ameancow

That’s not a definition of middle class at all.

Christ that's the point of what I wrote and the point of this post. That's some reddit-level density my friend.

If you define "middle class" as having a phone and a car and a job, then yes, there are countless middle-class families who get some form of assistance.

Middle-class, working families who live in their fucking car.

Right after "People Falling Down And Suffering Serious Injuries: Oops! All slide Whistles Edition!"

If subscribing and paying for services actually guaranteed ad-free, useful and complete experiences, then yes I would gladly pay. When iTunes made buying songs for a dollar easy, I paid hundreds of dollars for them, because it gave me exactly what I wanted at a fair price.

Now, when you sign up for a service, you're still getting ads, you're still getting paywalls around the movies and shows you really want to watch, you're still getting your data mined and sold. You're still paying more than you would have paid for premium, ad-free cable TV back in the old days.

It's useless. I want to pay for good experiences and services, but they ain't offering it.

Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great

Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their "rights" and "censorship."

By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.

I don't even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010's and beyond.

Owning an "upvote company" is literally the only reason on God's Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.

It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.

Now it's just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven't quite "move on" but they certainly don't give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you're "never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit" and "reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it's shameful to admit it."

Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.

containing loli

It wasn't containing loli, it had generic hentai and some horse stuff. I was there and saw it, about 1000 hate-watchers immediately screamed "LOLI" and it stuck.

I think to be fair the artist was a known artist who had done loli and there was a character who was underage in some show but didn't look more or less underage than ALL hentai, but people don't necessarily save porn based on what other works the artist has made or what the storylines say. It was a pretty desperate accusation, people REALLY need to hate people who have different opinions.

I started at advanced, I was born hating everything and scowling at imbeciles who didn't think about the world. I am trying slowly to get back down to "beginner." It's been difficult.

Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone's pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson's voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?

If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.

As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they're actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don't leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you're not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.

But I noticed right away that I couldn't justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.

I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.

At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM's versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM's start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.

Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They're literally planning for what they're going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization... in five years. I wish I was kidding.

Just got back from Southeast Asia, I'll take this any day.