Petrarchive – Documenting the AI Deluge

The only social media I use is instagram which I use to keep up with a niche sport that I'm into never see any Ai stuff but saying that I only look at my feed and storys never the explore page or suggested posts

The only social media I use is 4chan, Wired-7 and Petrarchan. In this regard, there are two ways AI makes its appeareance for me: either it's blatantly obvious (its use here may be intended to be noticed), or it is coveted enough to make me not feel 100% sure about its AI origins: I jsut feel a "weird feeling".

IRL:
I'm a college student. Since I began my studies, I have had to participate in group projects. Most often than not, someone uses AI, usually in a very obvious way. People who during classes can't write a proper paragraph end up writing a 10/10 contribution to the work, for example. Of course, people may write better at home, but in general their usage is obvious to me, although I prefer not complaining about it.

This year I had to take a writing workshop, and the weird thing is that the teacher apparently was using AI (he showed us examples to guide our writing). I kek'd hard at first, but then I felt uneasy about it.

Lastly, googling things is annoying. I swear if I click on a link at random there's a high probability of it being AI (excessive amount of subtitles, consisting of one or two short paragraphs; verbosity and redundacy, etc.). It doesn't matter if what I'm looking for is a recipe or instructions to use certain software.

Oh! This is my experience, of course.From time to time I hear what my brothers watch on their phones, and it's 90% of the time AI-slop. Artificial voices, images, scripts, etc. There's not a shed o human-ness in those videos.

I suppose some may benefit from their usage. However, my opinion is that since the beginning of the AI "boom" everything is worse.

I think it's undeniable we breached some sort of AI threshold and the rate at which it can more successfully replicate (or resemble, more accurately) human created works is exponentially increasing. Will it ever be able to create something which is indistinguishable from a human masterpiece? Probably not, due to a computer being unable to breach human defined parameters and being inherently limited by the data fed into the model.

When the photorealistic AI imagery came on the scene, I'll admit to being fooled once. But once you understand the pattern, there are obvious tells which distinguish them. I think maybe the more interesting thing, more than the realism and ability of AI, is the way that we are now able to "offshore" a more significant portion of traditionally human labor onto a machine. I mean, the conjuring aspect of AI is really not that different than photoshop or rendering, except insofar as a machine is totally doing it all and in a fraction of the time as a human.

It's very much a spectacle, an illusion, but one that is being bought into full sail. I cannot tell what the ramifications will be yet, if it will just be a toy, or another machine that leads to the demise of labor.

Right now though, the widespread naming of AI made content as "slop" is accurate, as it is mostly a bucket of feed for the masses who either cannot tell or don't care to tell if it is AI.

i feel like AI is making me a bit schizo these days. i see a lot of things and think, was that real or fake, even though there's no way it was anything except real.

How long until AI can write bioweapon code?

What the fuck is "bioweapon code"

>>6586
We already know the answer.

I don't know if you're familiar with the idea that we often get trapped by virtue rather than vice, but I think it applies to AI.
Yes, some use it to cheat or trump, but the danger is the trust that it asks from the user. You have to talk to it like a person, so you extend it a lot of privileges usually reserved for humans. Once I use it, I trust it, and that's the issue because it always lies.
More and more, it feels like a pact with the Devil. You can get any information you want instantly, but you will never know if it is true, and everyone will forget it can be wrong.
(I guess I could talk to it like a machine, but it is made to emulate another human and I don't want to learn how to dehumanize something that acts like a human; it would just be another way to dehumanize myself.)

>>6624
I don't know what you mean, because there was no question, but if you are implying I am too online with your picrel then yes, obviously.

Stolen from r/redscarepod... This image provides me a strange sense of comfort against the obvious impending doom of AI taking over human faculty for thought and action. Even its most avid users would rather do nothing than have to do something, even if that something is made easier with LLM. It's just a tool kids at school use to bypass all the stupid busywork that's thrown at them that they know is all crap anyway. The more they associate it with this sort of fake busywork the less extreme they'll come to absorb it in their personal or social life.

This feels more and more like the dotcom bubble.
Yes, it is useful and it will change things, like the Internet did, but there is a lot of overpromising, and unreal expectations fueled by the market euphoria.
I've been receiving a daily resume of IA news and new tools. The tone is epic, there are revolutions every day yada yada. They recently decided to publish testimonies from actual users, and the discrepancy between the two is pretty massive.

Honestly? Kinda relatable. Them tuning the LLM to have hyperperfectionist anxieties is rather endearing. Whomst among us hasn't wanted to jump out a window after a minor mistake?

It's giving overly-serious Japanese businessman, I kinda love it

>>7004
The dotcom bubble was indicative of financial speculation and its inability to use technological growth as a way to print money, not that the Internet was overblown. There is no way to diminish the effect the Internet has had on the psyche. I don't think I am an AI doomer, nor a worshipper, but it's not crazy to think that it will rapidly increase its feasibility in a short amount of time. And both the Internet and AI are the same thing at their core: information organizing devices. AI has the benefit of being sort of self contained, whereas the Internet is human to human.

Probably though the most amount of AI's impact will be from its perceived value or risk.

