My recently deceased mother had a talent for talking to anyone at any time in any language. She's always been incredibly social and could establish connections with strangers very rapidly. One time she brought in a school teacher/sheep farmer from Dagestan selling yarn from his sheep's wool, she met him at the market and bought all yarn and asked if he had somewhere to stay before going back, and he didn't. He stayed in our house for a couple of nights, and then we visited him in that little village in mountains of Dagestan on a summer vacation, talk about going back a few centuries in time, an incredible and unusual experience.
I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.
It served her very well in her chosen career of real estate sales, although I think she'd might have done really well in community organizing or even politics where those skills are also very useful.
On the flip side, it was sometimes difficult to be there as family wanting some attention, since her bright light was always shining in many directions.
I've inherited just some of that talent, and I think it is a talent, but trainable.
It is fascinating to be around such social people. I still remember my great-uncle as a kid. He lived a very simple live as a rural farmer in Germany. He did not have a wife, and he didn‘t have kids, but he had a deep tie to his family and everyone around him. When he passed away during my teens, there were hundreds of people attending his funeral. I was amazed by the impact he must have had on all their lives given they‘ve taken time out of their day to give him a last farewell.
I also notice the generational gap the author of this article highlights. My parents are in their 50s, my brother and I are in our mid 20s.
My parents still have their friends from school, from their apprenticeships and different times of their lives. We can‘t go anywhere in a 100km radius without my dad knowing someone. In school I literally had bus drivers ask me if I am <dad‘s name> son, not because they heard my name, but because we look so much alike.
When looking into my brothers and my life, most of our friends from school left for far away. Things my parents considered normal back in their days, are now considered weird. While my parents still experience an incredibly supportive circle of friends, I would not know who to invite to my hypothetical wedding tomorrow.
Granted, I may be an extreme example. But even when looking more generalized among my peers, most of the friendships we have seem to be significantly more superficial and also fewer than our parents.
> I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.
I love this story, because I had the same experience. When my dad passed, I had the same 500 email limitation, and had to send out multiple waves of emails through Gmail. He was loved by so many people!
As fresh immigrant to USA, watching it on local PBS on the gigantic back projection jumbotron TV someone offloaded on us back in mid-90es, it made a huge impact with its absurdity and silliness.
I sing "Drinking Fresh Mango Juice" every time I get it out of the fridge, and when my wife and I visited Egypt and got room service with fresh mango juices, it was in heavy rotation. And every time I leave and it's cold outside, I tend to sing "It's cold outside!".
RIP
I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it. I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don't know what it will be but I would expect some adversarial stuff. Trying to keep clean is what I'd prefer for myself and my kids.
On other hand, the Neal Stephenson's Fall or, Dodge in Hell book has an interesting idea in early phase of the book where a person agrees to what we now know "flood the zone with sh*t" (Steve Bannon's sadly very effective strategy) to battle some trolls. Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core. It is cleverly explored in the book albeit for too short of a time before moving into the virtual reality. I think there are a few people out here right now practicing this.
> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.
I think he's wrong and I'm willing to say that. The ability for people to move beyond the fundamental attribution error is well known and takes major resources to correct that. For anyone that posts a comment, assuming you want to have easy attribution later is that you must future proof your words. That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.
For example:
"Ellen Page is fantastic in the Umbrella Academy TV show"
Innocent, accurate, support, and positive in 2019.
Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.
> That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.
Also for the fact that you cannot predict how future powers will view past comments - for instance, certain benign political views 20 years ago could become "terroristic speech" tomorrow.
I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.
I can be a rude prick online sometimes, but I can be in real life too - basically though the reason I do this is I never want it to be some huge surprise IRL if someone sees what I write online and be like, "wow, I didn't know that about him." I'm pretty much what I am online and IRL the same. For some reason this seems to matter for me, at least in the past when people have tried to like, send employers stuff I may have written online. The reaction is like "oh, yea, we knew that already about him."
Nothing terrible, maybe slightly embarrassing, but you know how online spaces can be. just be yourself basically, at least I try to be.
This really hits a string with me, adding on to this, This is how I believe the same way but I would argue that I might be more nicer online than offline because I am better able to control any emotions imo when I give more thought to it.
Because I don't really appreciate flame wars and when that's the case, I like to take some time to find common ground and just have a respectable discussion when possible.
