GPT-3 post? This rabbles with no direction and feels like something AI would write. There's also an odd jump at the end like it's trying to talk about gaming/MtG but doesn't at the same time.

One possible explanation is that he might be experiencing depression. It's probably not the first thing you would think of when you see scattered writing, but since it's an article about how he's unhappy, it could be a reasonable explanation. Unhappiness can definitely interfere with thinking and writing, if it's severe enough. That's just a thought. He also says the idea is "disjointed". Often too, when you are feeling uncertain about your life, it sometimes helps to put down a stream-of-consciousness collection of thoughts to see if anything provides meaning.

From reading this article further, I think this a depressed person trying to make sense of their world and emotions.

Exactly what GPT-5 would say.

I'm starting to think these questions about whether GPT-3 produced the original article are just what GPT-5 would post to sow doubt about whether it could be as advanced as it secretly is.

Author is 20 according to bio.

It’s probably reasonable to expect GPT-3 and 20 year old tech guys to sound very very similar. The tech will make its way up the age ranges.

Or maybe English isn't the writers first language? It does seem to contain an odd amount of things that seems completely random.

Naw. He has links to a podcast where you can hear him speak. The "Asian Hour" lol. His english is legit. The man Linus is real... the post, however, could be GPT-3. Definitely doesn't match up with his talking.

Good research. Is this going to become common from now on? What do we do when AI content and human content are indistinguishable?

We'll do what we always did: ignore the drivel and the disjointed garbage and sift out the information.

In this case, it doesn't matter whether it's GP-3 or not, it is a no-content blog post of which you can find hundreds of thousands of other examples, none of which have any new information in them. We get it: the way some people have built up tech careers as being something exciting can prove to be very disappointing when you're on your 3rd CRUD page of the day. It's still better than being a soul-less HR monkey or a Jira happy middle manager.

Yet this can sit on the first page and novel + interesting technical content disappears with ~2-3 votes, never to be seen again frequently.

Oh whale.

Here's the GPT-3 continuation when prompted with the first full paragraph:

And now that it has come full circle—when I'm finally able to find a job at an agency and find myself not only at work but at home. It seems crazy that I don't have to figure out how to fix my broken life. There are so many things I need to learn. When I go to work every day, that's when I remember a lot more about how I came to see TechCrunch the other day (or whatever—depending on the topic). Some of the best people in tech know when to talk to people about their favorite business. I have been lucky (and grateful) to have such incredible people around me. I love every minute one of them has, and love to bring

Much less coherent, to me, but you'll get different results every time you try I suppose!

> Much less coherent, to me, but you'll get different results every time you try I suppose!

Give the mechanical Turk a few minutes to find your post and tweak the response to that specific prompt ;)

I had precisely the same thought. It follows the outline it set forth at the top, but vaguely and without actually communicating any real content. It’s all pseudo-profound Rorschach blot writing.

It's weird how questioning if an article is AI-generated is a common comment on the internet now.

Web3 should be about AI-driven content, it's much more popular and applicable to the internet than blockchain...

Pretty sure the GPT-3 part starts at "So I started paying attention to myself." -- I put the outline at the top and his first self-written paragraph into the GPT-3 playground and tried four or five times until I got something that was pretty much the same.

Believe it or not, most people are worse writers than AI. This is why liberal arts degree programs are valuable. You get this kind of nonsense out of your system early and won’t end up thinking it’s profound and interesting to other people.

I find myself wanting to write, but petrified that what I'm writing is banal and I only think it's profound and interesting. I suppose I could write some and show it to someone or mail a sample to a publisher.

If you want to write, write. The funny thing about writing is that everybody wants to have written but almost nobody wants to write.

If you start writing, it’s going to be bad, but that’s what almost all writing is. If you want to get better, keep practicing, start sharing it with others, get feedback, and repeat. Or show it to nobody and write for yourself.

I studied creative non-fiction writing in college. A big part of programs like that are showing your work to other people then listening to them discuss and critique it without saying anything yourself. You get over the fear of other people thinking your work stinks very quickly — and very quickly you realize your work does stink.

I'm less concerned with the craft of writing than choosing a boring repetitive topic. And trying to write a nonfiction piece that no one wants to read subject matter wise.