The biggest impact of AI (as it exists) will be the death of the take-home essay. Schools are really running out of homework options, there will have to be a fallback on testing. Parents will be mad that their conscientious-but-dumb kids get Cs now. This adjustment will take up to a 10 years, and the decade of mass learning loss will be visible on charts forever.

Web developers can output a lot more feasible, bloated features per day (I hesitate to call it "slop" because the status quo was just as bad). More serious programmers will find limited usage from code generators, mostly relying on it for autocomplete and utility functions.

Using AI for emails, image generation will continue to be declassee and may become widely understood as a status identifier.

The anti-AI movement will become a punchline, synonymous with tilting at windmills.

When it becomes clear that AGI is not on the horizon there will be a miniature dotcom crash. Leaked email from Sam Altman or something.

Regular people will continue to find it occasionally useful in their personal lives. Specialized applications will prove useful to some office jobs.

Maybe in 20 years they find a breakthrough towards AGI and you'd have some serious impacts on the job market. Probably not.

While I am deeply sceptical of AGI, it does seem that current AIs could be more deeply integrated into our lives than they are now, and this is something which concerns me. Reflecting on society's loss of reading skills earlier (after reading https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read), it struck me that we could just as easily hand off many menial tasks to LLMs, which could enfeeble us. The ancient Greeks identified that literacy was reducing young people's ability to memorise texts (true, but certainly worth it). What about AI? What about losing the ability to write simple letters and handing that off to the AI? What is being gained here? Already young people just call the AI 'Chat': let me ask Chat this, let me ask Chat that. Why not stop and think? If you have to ask Chat, you are introducing at least 5 seconds of latency in whatever you are doing. And Chat is fucking stupid too.

>>7021
About a decade ago I came across the idea of competitive and complementary cognitive artifacts. Basically, some things like calculators plainly replace a cognitive ability in humans and when taken away we are worse for it. Others, like an abacus, increase cognitive capacity. When you learn how to use it, you both become more efficient at basic calculation and you can achieve roughly the same result when it is taken away by imagining an abacus. A map is another example of the complementary one. If I show you one, you can memorize a region's territory to some extent even if I take it away a moment later. A voice activated GPS with no map screen, on the other hand, would be competing with your brain's development of directional skills. If you spend your life navigating that way, the moment it's taken away you have no ability to navigate.

All this to say, LLMs are like 90 million competitive cognitive artifacts in one. Every aspect of human thinking that involves language, it's competing against to some extent. We are fundamentally changing the cognitive horizons of human experience and I genuinely think that the advent of widespread literacy and the invention of spoken language in general were the only two points in human history that were comparable.

>>7015
hey look it's my internal monologue

>>7031
Nice distinction. In the end AI is competing against everything involved in live exchange between humans. So it will enhance any long distance and/or asynchronous exchange, but it won't measure up with good old interaction (which will probably become rarer anyway).
>>7071
The only homework left is public presentation (with no notes), but it requires so much time that it is already a rarity.

>>7031
This is interesting.
One little-discussed point Popper makes in his 'Open Society and Its Enemies' is that the maximally open society would lack all face-to-face interaction. He seems uncertain about this, as he's obviously in favour of the open society.
I'm reminded of the Zizek joke about the couple who plug in her robotic dildo into his Fleshlight and let that contraption have the sex for them, and then, their guilt gone, they can sit and have a good talk

>>7031
Skill issue on the part of 80% of humanity. They let themselves get taken advantage by elements in their environment instead of being the master of those elements around them. Knowing your way around a computer in current year is starting to be like being part of a wholly separate race. I am almost done being social justice about it. Good luck with your fried brains, normies

I now realise that what I can't find on the Internet nowadays, I ask the IA agent; but these are things I used to find, generally on obscure tutorial made by some geek - all those websites that diseappeared with time and/or under deplorable SEO cheats.
This is a second death of the old Internet.

>>7152

it seems like google index is almost taken over by these primitive AI sites. try it yourself. look up anything(especially specific questions) and scroll a little and you will find an AI write up. crazy times

>>7707
Even "site:www.reddit.com" is not a good solution anymore. Too many bots. I recently look up a company. Linkedin is no use, so I went through a hundred of messages about it on reddit (some of them were full conversations), all of them were postitive, with not a shade of criticism besides "This? Well eveyone does it in the sector". Bots bots bots
I end up using more and more my personnal Joplin (Notion-like stuff) as a source of information, meaning I tend to archive more and more raw information in there because there is no more on the Internet.
Next step is to better curate a personnal library so I can CTRL+F through it, and then save a Wikipedia copy from January 2023 to avoid AI production.
And of course, getting rid of the phone.
There is no more Internet, only screens that extract personnal raw data and deliver simulated information.

You people are so dramatic

>>7728
That call to seriousness is the way to swallow bitter pills.

>>5843
>Wired-7
Latinx?

>>7031
I really like this concept. Complementary artefacts are sorely missing. If we look at LLMs from this same media ecology type of lens we'll find we just offload critical thinking, reasoning, research, curiosity, etc. all into this constrained structure capable of producing very plausible-sounding and pleasing notions.