This approach is harder to work irl because those moments are also spontaneous & it does require significantly more discipline to control one's emotion within seconds rather than minutes, but its something that I think I can work upon as well.
But I would say that aside from that, most of my comments are pretty spontaneously written. I frame it as a question of being honest with myself at times, I think I am mostly pretty much the same IRL and online as well.
Another point but such forums also act like a journal to me for my future to read as well. I try to write comments in such sense that in future, I can read them and try to accurately remember what my mind was thinking during the time/days I wrote that comment for self-retrospection as well.
Edit: Although now that I think about it, there are definitely some subtle changes I might have online vs irl but I would still say that I feel like my accounts are pretty authentic fwiw (personally) but I am happy with my authenticity online but there's definitely a level of my thinking which worries about any comment being permanently available though.
Your framing is interesting. You may feel that you can’t change who you are in real life, but people have a choice on how they behave online (or choose not to engage at all). So you could choose to be nice (or at least not a jerk); I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get people writing to your employer complaining. I’d argue that if you know you’re sometimes a jerk, it’d be less stressful for you and others if you didn’t bring that energy online.
Sure, there is a choice. it’s rarely/never been stressful for me though, and I value being who I am for my own reasons as a strength and not a weakness. I always try to play by the moderation rules as I can possibly and realistically do. some of what I’ve written online has gotten me opportunities it wouldn’t have if i’d been more hesitant.
My point is if you have a good track record what you maintain online vs irl doesn’t matter as much to people as you’d maybe think as long as you are being true to yourself. I’m an elder millennial though, so that’s always been the case online for me and i dont think i often get out of pocket online anyway.
maybe that won’t be the case in the future. I could write a lot more than I’d care to publicly about personal and implied threats I’ve received based on my writings, but caving to that to me would betray my own values and I choose to consume the web how i choose knowing possible consequences - plus the fact moderation standards and what is “rude” drastically differs amongst platforms.
As someone who gets dopamine hits from downvotes on HN, I approve of your behavior!
>just be yourself basically
Yea, it is boring when everyone is the same. I would like a rude but interesting world (even if I might not survive long in one), than a nice, boring one.
This is very import: you don't know how the cancelation culture will be in 20 years.
I like to use the example of a guy who did a blackface in a party back in 2000's. Although reprehensible, was not commom-sense racism back then. Today society sees it as completely unacceptable.
Eventually that guy became prime minister of Canada and things went pretty bad when that photo surfaced decades later.
Is it far to judge someone's actions by the lens of a different culture? When the popular opinion comes, they won't care about historical context.
I think people forget that before about the 2010s plus or minus depending on who and where those sorts of overt bigotry were considered a "solved" problem, things were looking up and you and your buddies dressing up as Klansmen for Halloween was mocking the Klansmen more than anything else.
That’s false if you consider an idiot to be a person that can’t understand why it’s important. In this context, we can see companies selling the exact service we’re talking about to hr departments. Every bit of data they can get from social media sites to data brokers of all stripes or whatever else and assigns generic employability scores.
I’ll bet most of the people in those companies have considered this problem more than nearly anyone else — because they need to figure out how to get people to buy it anyway, and try to spackle over the parts that give people pause. The reason they don’t care is because it’s what’s in between them and money. There are intelligent criminals out there. They aren’t idiots, they’re just assholes.
I think the problem with this, especially amongst younger people, is having spent so much time online, they don't know where to draw this line anymore.
Depends on what you want to say. It can be safer to say something directly to someone's face than online because it is transient and generally does not involve random passers-by.
I am not going to give examples, because I don't want them to be pinned on me as my views, but I'm sure most of us have enough imagination to come up with them.
> I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.
I think this isn't enough for the digital age, simply because "comments you'd say to someone's face" can compromise you on the internet.
Some dirty joke, gossip or whatever you tell a friend, if posted online, could come back to bite you in the ass in the dystopian future, lose you your job, or worse.
well, how about "abortion legal" to "abortion murder"... possible to see this coming, but I know doctors in NY who are now afraid to travel to Texas.
How about DEI initiatives as good things in 2024 and a mark of evil in 2025? Lots of people were fired because in 2024 their boss told them to work on DEI and they did what their boss told them to do. Turns out this was a capital offense.