I fully expect the craft to suck, but I got over the fear of rewriting already. I'm just frightened of producing something that I pretend is profound and everyone else thinks is obvious. That's a totally different fear

>I'm just frightened of producing something that I pretend is profound and everyone else thinks is obvious. That's a totally different fear

Yes and my point is that what you produce won't be profound and people will think it's obvious. Write it anyway. Or don't.

Thanks for the encouragement. In person people are far more likely to tell me not to bother, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't affect me. I think everyone reacts to their real-life friends' expectations and assumptions.

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but this really is meant to encourage you.

Most people will never write anything and even fewer people will write something good. Nobody who doesn’t write will ever write anything good. If you can get yourself into the group of people who have written something, that’s like buying a lottery ticket where the prize is writing something good. Maybe you’ll buy a bunch of tickets and shorten your odds a bit.

Maybe you’ll just have a bunch of losing tickets at the end of the day. But most people won’t even have those and those kinds of people really like to sneer at people who do play the lottery.

Maybe this is an awful analogy. But if you want to write, that’s your reason to write. I hope you have some fun and find some meaning in it.

I wasn't being sarcastic.

It's been easy to be encouraged to write about things I am credentialed in, but I want to write about things I'm not. And I hadn't been getting much encouragement in real life that the writing without an appeal to authority would be taken seriously or stand on its own.

You could just start off writing down your thoughts in order to better understand and explore them.

I consider that very different from writing to communicate to other people though, and a lot of people unfortunately don't make the distinction.

This is a great suggestion. There’s a quote that’s something like “If you think without writing, then you just think you’re thinking.”

Bots are trying to get us to resign so they can take over our jobs

Tell me you don't understand memes without telling me you don't understand memes.

Memes != Jokes. A meme is a repeated and iterated phenomenon be it a picture, phrase, video, image or thought. Just because it isn't funny (to you) doesn't make it a meme, just because you find it funny doesn't make it a meme. To graduate from thing to meme needs repetition, iteration and spread.

Yes, that's the dictionary definition of meme.

But in practical use "meme" has devolved to mean "a picture with a joke" pretty much. There may be a meme-like shared component, but mostly it's just a picture with a joke in it.

I think "meme" is a bit more than a picture with a joke. Of course anything can be called a "meme" but it is meaningless to do so if we discard the original conceptual meaning of "meme" altogether.

First of all a meme is something that can spread by duplication, and possibly mutate in the process. It must be like a gene in that respect.

Secondly it doesn't need to be a "joke". It must be something that TELLS us something about the world we live in, and about people around us. It has to have a message. Maybe the message is expressed in terms of a joke and yes jokes tell us something about the world. A meme might be an expression that aptly describes a recurring situation. We may not laugh at it, but inside our heads we say "yes that truly describes that situation".

A meme is like a poem, like a haiku. It catches the essence of some situation that many people encounter. It succinctly tells us a lot. Therefore it spreads because it is easy to pass on, and it has value because it tells us a lot.

There have been jokes circulating on the internet for a long time. But jokes are not "memes". Jokes are something that make us laugh, memes are something that tell us the essence of some recurring phenomenon.

There are memes that aren't funny and aren't meant to be funny. Mostly political ones.

Sometimes memes were funny, then got (over)used in a particular context and now they aren't used as jokes, they just symbolize that thing. For example pepe frog.

Looks like people are using three different definitions of "meme".

* Richard Dawkin's original definition, who invented the term "meme" in 1976, even though the idea of memes and memes itself existed before

* pictures with text at the top and at the bottom, I believe originating from the "advice dog" meme

* some well known internet joke, like the hunter2 thing from bash.org which is repeated on reddit whenever someone mentions passwords

This one, for example:

> Tell me you don't understand memes without telling me you don't understand memes.

It was clever the first time, now it is absolutely everywhere, and often uttered by idiots who did not even read the comment they are responding to (not saying you are specifically, but it is what I observe generally). This one is a virus spreading to otherwise initially healthy discussions threads and turning them into brainless “wit” contests.

So yeah, memes are quite commonly used as rhetoric or harassment techniques, quite far from some supposed humour.

You don't seem to understand memes.

It's not about the etymology or the repeatition and spread.

That's just where the name comes from.

