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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The consumer-side AI that a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies keep peddling to us is just a way for them to attempt to justify AI to us. Otherwise, it consumes MASSIVE amounts of our energy capacities and is primarily being used in ways that harm us.

    And, of course, there’s nothing they direct at us that isn’t ultimately (and solely) for their benefit–our every use of their AI helps train their models, and eventually it will simply be groups of billionaires competing against one another to form the most powerful model that allows them to dominate us and their competitors.

    As long as this technology remains determined by those whose entire existence is organized around domination, it will be a sum harm to all of us. We’d have to free it from their grips to make it meaningful in our daily lives.



  • That’s cool! My grandmother was similar–discovered email in her early 80s and loved it, got herself a printer to print out letters to send to people. Last I saw her before she died, she asked me to help set up her phone so she could answer emails on it.

    She loved getting emails from people too. It made me remember how exciting that stuff was when I first started using it and it still felt like a great, new thing to make it easier to connect with folks and explore the world.



  • I set up my mom on Microsoft Outlook many years ago, back when you had to set the server and so on.

    She called me a few days later and said her email wasn’t working, so I walked her through looking at the options, making sure the right addresses and preferences were checked, etc.

    After about 45 minutes, I remembered that I already set everything up correctly and it was working. Then I decided to ask, “are you typing the @ symbol, or are you typing the word at in the email address?”

    Yep.