You complained about the Facebook engagement algorithm. I said they should be allowed to run the code and people use it if they choose. You disagreed.

It is a bit weird that you’ve flipped over to my side, and now you want freedom, and you’re trying to put me over on your original side. It’s nice that we both agree now. Nice chatting.

It’s not only advertisers. It is a need for engagement. Facebook makes money if people are engaged, both from advertisement and selling data. People prefer to use platforms that have lots of money to put into the user experince. Maybe this will change as people become more aware, maybe with things like the fediverse.

Oftentimes, things like murder and insider trading are at least attempted to be stopped, I don’t know what your point is there. This was a discussion on whether or not the government should stop Facebook from having code that keeps users engaged. I said it is better if the government doesn’t verify all the code that makes it on the internet. That is what the government does in places like North Korea.

I prefer an internet where anyone is free to share the code they want to as opposed to an internet where everything has to be submitted to an authority who has to ok it. Imagine all the innovation that would be stifled in a society where such a system was in place. If you think would prefer that, then maybe North Korea is the place where you would be happiest.

The reason websites have things like engagement algorithms is because they are advertisement based, and they sell user data. This seems shitty at first glance, but it is what people prefer. The alternative is subscription based. Both models have been presented, and people chose what they wanted. Nobody forced them. As time goes on, things evolve. I like to think that in the future, people will move more towards decentralized, community run websites. That’s why I am on Lemmy, and I am not on Facebook. I am certainly happy that I have the freedom to choose. I am also happy that anyone has the freedom to make whatever options they want to offer.

And amazingly, despite all these awful things you listed, nearly everything is better. People kill strangers less. People kill their families less. People rape each other less. People torture each other less. Countries go to war less. People live longer. People live healthier. People starve less. These things all used to be much much bigger than they are now.

Pick someone out of history and ask them if they would rather watch all their children die of a horrible plague, or they have to live in a world where some idiots are messaging each other about Q-Anon. What do you think they will say they prefer?

Personally, I’d much rather some idiots running into a special building wearing stupid costumes than deal with the absolute living hell of the pre-technology world absolutely any day. So would you.

Yeah, sure, there are things to dislike about computers. In the same way, ambulances suck because they are noisy. Ovens suck because they can overcook your food…

It is wild how people mocked computers/internet back in the day. Lots of people are too young to remember it. Here is Letterman mocking the internet while a crowd laughs along. It’s basically the same as when people mock LLMs/AI or blockchain or whatever other new technology that they don’t understand.

Do you think that people were better off before computers? How so? Do you think there was more or less war? Do you think people died at an older or younger age? Do you think people had more or less years of sickness? Do you think more or fewer mothers and children died at childbirth? Do you think there were more or fewer rapes? Do you think there were more or fewer murders? Do you think we knew more or less about the universe beyond our planet? Do you think we knew more or less about the laws of physics? Chemistry? Biology?

In nearly all measurable ways, the lives of humans have improved since the advent of computers. To act otherwise is naive.

Thanks, I appreciate the answer. The downvotes for questions blow my mind. It’s like there is some group of people that has been tricked into thinking that questions are an attack or something.

A large part of creation is trying things and seeing what sticks. Nobody is claiming that every way LLMs are being tried out today will always be here. We are just doing what we think of and seeing what is useful. The useful things will stick around and evolve, other things won’t. Go back to videos from the early 90s when computers were starting, people talked so much shit on them. Now, we all have the future generations of them in our pockets.

Even solar and wind? What are the waste products with these that can’t be recycled?