• 3 Posts
  • 245 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2023

help-circle

  • Most of these aren’t even news. They’re entertainment companies that happen to include reporting-like segments and opinion pieces, whether they’re accurate or not. And they’re for-profit; their main customers are advertisers, not viewers/readers.

    A non-profit that simply reports without spin would be “real” news - actually trustworthy information from a source that isn’t trying to brainwash you or milk you for ad revenue. There are very, very few organizations that fit this criteria. The biggest is AP (Associated Press). The entertainment companies license AP content (and content from for-profit competitors like Reuters) but filter and distort it however they wish.


  • They can’t read your mind. A professional painter is going to make the exact image they want in far less time and with more accuracy than repeatedly prompting a black box to make small changes.

    But if you’re an amateur and don’t really know what you want, or you’re not very picky or care about quality, then meh good enough. High level software developers know what they want. They are like painters. And at that point, the LLM isn’t really solving problems for you. At best, it’s putting the paint to the canvas. That is, saving you typing time.

    But time spent typing is definitely not the limiting factor for productivity in software.



  • Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it’s driven by real creative intent and doesn’t result in something that looks low quality. But it’s not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is accurate. You’re also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don’t have fine control over because you can’t do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.




  • If you’re not planning to volunteer to drive political change, and you’re not going to seriously plan to expatriate, then I suggest blocking the news and the other anxiety-inducing content. I have keyword filters in Boost to exclude lots of political stuff. I also pick the “do not recommend this” for google news posts that are political. Has done wonders for me. All my digital content is fun, hobby related, or general interest news from my area.