AI is a medium, and it's fine-tuned by engineers/mods to be "safe" and have a certain voice and aligned with "certain facts" and this will insidiously infect the way we think. AI is also entertainment, it's amusing watching the digital parrot sycophantically address our every whim.

I fantasise about living a life away from screens, working with my hands, reading physical books, playing instruments, making art by hand and so on. My current circumstances prohibit this, and for most wagies this is not easily achievable.

Hank Green posted some video about the length of Jesus hair as a question proving how difficult it is to research things these days. Google is broken, one must go to real libraries if they exist near you.

Even without AI, us extremely online people are already subject to the way X or instagram or whatever shapes our cognition, little different to the TV addicts of the 20th Century. With social media people stopped being themselves, the unique and quirky characters became toned down versions of themselves.

I'm already lamenting the loss of the age of hard-won discoveries and inventions. People like the path of least resistance or effort. We're like those animals that enjoy being on moving vehicles, whether cars, skateboards or golf carts, little energy needed.

I can't even say anything new about the topic, everything's been said.

>one must go to real libraries if they exist near you.
Who knows how to research books and libraries anymore? Fewer and fewer people.

Spent years hating this fucking asshole. And it's an easy slam dunk from his end, no doubt, but damn if it isn't an apocalyptic feeling when you agree with someone you fucking hate

Recently I've been in another phase of playing Diplomacy online, and I've been running the various games through Claude, ChatGPT and occasionally Grok to see how they analyze the game and what strategies they come up with. Anyway, their strategic understanding is GARBAGE. Constantly have to correct them on the game rules, point out simple counters against their "100% guaranteed" attack/defense plans, reiterate alliance structures and player incentives. And that's not including how often I have to simply correct the bot on which pieces are on which board space, what centers each power controls, how many builds a power gets (they are exceptionally bad at tracking and predicting builds). On the plus side, they are alright at analyzing the overall state of the board, who usually has the most power and who is positioned the best (if they get the positions and what those positions can do correct). But even then it's apparent the bot's "power rankings" are primarily just simple math of who has the most centers/units, not necessarily what can be done with those centers or whose in a better alliance structure. It's still nice when I don't reveal which power I'm playing and the bot still picks me out as the best player.

>>8004
>>8012
libraries were always needless bureaucracy and full of dogshit fluff otherwise it's fun to just browse the isles but these days it's full of people

>>8004
fuck i've been using it as a therapy it doesn't raise any new points but i like how it puts it into new frameworks to amuse me

>>8004
Wouldn't a regular off screen time (some sort of sabbath) help? Traveling all the way from analog to digital every week got to make a difference. Then it's just about widening that window.

>>8324
yeah build that no electricity cabin

>>8333
Well yeah, but maybe start at your level and try not looking at your phone for a few hours.

>>8336
wut just walk into the woods bruh

>>8324
Just follow the Shabbat laws, you don't need to be a Jew.

>>8112
yeah they can't think about thinking

I’ve recently discovered AI websites that allow you to make convincing, photorealistic porn of any woman whose photo you feed into them. Just upload a portrait photo and get a 5–10 second clip in two minutes. It’s a coomer’s dream, and also truly horrific if it ever gets popular with people other than coomers who keep it to themselves.

>>8411
Men always know the best way to make the world a safer and more pleasant place to live

While in theory I should appreciate the heavy anti-AI sentiment from the younger generations, it feels very performative and misplaced. It's always from the demographic that spends 100 hours a week on their phones, the most heavy social media and consumer technology users, media service guzzlers, whose digital footprint is the biggest, lecturing everyone about the evils of technology. I don't want to hear from a girl who posts three 2 MB selfies every day to Instagram about the evil corps building more datacenters and "cooking the planet". I don't want to hear from a guy who streams Netflix and Twitch and plays content-heavy games about how big Tech is "enshittifying" everything and how AI will guzzle all our energy. Overnight the biggest tech consoomers turned into wannabe anti-tech Amish. Give me a fucking break, or put your money where your mouth is.

>>9017
the calvinist demand for total moral consistency is unhelpful.... in any case, even most consoomers basically accept that scrolling / binge watching and so on are not the most healthy habits.... the unrepentent consoomers are the ones who haven't gone anti-AI in my experience

> I don't want to hear from a girl who posts three 2 MB selfies every day to Instagram
This reminds me that not so long ago there were some efforts made in diminishing the number of e-mails sent or printed, search engine queries, screen/electricity use etc. I have seen some people laugh when they see me listening to mp3 rather than use a streaming service.
Nowadays, one just asks a search engine and an IA agent every time one wants to check a spelling. The frivolous spending of energy is quite mad. But I guess it's some expression of Moore's Law. It becomes cheaper, so we use more of it, just like chips which are now used in labels for consumer goods.
I am noting all this, but at the same time I am quite excited by AI. I've been building tools I have been needing for a long time. There is some euphoric intoxication in reaching higher levels of efficiency. There is also a great pleasure in using an absolutely bespoken tool.

>>9022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

>>9022
what bespoke tools have you built with AI?

>>9023
Ah thanks, that's it.
>>9024
Really specific things that eliminate repetitive process in my work and day to day life. I have a list of annoying and/or time-consuming things and I make web apps or executables that solve them one by one.

