This is not the future • Hacker News Board

Re: This is not the future

#351

Post by aanet » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #308

aanet wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage. FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now. YMMV

AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it. Unfortunately, it's going to destroy the Internet (and possibly society) in the process.

> AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

AI slop, unfortunately, is just starting.

It is true that nobody trusts anything online... esp the Big Media and the backlash against it in the last decade+ or so. But that's exactly where AI slop is coming in. Note the crazier and crazier conspiracy theories that are taking hold all around, and not just in the MAGA-verse. And there's plenty of takers for AI slop - both consumers of it, and producers of it.

And there's plenty of profit all around. (see crypto, NFTs, and all manners of grifting)

So no, I dont think "nobody will read it". It's more like "everybody's reading it"

But I do agree on the denouement... it's destroying the internet and society along with it

Re: This is not the future

#352

Post by Gooblebrai » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #327

rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

We lost that like 100 years ago. Sitting and watching someone perform music in an intimate setting rarely happens anymore. If you listen to an album by your favorite band, it is highly unlikely that your feelings/emotions and interpretations correlate with what they felt. Feeling a connection to a song is just you interpreting it through the lens of your own experience, the singer isn't connecting with listeners on s…

> We lost that like 100 years ago. Sitting and watching someone perform music in an intimate setting rarely happens anymore

What? There's still live music events in quiet clubs where indie artists perform

Re: This is not the future

#353

Post by cons0le » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #212

titzer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving…

Yes! I want my AI music generator to spit out stems and sheet music I can rearrange, not finished mp3 files.

Because none of these AI tech bros give a dam about music. I thought with ai we would be able to put all the "timbres" of instruments into vector database and create a truly new instrument sound. Like making a new color for the first time.

But no we get none of that. We get mega shitty corporate covers. I would rather hear music that's a little bad than artificially perfect sounding.

Re: This is not the future

#354

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #333

nostrademons wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...

Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products. https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...

> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.

Re: This is not the future

#355

Post by wiether » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #329

doesnt_know wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obesity rates have never been higher and the top fast food franchises have double digit billions in revenue. I don’t think there is any redemption arc in there for public health since the 90s.

those statistics really gloss over / erase the vast cultural changes that have occurred. america / the west / society's relationship to fast food and obesity is dramatically different than it was thirty years ago.

I'm genuinely curious about the changes you are talking about?

Keep in mind, thirty years ago, I was a kid. I thought that fast food was awesome. My parents would allow me a fast food meal at best once a month, and my "privileged" friends had a fast food meal a week.

Now, I'd rather starve than eat something coming from a fast food.

But around me, normies at eating at least once a day from a fast food.

We have at least ten big franchises in the country, and at every corner there's a kebab/tacos/weird place selling trash.

So, from my POV, I'd thought that, in general, people are eating much more fast food than thirty years ago.

Re: This is not the future

#356

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #93

Juliate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping. I do wonder who the AI er…

[deleted]

Re: This is not the future

#357

Post by goopypoop » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #93

Juliate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping. I do wonder who the AI er…

  "You bet your ass we're all alike... We've been spoon fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... The bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert."

Re: This is not the future

#358

Post by underlipton » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

I would argue that the Apple Vision Pro is a rare example of something that WAS inevitable BECAUSE of the misbehavior described. Every large VR company COULD have just created and iterated on the basic design that Palmer Luckey (aside: who is also a villain here, too; don't read to much into the name-drop) forced everyone to recognize as viable, slowly developing the technology in the organic way other computing platforms came about. Instead, they all played a decade-long game of chicken, trying to bait their rivals into being the Xerox or Rio of the technology, to their... well, Apple. That is, letting them do all the hard work in standing up the tech's basic user experience, use cases, etc., then swooping in with a polished product offering.

None of these companies wanted to get Apple'd, and they (particularly Facebook) did everything they could to pay lip service to developing VR without funding anything really groundbreaking (or even obvious). Apple finally had to release something after years of promising shareholders that they weren't going to get left behind in the market, and with nothing material to skim off of competitors, the AVP is what we got.

Until Apple figures out how to dig up and purify its deep-rooted cultural rot, and learn how to actually innovate independently, every halfway-aware competitor is going to hold back development on anything they might want to appropriate. In the meantime, we all lose.

Re: This is not the future

#359

Post by underlipton » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

Re: This is not the future

#360

Post by acituan » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

empressplay wrote: post #147

_heimdall wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here. I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not. Math is almost the definition of inevita…

> I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not.

You might be conflating determinism with causality. Determinism is a metaphysical stance too because it asserts absence of free will.

Regardless of the philosophical nuance between the two, you are implicitly taking the vantage point of "god" or Laplace's Demon: infinite knowledge AND infinite computability based on that knowledge.

Tech people ought to know that we can't compute our way out of combinatorial explosion. That we can't even solve for a simple 8x8 game called chess algorithmically. We are bound with framing choices and therefore our models will never be a lossless, unbiased compression of reality. Asserting otherwise is a metaphysical stance, implicitly claiming human agency can sum up to a "godlike", totalizing compute.

In sum, models will never be sophisticated enough, claiming otherwise has always ended up being a form of totalitarianism, willful assertion one's favorite "framing", which inflicted a lot of pain in the past. What we need is computational humility. One good thing about tech interviews that it teaches people resource complexity of computation.