That’s a question for the ages for sure. I’m worried it’s going to get quite a bit worse before it gets better.

As far as I can tell, there are multiple ongoing components to what’s going on.

There is definitely some Russia-driven agitprop going on, with the apparent aim of weakening the West through division. But on its own I think it’s not a sufficient explanation, for two reasons. The same research showed that Russia is also pushing left-aligned agitprop points to increase division. And Russia was not similarly involved in the 1930’s, which nevertheless saw a somewhat similar trajectory.

But it’s still a factor either way of course.

The main force, I think, is the collapse of capitalism. That capitalism is its own self-destruction mechanism has been observed for centuries; it’s kind of one of the main takeaways from Das Kapital. With the ceaseless rise of wealth capture by the ruling classes, discontent rises correspondingly among the general population, and the beige centrist neoliberals that tend to occupy power seats in most democracies keep onboarding more and more far right talking points in an apparent effort to keep this discontent from getting an actual left wing government elected: drawing false equivalency between left and far right policies, forming coalitions with the far right to prevent even a mildly left wing party from forming a government, etc.

The latter seems particularly driven by the flow of donor money from the wealthy elites.

But it also looks like in many countries, the national media are disproportionately captured by said wealthy elite, who also increasingly push the same far right societal framing for the same core reason.

Historically speaking, this private capture of wealth and power does not stop on its own, and it goes to some pretty bad places before it gets better. It’s bleak as hell, but we can take hope, I think, from another historical observation: it always gets better, eventually.

Till then, take care of each other, y’all.

The Internet was already a very different place back then. These days, most people are on a few very large platforms. Back then it was a lot of smaller sites and forums, whose individual vibes depended a lot on its own moderation policies.

I spent much of that day with other players of the MUD-style game I played at the time, figuratively huddling together, sharing updates about our people in NYC as we heard from them.

For a time, I think, people were kind of stunned. The US had thought itself invulnerable, you understand.

But it wasn’t very long before the raging islamophobia began, and a hard turn toward the direction of fascism. But also the reaction to that. The split was stark.

And is still going on to this day, I suppose.

So no, people didn’t quite stop being dicks. If anything they only started dicking harder.

Interesting point… In this case, I have a hunch that the requirements in terms of training data and hardware to run the training on would remain prohibitive, but I do wonder how much could be actually achieved using a distributed scheme of sorts.

I’d take a model whose training data is open source and legitimately obtained. The only ones I know about are Apertus and OLMo, and they aren’t really competitive.

I mean, the poll was like as not a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the fact DDG is not doing AI. All the same, the fact they are making “no AI” a selling point is noteworthy.

EDIT: I stand corrected – apparently DDG does do AI presently. Hopefully they’re serious about reconsidering that, then.