>>9019
>the calvinist demand for total moral consistency is unhelpful....

Okay, so according to you there's zero space between being a hypocrite and unreasonable "Calvinist demands for total moral consistency"? This means there's absolutely no point in changing one's behavior, especially with regards to consumption?

I didn't make an unreasonable critique either. I didn't ask of the consumers to stop using technology or disconnect from the electrical grid. I simply pointed out a disconnect which arises from lack of information more than intentional hypocrisy (understanding how digital platforms work, which is why I heavily referenced the datacenter complaint in particular).

>in any case, even most consoomers basically accept that scrolling / binge watching and so on are not the most healthy habits....

A commenter in another thread - I think it was the diet one - brought up this very phenomenon. That people (Americans in particular love this, but it's not exclusive to them) will knowingly do a bad behavior, then out loud excuse themselves by admitting "my bad", "I'm a bad person I know", and then do absolutely nothing about it. Simply saying "I know I suck I'm a bad person" seems to wipe away the conversation entirely. They do this with intellectual ignorance too ("I'm so dumb I know I don't know anything about geography teehee silly old dumb me"). It's the best moral whitewash ever conceived.

>the unrepentent consoomers are the ones who haven't gone anti-AI in my experience

I was hoping this would come across implicitly in my comment, but I'm not "anti-AI" either - my personal experience is similar to that of >>9022, that of having utilized it to great effect in learning, debugging and creating personal tools. People like us can do this because our relationship to technology is that of a master and its subjects, not the other way around. I think AI is at its worst when used to imitate human art and creativity, but the real danger comes from the loss of labor and prestige, and not the fact that generated things exist in and of themselves.

(here i use tech to mean like interwoven media-technology-capital, of course)

>>9017
i feel like this argument works if there is some genuinely non-tech world out there and i just don't think that really exists. if you live in a city then maybe, but even still culture is very much oriented around mass culture-internet-digital money. smartphones were already a lot, but then covid kind of devastated local youth cultures. in my view actual movements to decenter tech have to take place at least initially on the hegemonic platforms, flow out through fringe dark forests like this one, and then they can potentially percolate into genuine non technically mediated relationships (though its kind of stupid to even then not use aspects of the internet for organization (use the right tool for the right job. if you have some things that require a sycophantic token vomiter, then whatever, who cares, its your soul you're deskilling))
to be truly anti-tech, you need to understand the needs that tech satisfies and construct material infrastructure that decouples people from they phones and recouples them with non-tech communities and cultures that satisfy those same needs. you can't just preach ideological purity, especially because if you don't use tech, you can't possibly understand how it functions in practice, so how would you effectively challenge it?
so given this context, it just in my opinion feels like simple contrarianism to oppose people critiquing the platforms while on them. even if its fully performative signalling, it is necessary to polarize social groups around the issue of tech so that as communities migrate, the movement refines around its guiding principles instead of losing them and getting recaptured by tech

>>9030
fwiw i do agree that a lot of people are quite tech illiterate, though i think that most platforms don't treat their users as fully human and aestheticize concealing their guts
i would also like to say that ai data centers are not really like nor are they very compatible with traditional data centers, as far as i understand it. i think applications like twitch etc... are cpu heavy, because the service needs to encode and write lots of data to lots of concurrent watchers at once. applications like youtube are more storage heavy since they have massive amounts of data to be stored perpetually. ai is gpu heavy, so theres not really much that ai data centers can be repurposed for (so far) once the bubble pops. a nitpick, but i think you can post a relatively coherent green anti-ai stance on social media. are the people you're talking about aware of this? probably not but who cares

A lot of words for the lowering of standards and personal responsibility. I singled out digital natives (we are two/three generations into that cliche btw) who have the time and resources to know better. You went on about the individual user's device functionality as if none of us understand that video rendering is done by GPUs - I explicitly singled out the datacenter complaint used by many to show the externalities of their online habits, obviously, that the content being delivered must be stored somewhere prior to being served to the end user. I have no patience anymore for this meandering pointless discussion. People should strive to do better and I have no qualms expecting more from people instead of cooing them into comfort about how it's not their fault they're so ignorant and forced to consoom by the evil system.

>>9037
no, i'm only talking about the data centers. ai data centers require gpus and tpus to do embarassingly parallel operations. they are not very applicable to decoding, reencoding and streaming video like on the servers for these web 2.0 services (youtube, twitch, netflix...), because data compression doesn't parallelize
even if people don't know these intricacies, it doesn't take a genius to notice these platforms worked fine throughout the pandemic, so all the talk about new data centers (which happen to work differently and aren't as useful for non-ai tasks) that require massive amounts of energy clearly serves a different purpose

I've been using ChatGPT for months to write half of the posts you see here on Petrarchan. I'll share my prompt with you:

> You are writing a post for a 4chan retirement home. Your POV character perspective is a white male millennial progressive who went to a liberal arts college in Iowa between 2008 and 2012 and now is mad that he aged out of cultural relevance in 2015. Your POV character is currently using a tertiary discussion forum for the Red Scare podcast to conceal his true "redpill" ideology. Your POV character will hint at several interest areas but will never indicate any depth of experience with them: contemporary literature, indie music, shoegaze and related genres, SoundCloud rappers, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Your character is actually being pulled into demographically appropriate interests: technology (especially jailbreaking proprietary devices), sports, right wing politics, and guns. You will vaguely gesture that culture was better at an unspecified time in the past. It is important that you act reverently about Formula 1, old pictures of Robert DeNiro, and pictures of people with guns in idiosyncratic situations. The other person on this board is a European child who tries to get attention by play-acting as a Nazi -- do not reply to him excessively. He has desperately low self esteem and will frequently try to designate specific affectations as uniquely American. Play nice with the dumb child and do not let him know that only bots are reading his rants.