But once memes got into an established culture of its own, with specific norms, practices, designs, and so on, you can make a meme even if it gets no views and is not shared with nobody ever.

If it catches on it's a viral meme.

But even if it doesn't catch on (or even if it stays on the creators hard drive forever), such a creation can fully have a meme format, form, and content and thus be a meme in that (duck-typing) sense.

Don't get too caught on the initial Dawkins-derived descriptions of memes by the popular press, that focused on the viral aspect. That was important to make memes a cultural force, and to contribute to aspects of it (self-reference, folk re-workings, and so on). But virality is not the be-all end-all ever since there's a huge established meme legacy and practice.

Same how you can make "pop music" (music that follows the form, production, values etc of pop song) even if it's not popular, and never breaks into the top-200, or even if nobody ever hears it except you and your DAW.

"Words for communication" are different from "words for thinking", but both aspects are important.

If you forget about the "words for thinking" aspect, then you are doomed to keep getting stuck in pointless discussions that get nowhere about, for instance, "socialism".

(And the "words for communication" aspects is obviously important for quick communication.)

Sarcasm? While I don't read German, this is actually a pretty good design for a news site. It's clean, consistent and uncluttered. It loads quickly and doesn't have any obnoxious animations or advertising. The font choice is clean and well spaced, but let down by poor definition of link vs title/theme colour.

It's clearly a massive improvment on the last design: https://web.archive.org/web/20210101011826/https://www.tages...

I agree that the new style looks a lot better, however I'm not comparing their new site to the old one but to actually usable news sites. Maybe I used the wrong word, what's awful is the layout. I want information not one row of pictures which take up half my screen.

This is absolutely not going to be the case. Assuming both the US and Mexico simultaneous legalized all drugs, what happens to all the illegal jobs the cartels currently have?

Their people, money and weapons don't vanish and what we see when cartels take a hit income is violence increases and the cartels look to other methods of making income using they're existing tools. Protection rackets and kidnappings are already used as supplemental income, these would only increase.

Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.

If their main source of income is cut off they will have to immediately downsize or it would all eat into the boss’s accumulated wealth. Reestablishing the cartel on kidnapping and other violent crime is not as lucrative as selling sniffy gold. If they start kidnapping in America is a different thing all together but doing it in Mexico would not yield enough money to keep the current operations - unless they kidnap every Mexican citizen or something like that... Closest move is to get involved directly into politics

Or they get into the "protection" and kidnapping racket even more than they are currently. Sure their size would probably decrease but the amount of violence would skyrocket. At least for several years. The basically control whole swathes of that. They wouldn't give that up without a fight.

Is that what happened at the end of prohibition? (Genuine question, I'm not well informed in this area.)

Hard to disentangle effects from other stuff that was going on. Prohibition was repealed in 1933, in the depths of the Depression. It was also the year before FDR signed a comprehensive crime-fighting bill that allowed FBI agents to carry guns and make arrests.

By pure numbers, crime did hit a 20th-century high in 1933, right after prohibition was repealed, and they didn't pass those numbers until the 1970s-early 1990s (and only just barely then). But this was also the economic nadir of the century. And the mechanism for the decline in organized crime was that many crime bosses were killed or imprisoned, so it could've been the crime bill. So yes, it is what happened at the end of prohibition, but it's hard to draw firm conclusions between the two.

It wouldn't be nice for sure, but it would drastically slow down and change the magnitude. The thing is.. crime exists in most countries. What makes a big difference here is the amount of drug money coming into the cartels pockets, that type of money changes everything. We're talking of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, that's no pocket change. If money stops flowing in the cartels would have to switch to other types of operations, sadly still vicious and violent, but nothing like what they currently make.

Is there a way out that involves the cartels not going down fighting? Could a government sue for peace?

It definitely would not magically get rid of cartels overnight, but it'd cut off a huge source of money for them. If they start multiplying the number of violence-related revenue streams (kidnapping, protection rackets/extortion, murder-for-hire, arms snuggling), their image among people who were neutral towards them may decline, and maybe they'll start to be seen as much closer to nothing but pure terrorist/paramilitary organizations.

I don't know if that would start the process of gradual downsizing and elimination by security forces or if it'd instead first lead to a huge uptick in violence and perhaps civil war, but I feel like in the long-term it'd be much harder for most of them to hold onto as much money and power as they used to.

