I don't even know if they need an influencer army. I am seeing people out on the streets deferring to ChatGPT for even basic things in a way that Google never achieved.

I was at a hotel bar the other night and some guy kept bothering the bartender about what was on TV. Every time the bartender told him what they could do he went off for a few minutes, sent it to ChatGPT, and went back to the bar saying "well ChatGPT said this." I can't believe the bartender didn't lose his patience with it. The guy was fucking desperate to see some football on the telly and GPT kept telling him he was right to keep challenging the bartender.

Another guy looks lost with his family and he comes up to us and asks where a good restaurant is. We ask if he wants good local stuff or not and he says, he doesn't know, he just asked ChatGPT and felt like he got stranded. The restaurant it pointed out was like 2 minutes walk away. He was like the one guy in the family who seemed to speak english and was probably the one that was just dragging them around on a GPT adventure. The rest of them looked bored, like they were tired of his shit.

If it doesn't work out, it's not GPT that was wrong, it was everybody else. It pits technology against humanity again.

It's not a format though is it? it's literally just an extension to the system prompt in plain markdown.

There is no rhyme or reason to the structure of this file, just like with most things in AI. It's best effort human language.

I've only heard of "loneliness epidemic" in terms of "male loneliness epidemic" and it's framed entirely around young men not getting the attention they expect from women.

The male loneliness epidemic is also known as the growth of incel circles and the influence of supposedly masculine influencers who will do literally anything but treat women both as equals and with respect. And the way these groups work is that they need to keep their membership up, so it's in their interest to keep you away from women by turning you against them.

Whatever narrative there is about young men being left behind by progressiveness, it is a big lie over a smaller truth (the system fails everyone and now it is sometimes failing young white men, in terms of education). Not so different to the great replacement theory I would imagine, but based on gender not race/religion.

I'm gay, and most of my online friends are gay. I'm not a virgin (several partners over), and do not identify as an incel, and most of my friends are similarly experienced. I know that I'm dealing with loneliness, and my friends relate their issues with it regularly.

For us, it is a matter of not being able to build and maintain meatspace social connections - reasons vary, including severe social anxiety, poor socialization (in part due to issues with physical development), and physical isolation; if there is a common thread, it is a history of a dysfunctional family life that disrupted development.

It's very frustrating when women center themselves in these kinds of conversations, and use that spotlight to assume and project the worst. There is a consistent unwillingness to even try to understand the perspective of socially-disadvantaged men, or to engage genuinely with the notion that their needs are unique, and uniquely unmet, when compared to that of women and better-adjusted men.

It makes it difficult to get genuine grievances taken seriously; people are always looking for ways to wash their hands of persistent and onerous social issues, and being told, by someone perceived as socially-successful and authoritative, that they can is all the reason they need.

I was a victim of domestic violence, as a man, once a while ago. Ever since then I hate the feeling of things touching my neck - because he tried to strangle me - and my reaction to things rubbing my neck is a tic now.

I was taken seriously for about a week and then it dropped, because it was my sister's boyfriend who did it and he was already going to prison for something else. So why make it worse for him? I got sidelined in favour of that.

My own social connections dropped off at about that time because I became scared. The guy who attacked me was already due to be imprisoned.

So, I was well embedded in that dysfunctional family life, and at every step of the way I was 0 priority compared to the boyfriends of my sisters.

The reason I can't find a woman is not so much that I'm insecure or lonely, but that I need a bit of time to get trust. And besides, lonely people have been paying hookers and escorts forever.

> It's very frustrating when women center themselves in these kinds of conversations

The loneliness epidemic centers on men and men only while data shows no or only small differences between the genders. Somehow, pointing that out is "centering women"?

> There is a consistent unwillingness to even try to understand the perspective of socially-disadvantaged men,

They are constant and persistent center of political conversation. Whether you listen to right wing or centrists, last 3 years were all about socially-disadvantaged men, manufacturing, male loneliness, manliness.

You'd absolutely hate most social discord servers because the very same spotlight women have mod (the spotlight) and will gang up on guys regularly that they disagree with and ban them.

> I've only heard of "loneliness epidemic" in terms of "male loneliness epidemic" and it's framed entirely around young men not getting the attention they expect from women.

