I was getting ready to rant until you mentioned Terraria. Then I read the last line of your post.

Shoot, if I’m playing against the computer I use the game the way I want. It’s not cheating if your opponent is non-sentient.

I especially feel that way in games where ridiculous stuff happens at random (e.g. Rimworld). If I’m 2h into building a new colony and somehow get wiped out by 1 rabid squirrel, I curse, laugh my ass off for a minute, then load an autosave.

LLMs are cool up to a point. It is pretty neat to see something imitate human speech so convincingly. But that’s it: neat. Like a phone shaped like a hamburger.

For me to be impressed beyond that, your thing needs to either do something that I can’t do better or do something i don’t want to do. I can write a pretty good grade 8 essay. I can summarize a paragraph. I can write a dirty limerick. I can complete my own sentence without punctuation suggestions.

When I want to create something, I want to do it myself. Putting my ideas in order and finding the words to say something meaningful is the fun part. Even when I write a work email or a cover letter, I’m not really interested in help. Either I have something to say (don’t want help), or I rattle it off in one go (don’t need help).

Microsoft, I don’t owe you my attention or my money. Make something useful that doesn’t suck. Impress me.

They got a lot of stuff wrong, TBH. President Camacho, for all his superficial similarity to Trump, is sincerely invested in helping his country. Reality is way, way worse.

Fortunately, thou hast not even come close

That’s how I fixed it too! We can still watch videos on a desktop if there is something specific we want to see, but I never let the algorithm do its work. Youtube recommends this video? Nah.

If I wanted AI I could go to some shit website and use it. Just like I don’t want a “useful free” toilet in my car, I don’t want brain-damaging spyware in my notepad.

Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.

It’s a cycle to move the window on acceptable discourse. This is at least the third time Grok has been configured to say something outrageous: holocaust denial, white genocide, now Mechahitler. When people react with outrage, they dial it back a little (but not all the way back). Repeat.

Trump does the same thing: go too far, backtrack partially, go even further, backtrack partially. Each time, the transgression is a little less shocking.

Grok is working as intended.

Yeah. Grok is working as intended.

Honestly, that’s a weird take. Through reading i have learned about so many things i would never have the chance to experience in person. Having your perspective altered (i would say, expanded) by reading is essential for emotional and intellectual growth. The only thing you risk losing is ignorance.

I think it’s a bit fatuous to argue that altruism is just self-interest. Sure, people who volunteer or help others in distress usually get some kind of benefit. They feel good about themselves, or they get to live in world that is one trillionth of a percent kinder/happier because of their good deed, etc. But the self-interest argument falls apart when you look at it from a cost/benefit standpoint. Suppose a person spends 2h raising money for the food bank. The hungry people who gets to eat and feed their children benefit the most. The local community benefits a tiny bit, and maybe the volunteer gets a small self-esteem (and other-esteem) boost. On the other hand, if that person were to spend the time earning money for a nice sweater, say, they might get a bigger self esteem boost, a few compliments, and a warm fuzzy garment that lasts for years. The hungry person is still hungry, but remains an abstraction. I would argue that the sweater earner benefitted more than the volunteer. Yet, people still volunteer.

Some people make anonymous donations. Do you really think the self-esteem boost is more valuable than the literal money that person donates?

The argument that the world would be better off if everyone acted in their self interest is ridiculous. That inevitably leads to a might-makes-right system of oppression. The only reason this argument is still being circulated is because shitheads like elon musk, who already has a huge amount of wealth and influence, spam this shit everywhere (on Twitter, Fox News, etc.) to legitimize their undeserved status and evil power.

Lol. Like corporate social media isn’t creepy.

Almost every kid has felt that they were missing out on something because of parental rules at some point. The kids who had no rules were not necessarily the lucky ones, since good parenting always involves setting boundaries. i’m really not making the “in my time” argument because if we fixed the problems with social media i would have no problem letting my kids use something i didn’t have access to. to me it’s about balancing risks: make it safer, then let kids use it! after all, op is opening the door by making this post. she is directly responding to the expressed desire of her kids and trying to find a safe way to let her daughters access the tools they think they need.

For my part, i don’t consider forums social media. I may be in the minority, but im not as worried about stranger danger or cyber bullying as much as corporate control over content and privacy. i have never used snapchat, but i assume part of their revenue stream involves advertising and selling private data. maybe snapchat is very responsible about these things, but there is no oversight. take facebook, for example: a whistleblower just alleged that facebook targeted teen girls with weight loss and beauty products when it detected that the girls were feeling bad about themselves (say, when they had deleted a bunch of selfies). these exploitative and predatory decisions (to target an individual) are not approved by an ethics board. they are not subject to scrutiny. the only time we become aware of them is when some executive gets laid off and has a sudden crisis of conscience/lucrative book deal. maybe a ban on individualized ads and content feeds for young people would be enough to fix big problems. forums mostly don’t suffer from those problems.

You are right. But if things have changed, they can change again. Many countries are in the process of banning smart phones in schools and are legislating age minimums for social media. In such environments, access to social media becomes much less important. I think a better long-term approach would be to mitigate the risks of social media, and the fediverse is already addressing some of the big problems like corporate control of information and algorithmic curation of content. I like the idea of social media, but i hate the (prevalent) implementation.

True, using a defederated mastodon server as a group chat is “off label”, but i think it could work. I am not a fediverse expert, though.

With her friends, presumably. Why would she want strangers or mere acquaintances on her group chat?

There are more and more kids who aren’t allowed on social media because of its multifarious harms. Don’t forget that 20 years ago, no kids had social media. By all accounts, kids were doing fine back then. Also, OP said that her eldest daughter, at least, has a friend group, so your concern about their social isolation is probably misplaced.

I recently read that LLMs are effective for improving learning outcomes. When I read one of the meta studies, however, it seemed that many of the benefits were indirect: LLMs improved accessibility by allowing teachers to quickly tailor lessons to individual students, for example. It also seems that some students ask questions more freely and without embarrassment when chatting with an LLM, which can improve learning for those students - and this aligns with what you mention in your post. I personally have withheld follow-up questions in lectures because I didn’t want to look foolish or reveal my imperfect understanding of the topic, so I can see how an LLM could help me that way.

What the studies did not (yet) examine was whether the speed and ease of learning with LLMs were somehow detrimental to, say, retention. Sure, I can save time studying for an exam/technical interview with an LLM, but will I remember what I learned in 6 months? For some learning tasks, the long struggle is essential to a good understanding and retention (for example, writing your own code implementation of an algorithm vs. reading someone else’s). Will my reliance on AI somehow damage my ability to learn in some circumstances? I think that LLMs might be like powered exoskeletons for the mind - the operator slowly wastes away from lack of exercise.

It seems like a paradox, but learning “more, faster” might be worse in the long run.

Jury nullification for Luigi. Anything else is injustice.