance. The grammar may not be perfect, but the point is understandable.

If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#147

Post by Nightloaf »

moravak1984 wrote: post #65
maxdo wrote: post #44

I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past

You could add writing to that list of topics...

Could you focus on contributing something meaningful to the discussion instead of adding snarky insults?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #143
Alex2037 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar. "played a role" != "instigated". everything "played a role" there. their fucking government did it. >You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent. are you for real?

> "played a role" != "instigated" You took out a pretty important word. > are you for real? Yes? Both sides of the conflict used social media heavily to justify their actions and generate support for continuing the conflict.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by oldsklgdfth »

Lumping AI together with social media is confusing for me. One is a tool for the user, the other is not.

If social media is a tool for anything, it is for the company to generate ad revenue. Sure there is value someone can extract (keeping in touch family). But I can also extract value from junk mail (using it as scrap paper for notes and lists.)

AI is still a tool. I think? I have not seen any direct way that monetizes it through ads, yet. I expect AI with a revenue model will look way worse.

AI is turning people dumb. I see it all the time with code slop. It's the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish". Maybe a tool-using approach to AI is "should me how to do this", rather than "do this for me". "Show me an example of some code" is more useful to me than unleashing it on my project.

Also, social media is obviously a sort of digital narcotic. Probably should be scheduled.

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

#150

Post by Bombthecat »

randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

The internet will be more and more ai stuff.

At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.

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