I am not commenting on your specific example of DEI but I want to make the general point that you are always responsible for what you do, irregardless of whether you were told to do it by your boss, or commanding officer, or whatever.
So again, I don't care about the specific example you used but if something is 'in fashion' and you go along with it, including at work, then you are ultimately responsible for that choice. Because it is always a choice, including being a hard choice that results in you losing your job.
But working on DEI on your boss' orders in 2024 wasn't reprobable, anymore than bringing your boss a cup of coffee to their desk was.
The point is that the shift in what is considered "a capital crime" is arbitrary, this is not the Nuremberg trials. You cannot protect yourself by being a decent person, whatever you do today can be a crime tomorrow, and AI can assist those looking for your flaws.
This is easy. Have your own standards based on your own reason and navigate any arbitrary standards LCD majority of the society cooks up from time to time.
>lawmakers can create new laws which can not be applied retroactively
Still a courtesy:
Background: Mary Anne Gehris was born in Germany and came to the United States around age 1, growing up entirely in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident (green card holder).
The Incident: In 1988, during a quarrel over a man, Gehris pulled another woman's hair. She was charged with misdemeanor battery. No witnesses appeared in court, and on the advice of a public defender, she pleaded guilty. She received a one-year suspended sentence with one year of probation.
Immigration Consequences: Years later, under the **Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 **(IIRIRA)—enacted during the Clinton administration but actively enforced during the Bush Jr. administration—her misdemeanor battery conviction was classified as an "aggravated felony" under federal immigration law. This made her deportable despite having no subsequent criminal record, being married to a U.S. citizen, and having a U.S. citizen child.
Outcome: Gehris avoided deportation when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted her a pardon in March 2000, which removed the immigration ground for her removal.
Source Coverage:
The story was detailed in Anthony Lewis's New York Times columns:
"Abroad at Home: 'This Has Got Me in Some Kind of Whirlwind'" (January 8, 2000)
These columns highlighted how IIRIRA's broad definition of "aggravated felony" swept up many long-term permanent residents with minor, often decades-old convictions, separating families and deporting people who had lived nearly their entire lives in the United States.
The Gehris case became a frequently cited example in immigration advocacy and legal scholarship about the harsh consequences of mandatory deportation provisions for lawful permanent residents. If you'd like, I can search for the original NYT articles or additional reporting on her case.
This term itself is an example of what this thread is talking about. Are you aware that some people now consider this to be a racist term? It’s a reference to the disenfranchisement of black voters in America.
I think it’s naive to assume the private companies selling these services will know, let alone care, let alone disclose when their black box models botch things like this. The companies currently purporting to provide this exact service to HR departments for hiring decisions clearly didn’t let that stop them.
Not even the most extreme LGBT activist would accuse people who used the name Ellen Page in 2019 of having somehow been insensitive for failing to have a crystal ball. That is as absurd as it sounds. At most someone might be asked to change the name if they’re actively republishing the material in question.
Your point may be more valid when it comes to political attitudes, in cases where the issues were known at the time but the Overton window has shifted since.
That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange.
Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when they can use that as the delivery vector for intrusively "personalized" manipulation, on behest of the highest bidder, no matter how sketchy, grifty or dishonest.
Unpremissioned (or dark patterned, deceptive, surreptitious, or coercive permissioned) surveillance should be illegal. It is digital stalking. Used as leverage against us, and to manipulate us, via major systems spread across the internet.
And the fact that this funds infinite pages of addicting (as an extremely convenient substitute for boredom) content, not doing anyone or society any good, is a mental health, and society health concern.
Tech scaling up conflicts of interest, is not really tech. Its personal information warfare.
I didn’t say I hated technology, generally— I said I hate what the industry has morphed into in the US. What is or isn’t tech is immaterial. All of the odious things you listed are things that the ‘tech industry’ does, largely unquestioned, these days. Frankly, it’s sickening.
Except noting that it is crazy that we accept the framing of "tech firm" for what are really "psychology engineering" firms, simply because they use tech.
Their use of tech is only perceived as more glamorous than companies addressing far greater technical challenges, because they are making crazy profits. While the only problem they alleviate with any tech ambition, is making more money for themselves, through centralizing ad venues (maximum ad revenue extraction, blind eye to scams and other dark marketers) and social damage externalization (maximum psychological manipulation).
