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I have an hard processing all of that. I fully agree with you on the structural aspect of it and not the worker fault.
The line gets blurry when we talk about "influencers" (are they workers? Like some president are we all influencers gambling now?), "our industry leaders" that should know how to test a product before injecting it everywhere. Even if we have a system on one end it seems some are dodging any kind of responsibility and putting it on "us".
@cwebber Highly unimportant, but... Gallente4Lyfe! \o/
@cwebber yes! I'm the same with chocolate. I think of it like the Type 1 & 2 thinking model. I try to use Type 2 to plan my environment so lazy Type 1 me isn't tempted by the bad things.
(Type 1: fast, jumps to conclusions, easy to use but often wrong. Type 2: slower, more arduous but yields better analysis if you can persuade it to engage)
@cwebber yep, I have 100% compliance with my now very strict diet, except if I do something like cook pancakes for my kids and they don't eat them, then I get the urge and end up eating all of them and completely blowing my macro ratio for the day.
My number one and it's not even close leverage point for maintaining diet control is managing what foods are available to me.
Also my pancakes are REALLY GOOD so that's kind of a self inflicted wound ;D
@cwebber @mayintoronto I lost so much time to text muds back in the day that when that crop of games came out, I knew that I could either devote my life fully to them, or not. Zero middle ground.
@cwebber Oh I'm a person with self control. Of enjoying things in moderation.
The problem is that after that person starts enjoying with moderation, they turn INTO a person with absolutely no moderation.
@cwebber Aaah.. Eve Online... That brings back good memories. Bit of a timesink, but I did have a great time playing that from 2011 to 2018 (on Linux exclusively, it always worked great with wine for me).
Even years later it sometimes pops up in my dreams at night, usually I find myself being chased by an enemy and frantically trying to navigate all the nested menus to try find the option to warp out in time before he manages to warp scramble and kill me....
@cwebber In my early years, I had a kickass video card for gaming that had ZERO Linux support.
Had a less awesome one that did.
I was dual booting, but to boot Linux successfully you needed the one card. To make Windows even remotely useful, you needed the other one.
I permitted myself the 3D card on the weekends.
and then I got my hands on an excellent 4-way KVM and built a second computer....
the rest is many late night cram sessions due to way too much Ultima Online, Starcraft, and Quake 3.
@cwebber I'm still playing Everquest (on Linux, even).
Luckily I learned self control at some point. At least a little bit.
@cwebber the time spent dicking around with hisec mining can be better spent making a recreational program in smalltalk
@cwebber maybe a little unrelated but that’s also why advertisment should be way way more regulated 😑
Anyway the above post is and is not also about LLMs
Anyway let me also acknowledge: people don't always have choice over their surroundings or what things they're exposed to.
Peoples' work, school, home, regional, and economic factors all construct how much agency they *have* to construct a healthy environment for themselves.
Not to mention, there will always be marketing pressures to convince you that you want things that aren't actually in your interests, attempts to exploit your reward pathways for profit. That's hard to fight. And "willpower" is certainly not an accurate framing. "Constructing your environment" is something more people have *more* control over, to some degree, but that's limited.
That said, there's also continuously a marketing narrative from capitalism: you could be better than everyone else, you *do* have the willpower to make all these choices your own. So why not get that bag of Doritos! Oh you ate the whole bag? Must be your fault.
And you bombard people with this stuff every day as they go to the gas station, etc.
And, now let's turn to the way that people are being pressured into LLM usage as much as possible from their employers... many people have no choice but to use them.
And then that's normalized for when people *leave* work. You're pulled into the clicker game, and is that an individual's fault?
But your employer has reasons to get you hooked on the stuff: if the dreams they're being sold about LLMs are true, then they can devalue your work. Fire you, or push down your wages, etc.
I don't blame individuals for that. That's structural.
@cwebber why, can ChatGPT make Doritos?
@cwebber yes, and yes
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