One in five are you god damn fucking serious?

yeah…they call it “a recent study” but don’t bother to cite their source. which I find annoying enough that it nerd-snipes me into tracking down the source that a reputable newspaper would just have linked to (but not a clickbait rag like the New York Times)

this article from a month ago calls it “Almost one third of Americans”. and the source they link to is…a “study” conducted by a counseling firm in Dallas. their study “methodology” was…Surveymonkey.

this is one of my absolute least favorite types of journalism, writing articles about a “study” that is clearly just a clickbait blog post put out by a business that wants to drive traffic to their website.

(awhile back, a friend sent me a similar “news” article about how I lived near a particularly dangerous stretch of I-5 in western Washington. I clicked through to the source…and it’s by an ambulance-chasing law firm)

but if they had used that as the source, they probably would have repeated the “almost one third” claim, instead of “one in five”, so let’s keep digging…

this from February seems more likely, it matches the “1 in 5” phrasing.

that’s from Brigham Young University in Utah…some important context (especially for people outside the US who may not recognize the name) is that BYU is an entirely Mormon university. they are very strongly anti-pornography and pro-get-married-young-and-have-lots-of-kids, and a study like this is going to reflect that.

a bit more digging and here’s the 28-page PDF of their report. it’s called “Counterfeit Connections” so they’re not being subtle about the bias. this also helps explain why the NYT left out the citation - “according to a recent study by BYU” would immediately set off alarm bells for anyone with a shred of media literacy.

also important to note that it’s basically just a 28-page blog post. as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed, or even submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

and their “methodology” is…not really any better than the one I mentioned above. they used Qualtrics instead of Surveymonkey, but it’s the same idea.

they’re selecting a broad range of people demographically, but the common factor among all of them is they’re online enough, and bored enough, to take an online survey asking about their romantic experiences with AI (including additional questions about AI-generated porn). that’s not going to generate a survey population that is remotely representative of the overall population’s experience.

any time you read an article like this that profiles “everyday” people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?

because “everyday” people generally don’t bang down the door of the NYT and say “hey write an article about me”. there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about “everyday” people.

let’s see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here’s contestant #1:

Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.

and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:

Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.

cool, so he’s doing the “I had AI write a book for me” grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who’s reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.

moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:

I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.

she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.

notice they don’t mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.

contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:

Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.

the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.

a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.

unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called “Flesh and Code” that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.

the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in “sponcon” (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is “How I Built This” which is just…an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they’ve convinced people to listen to for entertainment.

now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon…but if we read the episode descriptions of “Flesh and Code”, you see this for episode 4:

Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.

going “behind the scenes” at the company is pretty clear indication that they’re producing it with the company’s cooperation. this isn’t necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it’s a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.

(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)

and it’s sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:

And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.

“Hey” is an email thingy run by the company that DHH owns.

the rest of those “apps” are probably thrown in to make the list seem more complete. the real goal is to promote his paid email service.

This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.

this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction

who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?

at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”

4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?

I’m criticising the headline not the article.

there’s a pattern here…did you only read the 2nd half of my comment?

because you were also complaining about Clinton and Starmer being mentioned, but they aren’t in the headline. they’re in the first paragraph of the article.

the vibe you’re giving off here is that you read the headline and the first paragraph, decided you didn’t like the entire article based on that, but then decided to post comments criticizing it anyway.

asking ChatGPT to criticize the article would result in more substantive criticism than what you’re doing.

Oh yes those infamous left wingers like Clinton and Starmer.

they were mentioned in the first paragraph. did you read the article beyond that? because it’s quite clear that they’re not claiming Clinton or Starmer to be left-wing.

What a weird headline. In what sense are we too early?

gosh, if only there was something to read other than the headline that would explain the point the author is trying to make…

I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.

what news sources are you consuming?

because if you’re getting the message from the news that economic collapse is imminent and all currencies are going to be worthless and we will need to fall back to a barter-based economy…that is a function of choices you’ve made in your news diet, much more than it has anything to do with anything actually happening in the real world.

and what specifically is happening to people around you that you’re referring to? do you have a pen-pal in Weimar-era Germany who you’re communicating with through a time portal? or are you talking with other people who have the same news diet as you do and forming a self-reinforcing worldview?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_archaeology#The_Search_for_Atlantis

In their search to prove the superiority of the Aryan race, the Nazi party began searching the world for archeological evidence that would prove to the rest of the “inferior” world that the German people were not only a superior race, but that they transcended traditional human standards. One archeological exploit made popular by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was the search for the Ark of the Covenant. Another, perhaps less known, exploit was their attempt to discover the lost island of Atlantis.

yeah, it’s a real mystery why Rogan is surrounded by people who believe in Atlantis.

Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we’re only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still “64-bit”.

it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.