Technology

Social media even moreso than news, for younger audiences. Doom posts gets engagement.

I think people have always been like this. Listen to any two people talk, it is just natural that they will talk about something that makes them nervous. It is like salmon returning to the spawning ground, humans discussing fears.

Learn, don't just watch news. Get perspective.

We could already be having that, maybe minus the space part.

Weird Al never went away. He still drops albums from time to time.

Online news reports have become nothing but buzz words

Wasn't that the case for the past decade or so already?

I don't see such an amazing difference in daily news unless maybe you're reading some already worthless tabloid rags. Journalism has to be searched for and usually paid for. Free "news" sites were always clickbait and pointless reposts of real sources.

I came here to say this. We've had threats of "AI" for a while, and initially, it should have been better, but it wasn't. Look at the latest voice assistant from your favorite large corporation spy gadget, like an echo dot. The voice assistant sucks. It constantly misunderstands you, half the time you get feedback like "I don't understand" despite asking for something you've asked for before, in the same way you've asked before, and had it do something before, but now, no, fuck you.

Responses are repetitious and boring, like "playing (song) by (artist) on (streaming service)" or "turning on x lights".... Always the same, always boring. Ask about almost anything beyond a function, and usually you get a quote snippet from a webpage you've never heard of, which only mentions whatever you asked for and doesn't provide any actual information 90% of the time. It would be more useful for it to respond with "I found this on the web" followed by the sounds of hippos farting.

This is the "AI" we had until now, and it's the AI we constantly interact with. None of the star trek computer level intelligence where you can ask your assistant to increase the illumination, and have it do something because it understands the intent behind what you're saying, not just running a select statement on your literal words... And that's even if it understands at all. You don't see Will Riker standing there arguing with the computer like "no, I asked for a coffee" while the replicator is populated by a cookie.

Then LLMs go into widespread use and the system shits out stuff like chat GPT which most people can't seem distinguish from talking to a person, and now we live in this hellscape. AI chatbots are now selling us shit, replying to our emails, posing as real people even....

And I'm just talking about speech-based AI.... Don't get me started on the insanity of image AI.