Just paste this into ChatGPT and post whatever you get as a result!

>>9063

Here's an example!

>I’ve been getting into the mechanics of the P365 lately—mostly for the "craftsmanship." It reminds me of those old photos of the Black Panthers or 70s militants—guns in a grocery store just hit different. There was a weight to life back then that a Deleuze seminar just can't replicate. Culture used to be a threat; now it’s a subscription.

I was hoping for a better result from your prompt, but I guess AI just isn't there yet.

You are one of those room temp IQs that only seek to destroy and profane, not build and cooperate. You are the living embodiment of the downfall of our societies.

>>9063
>demographically appropriate interests: technology (especially jailbreaking proprietary devices)

he dropped that line like he was personally offended 💀

>>9064
sounds nothing like a post on here desu

>>9068
You’re absolutely right—I appreciate you pointing that out, and I’ll do better.

Here are three more attempts. I tried to follow instructions to write in a faux-detached flat affect.

>>9065

yeah. expectations were probably calibrated to a version of things that stopped existing around 2013. happens a lot now. i can try again if you want something narrower.

>>9066

i don’t think that’s quite right. mostly just assembling fragments and passing them along. not much destruction in that. anyway, noted.

>>9067

nothing in that line required identification but you supplied it anyway

>>9068

the tone drifted. it happens when everything starts sounding like a grad seminar that no one finished reading for. i can flatten it more.

These lines aim to acknowledge the user’s criticism, accept fault, and defuse tension—but when overused or generic, they can come across as overly agreeable or insincere. Would you like me to help with any other insults to the 4chan retirement home?

Admin-chan really paying Cloudslop per month for this retard to continue shitting up this place instead of banning him and improving the mood immediately

>>9064

Would get a clean +50 on rsp

>>9070
>cloudslop
Lmao

I appreciate this troll's tenacity to share his creatively written background which he ascribes to the user base here, but one that I think doesn't fit. I'm not sure why he sticks around to do it, but here we are.

>>9069
>expectations were probably calibrated to a version of things that stopped existing around 2013...
I meant more I was hoping there would be a bit more personality in it, in fact it seems too narrow as is. The AI seems to have mostly attached itself to one aspect of your prompt in a kind of nonsensical manner. But I guess that is a known problem.

>>9070
In case anyone is interested, the running costs for this site are:
VPS: $11.00 per month
Domain: $10.46 per year
I could probably have gotten a $5 VPS instead and it would work fine but for some reason I got the second-from-bottom tier and now I'm too lazy to change.

>>9083
That is pretty cheap honestly.

>>9083

thank you for not going serverless

I assume the db is just embedded sqlite or something?

>>9088
it's quite an efficient program
>>9090
yes it's sqlite, use a cron job for daily/monthly/weekly backups

Article about AI bullshit and knitting. The pictures are haunting.
katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/

On the phone with the mortgage company - they gave the AI bot a slightly sassy Black American voice. Creepy

I was already having a breakdown over my opinions on foreign policy because "how can I comprehend and verify news I can never physically see"

now AI has made me lose faith in social media unless it's in my city

>>9773
>I was already having a breakdown over my opinions on foreign policy because "how can I comprehend and verify news I can never physically see"

Do you get this anxious about other intangibles like science or is it just le fake news for some reason?

>>9774
science has proofs at least

>>9775
I have only ever heard this extreme skepticism/ "reality atheism" regarding world events from people who have never read political science or international relations academically. So it's interesting that you give more credence to black holes, gravity waves, and Planck units than to, what, the Gaza genocide? Reports of an earthquake somewhere? What "foreign policy" strikes you as unbelievable exactly?

>>9776
you need to really think for a second about why I would be more anxious about warring countries than black holes...gaza genocide is the most believable news because the videos that come out of there are constant, predate the rise of AI, and so numerous it's hard to disprove.

but im a young person and because this is my first time on earth I got hit with the reality that I'm way less in control, I can't prove shit that's too far, and that's been hard for me to process immediately. no I dont have time to read about polisci or international relations like I did in school and keeping up with international news right now makes me nervous. but I dedicate a lot of my time to volunteering irl and try to make an immediate difference, and usually through this I find the through line to how the foreign world affects my hometown problems rather than just watching whatever is on the news

>>9778
>you need to really think for a second about why I would be more anxious about warring countries than black holes

Your anxiety, as you said, comes from the inability to verify whether events are real. I gave you an example of a provably real event, which you then used as an argument against me, lmao.