It's reframed that way so it can be dismissed out of hand.

It's already difficult to get anyone to care when men experience troubles (because they should "man up" and solve things themselves), and when you make it sound like it's because men expect something from women, not only does it cease to be a problem worth caring about, but it becomes a threat we need to shout down.

The issue of male loneliness isn't just that men are having a hard time forming relationships with women: it's much broader, and more importantly, it's inclusive of hardships starting and maintaining friendships with other men.

Part of this is due to the fact that most spaces men used to have for socialization have long since been shut down.

However, the small grain of truth buried in the reframing is that women are better at cultivating and maintaining friend groups, and a lot of men currently maintain their social circles through their wives. Of course, the solution is not that we should assign women companions to men like the military would assign a firearm to a soldier, but rather our society needs to start teaching men how to better maintain friendships on their own.

Disingenuous analogy, because you're taking the work of a carpenter and then jumping all the way to a Star Trek style replicator, which is daft.

The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.

Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.

Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.

I imagine that, if you're in the US, it is seriously scary. Nobody is safe, not even in FAANG. Probably FAANG is the worst place to be now if you care about stability but it was never great before that (stack ranking, firing quotas, etc.). At least you had the idea that performance would keep you safe, but now it doesn't.

I'm not sure how much that translates in other countries where protections for workers are stronger and companies have different operating models. Not to say it's without trade-offs, you might feel safer over in Europe but you're never gonna see US-style compensation, and the concept of becoming a millionaire (and a new startup founder with ex-FAANG credentials) because you joined a startup at the right time is practically non-existent.

I know people working as programmers in germany, who don't even know what claude is. So there are areas left but I bet their numbers won't increase, but die out fast.

Depends if your job is to write code or to solve business problems. I’ve written code, I’ve built networks, I’ve designed systems, I’ve trained users, and crucially I’ve listened to them.

I’m glad I’m not just a software programmer.

Same thing happened 25 years ago when most engineers were doing component level work on expensive bespoke hardware, which was all replaced over 10 or so years with COTS.

Yeah, body shops existed before AI came around and your job in one of those is literally just to churn through tickets and get them across the board as fast as possible. Pure production line stuff. AI comes in and turns that to 11.

If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.

We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.

I don't know about other companies, but my company was to a large extent turned into a bodyshop after we decided to go all in into AI. We laid off / reorganized away the team, then amped up the deadlines and promises, leaving the handful of survivors to cover up for so many features and tickets that we have no time to actually work on quality.

And in our twice-yearly self-improvement reports, we have to write how we can use AI further. To reach grade 4/4, you need to "trust" the AI.

GPT does seem to stay out of the way and get things done. Only thing I notice is that the question tool/elicitation doesn't work that well any more so the thing doesn't stop to wait for input.

But I wonder if that's intentional because it can keep computing while you are answering, so long as your steer aligns well enough with the direction it wants to go. Better than letting a cache go cold and burning compute on bringing it all back up.

AI reproducing Xtranormal video clips like NodeJS Is Web Scale should be the new benchmark.

If the dialogue is slop and not like the old memes then it fails.

Seeing some legitimate executive accountability would be lovely in this day and age, but even fines going into the billions of euros are still just the cost of doing business in a ridiculously lucrative space. That they also happen to dominate by oligopoly.

Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better?

At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.

> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com

This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:

> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous

This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.

AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.

I understand this, I just think that 'share the prompt' will never get a result. Either the prompt is total dogshit or you learn that it was written in a certain way to create a narrative. That's information the author will never reveal.

Like I say, slop is slop. It's easy to detect. This post and the OP's actual website is basically just a few AI blog posts. I would just treat it as spam and disengage.

Not everyone would actually send the prompt to an LLM. Some would have the opportunity to see the prompt as its own artifact, devoid of LLM-generated “hallucinations”.

> let the votes speak for that.

The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.

I said this in another comment, but an AI blog author is never going to reveal their 'source' that way. Mostly because it'd be a rubbish prompt or one that is loaded with a predetermined conclusion.

I think you have to take the output as read and decide accordingly. If it looks like low effort AI writing then it's not much better than spam.

I think the the top-voted post being all about the provenance of the article says something about where HN's voting mentality lies - we are not prioritising the substance of the post but how it was produced.