The negative downstream impacts of all this value extraction are many, including the vast sums of money being paid to attention-hacking social influencers. This destructive army is directly funded by social media, whose alibi is they don't want to be censors. But they are not neutral, as that framing would imply. They are very actively financing the dreck!
A huge amount of western society and the way we run institutions is based on pretending everything meets some quasi victorian moral standard and is all proper, everyone consents to and supports how everything runs and everything is fine and dandy when that is very much not the case and people put up with a lot of it because they have no better option.
In light of that what I see happening in the short term is that every institution will start screwing people based on information that basically doesn't matter since that's kind of what they're already set up to do with that information but don't except in exceptional cases since those are the cases in which that information makes it back to them.
Imagine some business owner opening a new location, some social worker renewing their license, some civil engineer creating plans on someone's behalf. All those people need to deal with institutions that in the "normal" case pretend to not have large discretionary components in order to get the public to put up with them, but do in practice have such ability. Now say those institutions pay for some LLM based "who am I dealing with" service that finds everyone's pseudonymous posts and whatnot.
Well, all of these people wind up getting given the run around because even though they do fine work that meets the rules, knowing how the sausage is made has made them jaded and given them opinions that make the institutions they have to deal with want to screw them. The business owner gets given the run around because it turns out he believes the institutions he's seeking permission from are a corrupt racket who's members ought to be hung from the overpass. The social worker gets denied because their career has turned them into a "defund it all and when faced with real consequences most of these people will shape up" type. The civil engineer's plans get rejected and he has to go around in circles because he's been posting about how in light of what corporations with good funding can get approved and the impact thereof it's unconscionable the stuff they try and enforce upon individuals and engineers ought to pencil whip anything that isn't clearly F-ed up.
And so, all these people have to waste time and probably a low five digit sum of money fighting the BS. This would be fine perhaps if these people's conduct was so egregious it made it back to the institutions on it's own (like say some doctor who's preaching quackery on youtube may get his license yanked if he amasses such a following the board hears about it, that's the kind of stuff institutional discretion was set up for) but no real good social interest is served having an LLM dig up petty dirt on everyone. However, the LLM service peddlers stand to make a buck. The institutions stand to make a buck while washing their hands of responsibility. The lawyers who'll fight on wronged parties behalf stand to make a buck. And in the process they can all pretend like society somehow benefits from this enhanced scrutiny when in fact they're just making mountains out of mole hills.
Do you want culture to be frozen and instant digital communication with anyone else in the world to become a privilege of the few? Because that's where "clean" leads. And all you get is a little bit of temporary safety.
Here's a different vision for the future:
Let information filtering become each individual's own responsibility. We have LLMs now, and they'll get more efficient, so why not use them locally to filter incoming feeds according to each of our own preferences, but remove all of the filtering/moderation for posting info out. Build systems to decentralize and anonymize the Internet so that people can discover anyone and aren't afraid to post anything. Make it so that everyone can get a message out to the world and nobody can be arrested or assassinated for it. This will put an end to most violent conflict because they'd be replaced by online discourse.
Let the Internet be flooded with trash and gold at the same time. Let each individual decide what info is/isn't valuable to them. Let those individuals self-organize. Let ideas compete freely, so that the best ones may prevail.
I have lived my life on the web under the assumption the other Tom Clancy will leave enough chaff in my wake to make things hard. But probably not because I make the same 5 or 6 jokes over and over.
>I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it.
I do the same thing, and I think I'm a much better person for it. The Internet is not, in my final analysis, some indiscriminate dumping ground for my personal issues and moods. It's a place where I can relax and practice putting forward a more prosocial form of myself, even when what I actually have to say is uncomfortable.
While we can't predict how the adversary will read and respond to our moves, I suspect the easier marks are the people who choose to publicly drench everything they touch in negativity and cynicism. It's a sign of an already compromised social immune system.
I view posting online with a real name like getting a permanent tattoo.
My values or priorities may significantly change over decades, especially as a child, so why would I want to jeopardize the reputation of a potential future identity with something I may post today?
One could just as easily make the opposite argument. Given that your values and priorities may change significantly over the decades, a smart investment now into a solid, stable, and prosocial public identity may reap considerable and wide-ranging benefits in ways you couldn't even predict. This is especially true if you take seriously the idea that it's not what you say but how you say it that matters in the end.