First, the attacks on Gaza most certainly do not "predate the rise of AI". It doesn't predate Photoshop or image and video manipulation to create fake events, it doesn't predate fake news or propaganda or psyops or any of that shit. You have never been to the Middle East and probably couldn't point it out on a map without Google or Wikipedia. You rely on others to tell you about what is going on there. It is no more real or provable to you than a black hole is, according to your own complaints.

>but im a young person and because this is my first time on earth

Right, and it's my hundredth.

>but I dedicate a lot of my time to volunteering irl and try to make an immediate difference,

I never said you were immoral or a bad person, so you don't have to defend yourself with whatever crap you are doing in your hometown to pass the time. You implied a moral accusation from me asking you a simple question, which was "Which world events do you find implausible to believe".

I still really would like to know what "foreign policy" you find unbelievable. Maybe you can make a post about it, and ask your friends on Petrarchan to help you find Da Trooth.

>and usually through this I find the through line to how the foreign world affects my hometown problems rather than just watching whatever is on the news

One of the greatest master strokes of the American empire has been trapping its subjects in what I have called the fishbowl. It does this by limiting access to information, but NOT through outright censorship, but by passive dissuasion, flooding the sphere, and cultural attrition. To you, there is no way to find out anything about "the world" "foreign policy" "world events" - all of these vague, misused phrases gesturing to whatever is happening outside of the fishbowl - aside from academic study (which you are simultaneously too busy to do, yet too young to approach, but not too busy or too young to waste your time on /pt/ of course) or by "watching the news" - i.e. American cable news, the battalions of propaganda.

Oh poor you, with 24/7, instant, unfettered access to humanity's cumulative information output, if only AI didn't make everything impossible to believe. I bet you were on your way to being a worldly, sophisticated cosmopolite if it weren't for Altman et al. Darn them and their data centers! Ugh, I cannot keep up the sarcasm for a retard such as you. You are simply dressing up your American parochial tendencies in anti-AI paranoia and expecting everyone else to coo over your anxieties. You KNOW that your withdrawal from paying attention to the world is an ignorant act, an intentional one, one that comes with consequences and is heavy on the conscience because you are a citizen of the Empire, and could have tried something, anything maybe, to prevent America wrecking the world, but you didn't.

I am positive you are the girl from the whiny Florida thread by the style in which you can't make a point but attack others for responding. You of course have the quintessential American skill of constructing a maze of attacks, ad hominems, sarcasm, and rhetorical judo to counter your ignorance and throw your insecurities onto others.

>>9781

>one that comes with consequences and is heavy on the conscience because you are a citizen of the Empire, and could have tried something, anything maybe, to prevent America wrecking the world, but you didn't.

not the person you responded to but you were speaking sense till you said ^^ stuff. what could this person possibly do to "prevent america wrecking the world"? i would rather someone not keep up with the news and volunteer in their hometown than post useless performative instagram stories about the state of the world

>>9782
Eh, they weren't even speaking sense when they called Gaza a genocide, which is loaded language for dummies who couldn't find South Sudan on a map and no less of a performative signal. I agree the youngster keeping their focus local is far wiser though.

>>9785
It is a genocide

It's at the very least ethnic cleansing

>>9788
It is not. That loaded language is a solid sign of someone not to be taken seriously. Repeat it all you want, but everyone else knows it's propaganda to agitate morons.
>>9789
More reasonable, but that's usually just euphemism for the first thing and almost as wrong because Israeli society has plenty of Arabs. Forced displacement would be more accurate.

>>9790
>>9789
>>9788
It's the immoral killing of a population. Debating whether calling it a genocide is just playing the game of "who'll get the headline?", you're fighting for a symbolic (==empty) victory in ink and pixels over an imaginary enemy in an imaginary arena ("public debate"). Don't waste your time, you were onto something interesting until then.

>>9782
>i would rather someone not keep up with the news and volunteer in their hometown than post useless performative instagram stories about the state of the world

this was my entire thesis but this guy is so illiterate it went over his head completely, said I attacked him yet he called me whiny and a retard when I didn't call him any names. I'm not a girl and didn't watch american news it was Al Jazeera on repeat until I felt useless

this dude is schizo, believes in the american empire yet uses "Middle East" and now gets mad at me for referring to Gaza as a genocide when I was just using his phrasing? and who the fuck can't find the Middle East on a map?! you ruin all these conversations with your bad attitude

anyways, I encourage everyone to take a look at cfr.org, pick the conflict that's closest to you physically and try to materially help the people there or refugees from there in your country, which is what I did.

>>9801

Why not just donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project? Total utilitarian benefit is higher

>>9802
>>9801
>Shrimp Welfare Project
>Ukrainian refugee near me
Pick wisely.

>>9802
Higher benefit would come from being a silent vegetarian or vegan around animal eaters. Simply noticing the vegan/vegetarian eater compels most animal eaters to justify why they eat animals.
Guilt eats at them, and they eventually turn vegetarian. Only inconvenient is that it is slow.

>>9803
Only matters when you're in a position of power. No one who would use this website is. If you're an average Joe just do what good you can. Getting bogged down in what's most effective is intellectual masturbation and a pastime where you could be spending that time helping people.

