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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I think the bigger issue here is that you are obviously uncomfortable with the idea of approaching people in public and your parents are treating this as irrelevant and something you are supposed to just force yourself to do it anyway despite feeling like the situation is wrong and threatening. You shouldn’t need to justify not wanting to do that by appealing to some kind of cultural authority about what is acceptable to society.

    Personally even as a man it normally freaks me out when strangers approach me in public. It just feels like a very unusual, unexpected and potentially unsafe kind of circumstance, almost never something positive, there’s no way I would trust such a person, so I’m not going to do that to others because it’s like I would be inflicting that on both of us simultaneously, and that would of course come through in any interaction I attempted. How could I expect them to be receptive to that when I would never be myself? People may argue, that’s the wrong way to feel and so it doesn’t matter, replace that attitude with a better one, as if they themselves could easily substitute a totally different way of being for how they are.

    If you need an invitation in order to feel safe in a social situation, I would say it is ok to demand that people respect that and not mock you for it.


  • Not even just because people are idiots, but also because a LLM is going to have quirks you will need to work around or exploit to get the best results out of it. Like how it’s better to edit your question to clarify a misunderstanding and regenerate the response than it is to respond again with the correction, because there is more of a risk it gets stuck on its mistake that way. Or how it can be useful in some situations to (if the interface allows this) manually edit part of the LLM output to be more in line with what you want it to be saying before generating the rest.





  • The argument they make seems to boil down to, there’s various reasons to believe that social media can be a negative influence on teenagers, social media companies are intentionally manipulative and amoral, the idea of this type of social media ban is popular with the public in polls, and the Trump administration opposes social media regulation. So yeah, not all that comprehensive. Notably lacking is a case that a youth ban is actually the right solution and wouldn’t cause its own harms, an explanation of why teenagers and adults are so different here and what that implies, or an acknowledgement of the cases against such a ban (for instance they make an uncritically positive reference to last year’s ban by Australia which is extremely controversial and has a lot of good arguments against it, like the privacy disaster of making everyone prove their identity to post online). To be fair the whole thing seems like mostly a really brief summary of The Anxious Generation, maybe that book makes a stronger point.

    It has to be acknowledged that much of what makes up human culture and society is online now, and will continue to be going forward. The real question should be, what do we want that society to look like, and how do we move in that direction? Probably there is a lot more to it than passing laws that ban things. Calling social media digital crack and demanding teenagers to go live in a past that doesn’t exist anymore seems like a very head-in-sand attitude to me.




  • “There is no formal relationship between the platforms and the workers. If the tasks disappear, they are simply no longer called,” he said.

    Fuentes and 19 other Venezuelan taskers have a WhatsApp group where they take turns to alert members when a task becomes available. “If someone has insomnia, they say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out tonight,’” she said.

    I used to do online gig work like this. The good part is you don’t really have to directly interact with anyone, the bad part is this stuff, garbage pay, and the platforms not giving a fuck about whether clients scam you or falsely tank your approval rating. To even obtain decent tasks you basically have to do what these people did with an active group chat, or cheat and use scripts to automatically snipe them and notify you.

    The most memorable ones were stuff like, transcribing videos of maintenance people describing what they were doing, and watching video feeds of surgery robots and rating the skills of their operators.

    Despite all the shitty aspects of it, I think it sucks this kind of work is going away, because it is really convenient to have as an option and used to be an effective way to avoid getting a traditional job if you were really dead set on that. And I guess a good option in general for people in countries with very low cost of living.









  • There was actually one published a few days ago that concluded that it can be effective:

    Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms, the best result in the study. Those with anxiety experienced a 31% reduction, and those at risk for eating disorders saw a 19% reduction in concerns about body image and weight.

    However the person who did the study shares your concerns:

    I asked Heinz if he thinks the results validate the burgeoning industry of AI therapy sites. “Quite the opposite,” he says, cautioning that most don’t appear to train their models on evidence-based practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they likely don’t employ a team of trained researchers to monitor interactions. “I have a lot of concerns about the industry and how fast we’re moving without really kind of evaluating this,” he adds.

    Also they did another article about difficulties and pitfalls of making these things