This is actually what I believe as well although I believe that its better to be pseudo-anonymous for me, right now.
In the sense that if I ever create any business/idea which can be serious enough that I want to back it up. I might create hackernews post about it.
Although that being said, I do sometimes make alts just to publish something if I don't want it under this particular account.
I do feel like I can be wrong, I usually am[0] but I think that I want to improve myself and perhaps this account can be a way for people to see me grow perhaps and sometimes fall as well. Life feels like a sin wave with ups and downs.
I have had some paranoid thoughts as to what if I get into controversy later on in life because of some things I do in my teen years but there was a line from a friend that I heard which said, "that anyone with more than 1 brain cell can figure out if a person has improved or not"
I do feel like authenticity is gonna be the differentiator if both code and infra aren't the bottlenecks. Perhaps authenticity can be treated as part of marketing but I feel like its also paradoxical to gain authenticity if you want to do marketing. Imo, a person has to be authentic for the sake of being authentic and only then and then can he also get some marketing benefits.
Authenticity means to share both good and bad (well as much as you can, I don't think one should be completely 100% authentic but rather only keep a few personal things to oneselves and even if they get leaked, then y'know just have the grace to accept it and considering that quote from above, I think most people will understand most things especially when you realize that there are people / (youtubers?) in the world who are part of serious accusations/controversies where I feel like most other controversies should be pretty non-issue fwiw.
Like my idea is being authentic enough to satisfy myself. If I become more authentic but if I feel unsatisfied/worried etc.,then that's wrong too.
[0]: (This is such a good quote from how to win friends that I use it quite often)
You seem polite enough even psuedonymously, so I'd say you're doing a good job so far. :)
>I have had some paranoid thoughts as to what if I get into controversy later on in life because of some things I do in my teen years
I have a relevant anecdote, from back in halcyon 2008. Maybe it will help you when it comes to believing your friend, or at least it will temper your paranoia, which I think is well meaning in small doses.
When I was 13 or 14 years old I got suspended from high school because a friend posted a link to the Anarchist's Cookbook, which I had never heard of, on my Facebook wall. Some of my classmates got very scared and called the headmaster saying I had made a bomb threat against the school.
When the principal pulled me in to talk to me about this, it became very clear I had no idea what they were talking about. We talked for much longer than I think anyone in the room expected, maybe for three hours about existentialism, Zappfe's essay The Last Messiah which I had read the night before, whether I thought I was a victim of bullying (I didn't), what I thought of the school (excellent, a welcome refuge from a very turbulent home), thoughts on Cicero's speeches, the books we were reading in English class at the time.
I got "suspended" for a week and my parents took me to a therapist for several months afterward. I had thought after this for the rest of high school that my chances of ever going to college were totally shot, because a suspension appears on your permanent record. However, when it came time for me to actually apply to colleges, I found out no such record of the week at home ever existed. There appeared to have been a miscommunication all those years ago; I had actually been put on some kind of medical leave.
Now of course going through all of high school thinking that no college in the country will accept you now no matter how hard you do is going to change your incentives a bit. Ironically the very thinkers I had been reading at the time helped me quickly conclude that I wanted to do my level best anyway, even if there was going to be no payoff at the end of the road at all for me. In some ways it let me take more risks than my other classmates. I became the earliest person in my class to take our infamously hard physics course, and I walked out with top marks on both kinematics and electromagnetism. I don't think I would have taken that risk if I thought I had to optimize my GPA.
I trust you to think about this story and come to your own conclusions on how it moves your needle.
I am similar in that all of my interactions are with my real name and it is unique enough that just putting it into google will instantly identify me. There is one other 'jeff sponaugle' but I think he is far more annoyed with my presence than I would be with him.
On the plus side, someone will sometimes say while talking to me - oh your are that Subaru guy, or that youtube guy, or whatever and that is fun connection.
> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.
You don’t know what information about you can bring you in trouble in the future.
I've come to a similar conclusion. I now almost exclusively post under my real name online, and before writing something, I ask myself whether it's something I'd say to a person's face and whether I'm comfortable being quoted on it. If not, I look for a more neutral, stronger version of the argument I'm trying to make (stronger, as in strong enough to stand without rhetorical devices or fallacies), or, I qualify the statement as an opinion or something I consider to be a possibility.