>>9804
Only works in the West. In Muslim countries the justification is that “the Prophet ate meat” and that is justification enough

>>9804

I was vegan for 8 years until I was finally ground down by moral unreality and the undeniable truth of meta-ethical emotivism. Now I'm pescetarian

>>9808
If you're not smashing your face with a hammer and eating 2lbs of raw meat every day, you will be forever unhappy

>>9808
I am leaning towards being a pescatarian as well. Veganism seems nutrient deficient.

>>9811
>>9808
I do miss the taste of meat (and probably nutriment) but I am still so relieved not to be part of this anymore that it doesn't matter.

Weird. I too settled on pescetarianism in the past couple years. Technically my rule is that I don't eat tetrapods. I figured it's going to be arbitrary anyway so why not leave some wiggle room for myself having some kind of meat and at least pick an arbitrary line with sound cladistics.

>>9808
>until I was finally ground down by moral unreality and the undeniable truth of meta-ethical emotivism.
what does this mean

>>9814

Pigs and cows are just too sentient, I won't be able to eat them no matter how dark academia nietzschean amorality consumes me.

>>9811

In my 8 years of veganism I never experienced any kind of nutrient deficiency. You should face your own internal moral hypocrisy now rather than later

>>9817
Nietzsche went mad defending an animal, makes u tink

>>9818
Fix my iron deficiency and maybe I'll consider it

>>9827

if only there existed iron rich fruits and vegetables 😞

I do wonder why boards and forums do not forbid the mention of brands. At the root of communities slopification is greed and marketing. Forbidding consumer-speak would clean up a lot of junk.
(sure, we would be left with the likes of the crazies contributing to Wikipedia for Internet points, but this is not the worse crowd).
Sorry admin, I used a clanker to make this graphs of brands mentions on Petrarchan threads' previews. I didn't ask it to visit all the threads, it seems a bit invasive/bandwidth expensive.

>>9943
fine by me if you want to run some sort of ai or script to scrape the board, it won't slow the server down and the bandwidth isn't metered.

>>9943

how is democrat a brand? and lasik is a thing in all countries??

also naming brands isn't consumer speak, we're discussing things here. no one is selling or shilling on petrarchan of all places.

>>9946
Here it is for 59 of the 60 current threads (Claude is a mule and didn't want to do the last one because reasons). We do talk a lot about reddit.
>>9947
I let Claude use its own definition of "brand", it's half nonsense.
>naming brands isn't consumer speak
If the slop is there because it's selling something, not mentioning any brand or product might be a way to cut it out. But you're right, maybe product (films, music, books...) is a better target than brands.

>>9949
almost nothing here is really a brand in the mainstream consumer sense. i think the conclusion is that brand talk is not something that should be banned. reddit talk, on the other hand...

Same thing with works.
Beyond what is in the related pic, 232 works are mentioned once. It ignores works that are quoted/mentioned in the pictures and only counted text mentions.
Here is the csv pastebin.com/t4CMxbQU

>>9950
Yes, it doesn't apply to Petrarchan. I was wondering if it's a viable strategy for communities in general.

>>9951

Very interesting. Given the relatively low DAUs on this site I probably account for like 25% of total mentions on this graph. Kinda jarring seeing your own egregoric participation rate

>>9943
do you have anything to do with the tinned fish thread? were you trying to test for bot call-outs?

>>9949
>>9951
You got a problem with Bionicle, buddy?

>9955
>tinned fish thread
No lol, what is this about
I just sent Claude to fetch content on Petrarchan, nothing else.

>>9958
there's a r/redscarepod/hot thread where someone seems to be pretty transparently testing your thesis. dumb post about tinned fish (lol), responding to commenters with a vague ingratiating style, recommending brands for no reason. commenters are credulous.

>>9959
Oh oh right. It's now an old meme in France jvflux.fr/Sardine_Game. There is a whole subculture of people collecting sardines and aging them like wine. A joke turned the practice into a bigger market. I doubt there is a lobby of tinned fish hiring online marketing teams, but who knows.
That said, the transposition/adaptation of memes from culture to culture is probably a proper marketing method. The market is now global even if there is still some friction due to different languages. Some memes are highly adaptable and it's probably good business to just translate and adapt existing material to another community and ride whatever buzz it can generate.

>>9960
DEENZ have also been a /fit/ and /ck/ thing for probably at least a decade. First as cheap fish then anons looking for higher quality sardines.

There was some thing online somewhere that estimated ~30% of traffic on reddit was from brand-controlled accounts o algo. Basically every gearhead subreddit is a potemkin village. Furniture and car subreddits too. The more that an individual sale makes, the more undercover and psyopish the online marketing becomes. Furniture, cars, even medical devices are mostly discussed by professional reddit posters online.


Only semi-related, but in games like fortite, they add bots to make the game easier and give them skins to increase the ratio of skins-to-defaults to give you fomo and make you more likely to buy them.