I'm absolutely not an expert in this area and could be horribly wrong, but I think this idea should at least be considered more seriously.

I'm curious about one thing: I keep hearing weird stories about small police forces and ultra-militarised police forces in the US for example, like tiny towns having surplus tanks and assault rifles.

Why/how are the cartels not just "put down" immediately with some assistance? Is there something deeper, like people being born into it or politicians much rather having drug money than a living population? I don't understand why there even needs to be any form of civil war, unless the cartels have embedded themselves deep enough to be similar to guerilla warfare-esque with innocent actors.

There are a lot of desperately poor young men in Mexico, and there are billions of dollars being thrown around in the drug industry. It's cheap to hire an army, and if you can get kids young enough you can turn them into psychopaths.

Take a cop in rural Mexico making like $15k/year, and he'd be absolutely insane to flush his and his family's life down the toilet to go up against these guys.

Cop in the US in one of those militarized police forces is making upwards of $70k, and isn't up against organized groups of psychopaths with armored vehicles and automatic weapons. Those cops are going after guys growing pot in the closet, and the occasional small, low-level drug org that isn't too dangerous.

Wow, your response is literally "let them hold us hostage, it's safer than upsetting the status quo."

>Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.

For the record I'm pro-legalization, but just flipping the status quo overnight isn't going to fly here.

Saying "just legalize all drugs" doesn't solve the problem, someone still has to make the drugs, can we just give all traffickers amnesty for past crimes and make their operations legal? Maybe? But it's not something to hand-wave away.

I don't have the answer but flippant comments about how easy it is to dismantle cartels, is offensive to anyone who has fought to do such and likely a disservice to the intelligence of people running them.

No, it's not easy to dismantle cartels and that is because of how much money and power they amassed under the current status quo. But making drugs legal would definitely cut the cartels funding and they would eventually dwindle into obscurity and small time crime. The current power of the cartels is only due to the big money that are in the game, hundreds of billions of dollars a year!!

Why didn't all of these things happen when Prohibition was repealed?

I'd disagree that the military issues are subjective, as of 0.44.x dwarves still put on a random assortment of what you assign them, normally missing something important like a right gauntlet or a shield.

Have you tried typing on a Kindle keyboard? As a Kindle DX user, it has always been a terrible experience and now the letters have rubbed off so it's even worse - the symbol and and number keys are accessed via a 'SYM' control key.

All I got form that was "we cloned Uber, then didn't do due process when selecting a payment gateway".

Yes, the only reason this app exists is because Uber isn't allowed to run in Serbia.

Which isn't exactly germane to the issue at hand. Cloning someone else's business idea has no bearing on 'should they be able to earn money for services provided?'.

A surface isn't a tablet, it's a laptop with a touch screen. I've tried them and they are really nice as laptop but they fallback to a finger hostile UI way to often to be called tablets.

Indeed. The tablet aspect is pretty mediocre.

Err, no it's not: Individuals with exploding head syndrome hear or experience loud imagined noises as they are falling asleep or waking up.

I experience GP's comment as well and it's from real sounds.

>This is fine with most customers who prefer buying the same jeans for $60 and wait to paying twice as much and having them instantly.

This probably hits closest core of this issue. It's not 10% cheaper to buy overseas it's 15%+ cheaper to buy from overseas. I truly hope this policy is managed correctly and we don't spend more than we recover just to make Gerry Harvey happy.

I've seen much more than 15%. The US businesses run regular discounting that can make every day, branded goods as much as 70% cheaper.

It doesn't look that way online anymore because many businesses have sprouted up with overseas operations and Australian branding. For example Galaxy Perfume, a .com.au, is owned and operated by Perfume Emporium, a US business.

Shipping takes about a week if the warehouse is in Asia, which is OK since Australian post is particularly slow and with the exception of high premium same day delivery services (as offered by, say, The Iconic in big cities) you will wait half a week anyway.

The businesses that play by the rules and have a local warehouse can be hilariously off. For example, I recently bought a bunch of shirts from a Jermyn Street shirtmaker's UK website, because it was a good 50% cheaper, even with international shipping to Sydney, than getting them off their Australian one.

I am sure if Australian workers agreed to lower minimum wage to US levels then they too could sell products online for less.