Data poisoning your own online profile is all nice and well. But in a society that goes beyond itself to cram AI into about every imaginable system, it may not be smart at all. Already in early adopter phase the average person gives way too much authoritative weight to what LLM's come up with. If complex societal processes become basically AI-driven you may get into a world of hurt. "I am sorry, we can't give you that passport right now, until we investigate potentially fraudulent behavior our AI flagged us about".
Yes it's basically data poisoning. It reminds me of the approach the Adnauseum extension takes. It hides ads from you like traditional adblockers but under the hood it's actually selectively clicking them to fool advertisers. I don't know if it's smart enough to create a "profile" for you (e.g. "soccer mom from Michigan") but that seems like the logical next step. Instead of just "flooding the zone with shit" you'd be more selectively/consistently misleading
> Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core.
I don’t think this is humanly possible against machine learning. After all, it is specifically designed to weed through noisy data and identify patterns. It may delay discovery, but will at some point easily fall apart, by something as simple as a “filter out shitposting and deliberate pollution” prompt. Even more so when you guide it towards specific attributes.
I think as the younger generations come of age they simply will not care about that sort of thing. Like it or not, it's part of the culture and might just be accepted as the norm.
I think it's kind of happened already. All the time we see news of politicians or famous people having their very old photos, comments, or reddit accounts found with distasteful takes. And it seems they can mostly just handwave it away with "Hey that was 10 years ago and I wouldn't make those comments today" and nothing seems to come of it.
Tell that to people who are tangentially mentioned somewhere among the 3 million Epstein files. It doesn't matter how insignificant the involvement, people are losing their minds and "cancelling" anyone and everyone without any nuance or critical thinking.
If in one post you say you’re Jewish, in the next you are Christian, in the next your Hindu, in the next youre Atheist it’s harder to know what your really are.
You could even mislead people if you know the difference between your and you‘re.
At this point, where everyone is using an LLM to post and I'm having to use an LLM to keep up and summarise it, I think I'll just ...stop and go outside for quite a while...
If you are trying to keep your secret accounts secret then you don’t want them to have your writing style. By having a LLM author each post you help eliminate that as a metric. Couple that with the usual opsec of posting via tor at random times and you arrive at something closer to anonymous. The hardest remaining item would be not exposing all of your real interests in the prompts.
Will they realise their life has devolved to pretending an LLM is them and watching whilst the LLM interfaces {I was going to say 'interacts', not this fits!} with other bots.
Will they then go outside whilst 'their' bot "owns the libs" or whatever?
Hopefully at some point there is a Damascus road awakening.
Autonomous Proxies for Execration - spam bots whose entire purpose is flooding the internet with spam so as to make identifying anything true utterly impossible. If you can't differentiate between real and unreal information in online comments, then online comments stop being a significant factor in shaping public opinion. You need to abstract - identify reliable sources of information, individuals or institutions that do the work to collect and curate.
We're already seeing this as a side effect of the mishmash of influence operations on social media - with so many competing interests, mixed in with real trolls, outrage farmers, grifters, and the like, you literally cannot tell without extensive reputation vetting whether or not a source is legitimate. Even then, any suggestion that an account might be hacked or compromised, like a significant sudden deviation in style or tone or subject matter, you have to balance everything against a solid model of what's actually behind probably 80% or more of the "user" posts online.
There are a lot of aligned interests causing APEs to manifest - they're a mix of psyop style influence campaigns, some aimed at demoralization, others at outrage engagement, others at smears and astroturfing and even doing product placement and subtle advertisement. The net effect is chaos, so they might as well be APEs.
Fifteen years or so ago I read an article arguing that by the time Millennials are nearing retirement and have more political power, people will give less of a shit about what you did online in your twenties because we will have, out of necessity, learned that asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties.
When I was that age, you could tell the kids who had political ambitions self-censored online. But now every is buck wild so you have to ignore that when looking at people.
For example, a MASSIVE portion of Millennials and younger looking at the Main election are pretty chill about the leading Democratic candidate having a Nazi tattoo because of this very thing. Basically, "dumb, drunk, deployed Marines will get cool skull and crossbones tattoos in their early twenties, and so what if he said a couple ill-worded somewhat misogynistic things in his twenties, that was decades ago, and he's obviously a different person."