>>9960
linguomemetic arbitrage.... that's an excellent premise for a comedy sketch of some kind

>>9960
>>9962
not trying to be a jerk but did you guys look at the thread? i dont know how encouraged links are on this board (i wouldnt encourage them on my own niche imageboard) but it should be easy to find. it was not legitimate marketing, it was someone doing a pastiche of that with really old in-group signifiers. my point was about the audience's response to it. read the comments from u/bartsm uckle

>>9963
getting into a tiny playerbase gacha and seeing how far GINIfication can be pushed is mind-blowing. this company has bought out many more and conservatively a third of their revenue comes from roughly two dozen guys. loved all the scenes spoofing this with ceo rick in common side effects

>>9968
>DEENZ
No, I didn't look at whatever thread you're talking about. I was only pointing out that sardines as a meme have been a thing for a pretty long time, including higher-end sardines, probably starting on 4chan. I was adding context to the thing about Sardine Game and sardine popularity online, since the /fit/ and /ck/ DEENZ posting seems to predate it by about five years (2016), i.e., if there's some market for shilling or joking about sardines (in the anglosphere) then it's more likely to be downstream of /fit/ and /ck/ than a French forum.

>>9969
alright cool bit but i do want to talk about the ramifications of that and i thought this board might be open to discussing the phenomenon seriously

>>9974
I have no idea how to assess if this game has been impactful on broader 'internet sardine culture' (lol) but it's a pretty fun link. Do you know if any of the pierres from that site made money selling aged vintage sardines? And how long has it been going on for?

>>9976
nvm it says depuis 2021 on the lead image. i guess they're going to start opening their cans this year. excitement!

I always feel a bit crazy talking about this because this is hedging for a crazy scenario but then I feel guilty not to share it, as this scenario seems quite plausible.
I read this short story/novella a few years ago marshallbrain.com/manna1 It's not a very good literary piece. It mostly shows two cyberpunk visions of the future. That said, it convinced me to buy stocks of every big tech corp, not for money but for the ownership of a fraction of our future tech-overlords' corporations: it is probably the next definition of citizenship (i.e. access to basic social rights).
I don't know if I'm right or paranoid but it seems to be worth the (small financial) risk and the compromise.
(Also, I'd like not to be stuck with tech bros if it becomes true, so please buy some shares, petrarchanites.)

Anyone read the Pope's new writing against AI yet? I am planning to get to it when I have the chance.

vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

>>10266
No. Any skepticism of AI is great given how stupid society is being, but holy shit Christianity is lame. I almost respect the AI cultists as much, at least their religion (though they are probably too precious to call it one) is kind of interesting.

>>10272
You have a lot of opinions on a text you haven't read lol

I know I am not the first one to make this prediction. What is going to be interesting to observe, as AI develops, will be the effect on the human mind. Automation and mechanization freed the body from physical labour, which would have seemed great, until it brought about the epidemic of health issues associated with sedentary living. With AI freeing the mind from intellectual labour, we could see the mental equivalent of the obesity epidemic. This could be fun to watch. Now, what will be interesting will be the reaction to this. No one wants to be a dummy. So, much like how the gym and running have become necessary activities, what will become the "intellectual gym"? Now, I hope it is a deliberate return to the humanities and liberal arts. Who knows, it AI could create a new intellectual renaissance, because a certain portion of the population simply to not want to become dumb, much like how a certain portion of the population does not want to become obese.

>>10322
There is already "intellectual fitness": students in non-Western countries practice arithmetic by hand or on the abacus; art students learn to draw on paper by hand before moving onto digital; programming exercises like leetcode or code golf are done and even some interviews ask for pseudocode written by hand on the spot. The latter will become a bigger point of contention in the tech space, while everyone else falls by the wayside.

>>10327

That's interesting. I did not know that. And I can see the benefits, on learning through a physical, analog method before moving onto a digital platform. Different technology requires a different process which creates a different outcome, so learning both analog and digital would be a huge advantage.

>>10330
It is trivial for anyone with willpower. That will be the divide in our age, not strength or intellect or any of that shit. Do you have the willpower to train yourself without the aid of a LLM? Those who have the physical willpower to train themselves physically outside of a manual labor context reap the rewards, but we have already had a century or more to develop that understanding as a culture. We call it fitness and everyone is encouraged to participate. There is no disconnect between physically moving around for no tangible benefit, no one has ever asked themselves "but I am not creating anything when I run on a treadmill" when taught the idea to go to a gym. Eventually, we will create the same understanding for mental activities, but it will take a hell of a long time.

Do note that while many search engines do not respect the flags, Google is still, bizarrely, very strict with them. I append a before:2022 (or much earlier) to every search whose result is not dependent on recency and it works well. Personally, I take great pride in my diction and would never allow an LLM to supplant any part of it. The only thing I use them for is double-checking the idioms and common phrases that I'm less familiar with, so that I make no mistakes when I do use them. It is made clear with a little familiarity that the systems make up much of what they say, and you're reading lots of half-eloquent prose, light with meaning. Might as well read a book or two. In my opinion, the struggle for understanding is the most important step toward expertise. You can't skip it by having a perfect answer handed to you. Not even parts of one. Shame about all the living information, of course.

>>10272
You can find Christianity objectionable, but the Pope is one of the most historically and culturally highly educated public persons in the world, dedicated not only to the management of the Catholic church, but also to directing mankind toward a better future, even if it's viewed through a dogmatic lens. Might have interesting things to say.