Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

  • George Orwell
  • 6 Posts
  • 101 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2025

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  • My unpopular opinion is that social media is simply inherently incompatible with human nature. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault per se. It’s like heroin in the sense that it doesn’t matter how you distribute it - it’s going to cause harm because hijacking our reward systems is the reason we use it in the first place. If you modify it so all that goes away, then what you’re left with is water - and nobody wants that.

    I don’t know what the solution is, though. I don’t think banning it is a solution, but I’m not sure how to square the harmfulness of it. It’s not just kids it’s bad for - it’s everyone. And yeah, there are degrees to it - perhaps Lemmy is objectively better than an algorithm-based message board like Reddit, but something being better doesn’t make it good. A non-toxic heroin that you can’t OD on is also better than the alternative, but it’s still going to be harmful. It’s an arbitrary line we collectively just decide to draw somewhere - even though you could argue infinitely about nudging it one way or the other.

















  • LLMs are AI. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly users. If just one percent of them are paying, that’s 8 million paying customers. That’s not “nobody.”

    That sheer volume of weekly users also shows the demand is clearly there, so I don’t get where the “useless” claim comes from. I use one to correct my writing all the time - including this very post - and it does a pretty damn good job at it.

    Relying on an LLM for factual answers is a user error, not a failure of the underlying technology. An LLM is a chatbot that generates natural-sounding language. It was never designed to spit out facts. The fact that it often does anyway is honestly kind of amazing - but that’s a happy accident, not an intentional design choice.