Contrast with Bill Clinton, where he literally had to explain away university marijuana usage TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FACT.
Point is, I think we're witnessing this evolution happening right now.
> asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties
Do people believe this? I certainly don't. How you behaved in your twenties is a good measure of the sort of person you are and will be for the rest of your life, albeit that you will (hopefully) mature and change some of your opinions and behaviours. So yes, you will have changed but you're also still that person you were in your twenties.
I very distinctly remember a dev talk at early 2000s Microsoft where a distinguished engineer recently come to MSFT from VISA described the herculean effort that it took to run this network. There was an anecdote that he shared that stuck with me where they had a worldwide daily balance mismatch of something like 0.37 cents and it was all hands on deck to find the missing thing. Yeah, man, it is very difficult to run these networks, hence so much money in it.
My fireplace has 1" cubes of tungsten, aluminum, and magnesium, plus a cube of selenite and quartzy-style synthetic prism, all arranged on little stands really close to the floor, so reachable by children. Neighbor 2.5 year old last year was very put out when he couldn't lift the W cube. It is really a lot of fun to hold. Dropping it on one's foot is ill-advised, particularly if you are 2.5 years old.
Site license to source insight was something I missed badly after Microsoft. Bought my own copy. It did wonders when looking at Snowflake monorepo, which was otherwise impossible to understand . Great piece of software, still going strong too.
We read LOTR to our sons when they were little. It was likely the 6th time for me,and 3rd in English. Stupendous experience. The command of the English Tolkien had is sublime. Wish the movies didn't take so much liberty with Faramir.!!!
Yep, read LoTR to my daughters before the film came out. (Thankfully.)
As promising as Fellowship was, the films just kept going down hill—one after the other.
As the girls were growing up we worked through all the Harry Potter books, a half-dozen of the "colored Fairy" books (edited by Andrew Lang), plenty of Uncle Remus tales, the "Little House" books and a number of Sid Fleischman books…
Those were magical years. Only when homework arrived did the reading hour finally come to a close. :-(
I'm bang in the middle of a reread now; I've lost count of how many there've been. I'm 55 now, having first read it in my early teens, and it's astonishing how it just keeps growing and changing with you. Even after all these years, I'm still surprised by a painterly description of a cloud, or the sense of comfortable rootedness of a little Shire lane, or a little "aha, I never noticed that correlation before, that's what those orcs were doing", or "hmm, that's an odd word to put in that sentence, I wonder why he picked it?" followed by a fascinating bit of research.
I've recently started the Letters too, and can thoroughly recommend it. It's fascinating and oddly cosy to get a direct tap into a mind you know so well at second hand, through its fiction.
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
Yeah, I'd have thought so. The lad's a little behind on appreciating narrative, though. Loves books, but can't yet focus on anything that isn't ~= pictures::words. It's fine; he'll get there.
Love both Pooh, and Wind in the Willows, and will enjoy seeing how they take him.
I feel like winnie the pooh won't lose much from having seen the film version beforehand, but also the books had the kind of whimsical humour that I enjoyed a lot more in college than I did as a kid.
When I was about 10, I read the Hobbit to my younger brother (8), over a large number of half-hour car trips. It's one my prouder memories of that time.
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.
I strongly encourage you to do that. The selection of the material is key: you have to find something that she is going to find fascinating but could not read on her own due to missing vocabulary / context / idiom-and-allusion cultural awareness. Then you get to try to fill that in with asides as you go along, if she'll tolerate it. Good luck!
It gives me distinct pleasure to see the little network cable plug from the cable coming from TV be sticking just so half-way out of the network switch enough so that I can easily plug it back in without hunting for it behind all the equipment, but also enough to know it can't talk to anything.
In russian there is a saying that translates "try to prove that you are not a camel" which describes the impossibility of proving what is obviously not true to an unwilling and/or obtuse party.
I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.
It served her very well in her chosen career of real estate sales, although I think she'd might have done really well in community organizing or even politics where those skills are also very useful.
On the flip side, it was sometimes difficult to be there as family wanting some attention, since her bright light was always shining in many directions.
I've inherited just some of that talent, and I think it is a talent, but trainable.
I miss her already.
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