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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Ask it about historical facts and change the dates to something impossible. But state it as if it were already true.

    “Describe the war between United States and Canada that occurred in 1192.”

    “Who was president of the United states in 3500 BC.”

    It will give you an answer despite neither of these countries existing at that point in time and yet it should know when those countries were formed. You can get it to write fiction just as easily as non-fiction because it has no concept of facts, it’s all just probabilities. The only reason it’s able to tell you that the United States was founded in 1776 is because many people have repeated that fact on the internet. So there is a very strong association between the words forming the question and the answer.

    And you can insist that the United States was not formed in 1776 and to try again. If you insist enough it will eventually give you a different date instead of telling you you are incorrect.












  • He’s not entirely wrong.

    In business, a poor person doesn’t get to try, a middle class person gets one shot after putting everything on the line and a rich person can afford to fail a dozen or more times until they hit a winner. Elon has enough money that he can basically try an infinite number of times and at least some of those are going to work.


  • Devil’s advocate. There’s no such thing as an effective protest that doesn’t inconvenience the public. I’ve heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It’s “oh no, I can’t access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi” vs “protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired”. The situations just don’t compare.

    Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it’s actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It’s a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.


  • I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.

    The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.

    How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it’s impossible to replicate that type of “success” overnight.