Readit NewsI think the question boils down on how to stop enshittification. Because if we were to recreate all the enshittified platforms, what would stop them from becoming enshittified anew? We must understand the mechanism of enshittification and fundamentally break this mechanism, making it nearly impossible for a new platform to enter the enshittification cycle again.
I think this calls for a government funded national un-enshittification Laboratory to study the social dynamics of enshittification and develop hygiene practices. Work must be done quickly before enshittification research becomes enshittified!
ChatGPT is basically the deshittifier that rewrites thousands of sites to just the information…?
And it has a much better interface than original Google. Every query starts with the equivalent of “I’m feeling lucky”, but then you can ask further questions.
Nah this tech will poison the web. People don't know what it is and take it too seriously.
I was fine with the simple ads in the sidebar of the Google results of yore. It felt like a fair deal.
I think the problem is then you eventually get SEOification. I suppose you can just reset every now and again. Maybe like give a training program to get SEO people real jobs.
__jambo commented on Growing number of apps help automate pro-Israel activism online washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/aspenmayer
I think that is probably an exaggeration. I don't see a lot of reason to believe they have the most advanced machine and I don't buy that their PR machine exists to ameliorate ethical lapses. PR/Propaganda is power and all regimes want power.
I've seen incredible amounts of (justfied) anti-Israeli action press, so I don't particularly believe they have a wildly successful PR machine either.
China, the US, and Russia are all clearly advanced. Facebook alone got significant press for weighing in substantially on elections across the world. Twitter, before Elon, was used to coordinate against despotic regimes all over the world. Hollywood alone has incredible soft and hard power.
NSO group's Pegasus, and their selling software to despotic regimes so that they can find and torture/murder/scare journalists is much more telling of Israel's ethical core, as is their bombing of associated press offices.
Seeking power is not mens rea, directly harming those who would report your misdeeds is.
> Hollywood has.. hard power
Um, what??
__jambo commented on Lessons from a never-ending personal project siddhesh.substack.com/p/p... · Posted by u/weekendvampire
This is a clearly false collection of arbitrary useless and arrogant opinions. See any famous reclusive intellectual or writer for counterexamples.
Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive aspects:
The flip side to this is the government had power because these activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones and the latest government bot according to your philosophy.
Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle? Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype such governments and trial them on smaller populations like iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there.
They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone, not so different from lowering wages which they already do.
Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports.
Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...
Great idea.
Nobody listened, and nothing has changed.