Why do strangers photograph and spend time thinking about what other people do around them when they have zero contextual understanding of what is going on in those other people’s lives?

I’m pretty sure this photo tells us more about the photographer and OP than it tells us about the kid in the photo, because we can see more of what the photographer sees(and thus understand more of what the photographer is doing/implying) rather than what the kid is seeing/doing.

Yeah, that’s what apps like “jobright” do.

All language is a mental model, shared between the speaker and the audience. Math without any context like this is just a language like any other, encoded for two or more parties to communicate something abstract.

If the speaker and the audience both believe two plus two equals five, then it is true.

“Five” might look like “4” and be called “Five” or perhaps “Two” is instead written “2.5”, but the truth of the original statement is only actually dependent on the shared mental model of the speaker/audience.

There is no telling what the objective meaning could be, if there was ever an objective meaning at all. For example, the entire meme itself could be a password that means “buy Bitcoin”.

Or for another example, two plus two is five if this is a shorthand for two 1.25lb baskets of strawberries plus two 1.25lb baskets of strawberries being equal to five 1lb baskets of strawberries.

You might say “Hey! That’s adding outside context! Not fair, it’s nonsense!” but consider that the original statement didn’t specify any context for the numbers at all. What are the numbers in reality, without any context? They represent nothing but the concepts they represent until they relate to a physical context anyway, just like any other fragment of communication.

I agree that this is a meme. It’s not a meme with widespread meaning yet, but I think a chip on the forehead, the obvious young age of the boy, and his expression of mixed happiness/fear is enough to convey something about the state of society that calls for nervous laughter.

I 100% agree with you.

I do, of course. I even do my hair. I didn’t mean to imply that one should not care about it hygienically, just for your own health and personal self image.

I just don’t understand the urge to thrust gender identity onto hair style and then argue about what that means to the polity online.

Why do people put so much energy into projecting identity politics on a superfluous detail like hair? Who cares? It’s all just a vanity concern, selfishly obsessed with what others think about how you look.

Does your hair make you have some intrinsic identity to others that you are or are not going for? Fuck you, I don’t care.

Do you authentically care, yourself?

Maybe you care about the politics - I can understand that. There is legitimate fear around legislating serious, dangerous things to your identity (not hair). Why the fuck are you spending your time and energy on hair???

Emotions are each examples of a continuum. You can be any level of sad or happy or angry, etc.

I’m not sure the distinction of spectrum from continuum is useful for understanding the world though. It’s just conversationally helpful.

Perhaps everything is a continuum but we just manufacture a spectrum so we can classify people for our own ease of conversation.

Hey what part do you think looks like AI slop?

I can’t see anything suspect but I’m looking pretty hard for it. If I’m wrong then that’s scary.

Is the photo somehow glitched that I don’t see?

I agree with you. Something I noticed and wanted to add: When I mention UBI to people, a lot of them are hearing it like a guarantee that everyone gets enough income to be happy or be comfortable.

I have found that people who interpret basic income in this way tend to become strongly opposed to UBI on the grounds that it could never be funded and would lead to social collapse due to limited resources.

Idk what you picture, but I imagine a person on UBI affording to eat rice and beans in a studio apartment somewhere in a low cost-of-living and low property value geography (though perhaps among pleasant neighbors and like minded folks).

So I kind of think the name “Universal Basic Income” needs to be reworked so it sounds more harsh, almost like a necessary evil. Something like “Rock Bottom Income”, idk.

I don’t have the perfect answer, but do you think conservatives would get on board if it was like “The poors can’t complain, they can take their complaints straight to Bean Town if they don’t like the wages” or do you think they’d still find it unpalatable?

No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.

Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.

Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.

I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).

If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.

This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.

I think they probably wake up thinking exclusively about how to increase their net worth, through politics and marketing, at the expense of low information voters.

Nachos are just upgraded taco salad.

I went to a party where everyone was supposed to bring a salad and vote on the best one. I brought the nachos. The vote was unanimous.