A recent study[1] seems to indicate that polarization is a hard problem, along with some of the other negative effects of social media. Many of the commonly suggested solutions have minimal impact, or no effect at all. That flywheel effect is surprisingly robust.
I saw that, but the approach taken is questionable (do LLMs represent realistic behavior for scenarios they’ve not been trained for?) and it also doesn’t seem like anything like my suggestions here were tested. It’s better than nothing, but far from conclusive in my opinion.
As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.
> they convey the meaning and humor much better than the americanized voiceover
I'm glad this isn't just me. I occasionally watch anime and the English dubs are seemingly universally terrible compared to the originals. Subtitles are annoying but nothing like listening to someone mumble their way though a script.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that GDP is usually thought of (by non-economists) as a trailing index that has some sustainability baked in, by inertia if nothing else. Military spending would normally track reasonably well with that. What Russia is doing... doesn't sound sustainable.
2. Russia only needs to sustain its current war effort longer than Ukraine can sustain its own war effort. Considering that Ukraine is heavily dependent on external aid just to maintain its current ability to lose slowly, and its single most important source of foreign aid is trying to drop it like a bad habit.....signs point to Russia's economy having enough runway to achieve some kind of victory, after which they can dial down the production levels and return labor to the civil sector.
> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization
Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.
Vertical integration in this space sounds like a really bad thing to me ("bad" in the sense of "likely to lead to the creation of products that erode human dignity in new and interesting ways").
I think the problem here would be figuring out how much of the brain's power draw to attribute to the multiplication. A brain is more akin to a motherboard than a single CPU, with all kinds of I/O, internal regulation, and other ancillary stuff going on all the time.
We can surely build more efficient and capable hardware than our current evolved wetware, since all of the details of how to build it are generally externalized. If the chips had to fab themselves, it would be a different story.
The software is a different story. Sure, the brain does all sorts of things that aren't necessary for $TASK, but we aren't necessarily going to be able to correctly identify which are which. Is your inner experience of your arm motion needed to fully parse the meaning in "raise a glass to toast the bride and groom", or respond meaningfully to someone who says that? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter - language is already a decent tool for bridging disjoint creature realities, maybe it'll stretch to synthetic consciousness too.
All of computation is realised by very few arithmetic operations. Then test energy efficiency of wetware and hardware on those operations. Then any difference can be attributed to algorithms.
I think this is still just a difference in how the output is used. You're presenting text generation as factual and image generation as artistic. It could be reversed - no one will care if a fantasy story gets some in-milieu "facts" wrong, but a blueprint or architectural reference coming out of Stable Diffusion could ruin someone's year.
Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought them in '96.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385