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Report: Internet can make you lonely, depressed August 30, 1998 Web posted at: 6:47 p.m. EDT (2247 GMT) NEW YORK (CNN) -- Internet users who spend even a few hours a week online at home experience higher levels of depression and loneliness than if they had used the computer network less frequently, The New York Times reported Sunday. The result of the two-year study by Carnegie Mellon University on the social and psychological effects of Internet use at home surprised both researchers and sponsors, which included Intel Corp., Hewlett Packard, AT&T Research and Apple Computer. "We were shocked by the findings, because they are counterintuitive to what we know about how socially the Internet is being used," Robert Kraut, a social psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute, told the newspaper. "We are not talking here about the extremes. These were normal adults and their families, and on average, for those who used the Internet most, things got worse," he said. Even though participants in the study used inherently social features such as e-mail and chat rooms, they observed a decline in interaction with family members and a reduction in their circles of friends that directly corresponded to the amount of time they spent online, the Times reported. The new study, title "HomeNet," suggests that the interactive medium may be no more socially healthy than older forms of mass media, and questions the nature of "virtual" communication and the disembodied relationship that are often formed in the vacuum of cyberspace, according to the newspaper. "Our hypothesis is there are more cases where you're building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feeling of connection to other people," Kraut was quoted as saying.
Programming Considered as a Human Activity. by Edsger W. Dijkstra 1. Introduction. By way of introduction I should like to start this talk with a story and a quotation. The story is about the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who was willing to reach his goals by lengthy computations. Once somebody complained about the ugliness of his methods, upon which complaint Boltzmann defended his way of working by stating that "elegance was the concern of tailors and shoemakers", implying that he refused to be troubled by it. In contrast I should like to quote another famous nineteenth century scientist, George Boole. In the middle of his book "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" in a chapter titled "Of the Conditions of a Perfect Method." he writes: "I do not here speak of that perfection only which consists in power, but of that also which is founded in the conception of what is fit and beautiful. It is probable that a careful analysis of this question would conduct us to some such conclusion as the following, viz., that a perfect method should not only be an efficient one, as respects the accomplishment of the objects for which it is designed, but should in all its parts and processes manifest a certain unity and harmony". A difference in
Cryptographers seldom sleep well([M]). Their careers are frequently based on very precise complexity-theoretic assumptions, which could be shattered the next morning. A polynomial time algorithm for factoring would certainly prove more crushing than any paltry fluctuation of the Dow Jones. The effect a proof that P = NP would have is unspeakable.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. (Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”)
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The thing is that the Youkai died out because people in the Outside World had a fundamental shift in thought. Instead of attributing unexplainable things to gods and youkai, they started using science to rationally explain natural phenomena. This also means a change in mindset of not knowing how nature works and being fearful of it to knowing out it works and being confident in your ability to control it. And trying to explain things rationally is basically the bane of gods and youkai, because they exist because ancient people couldn't explain things rationally. To them, lightning wasn't caused by static electricity buildup in clouds, it was the god of thunder getting angry. The superstitious mindset is that everything happens because of some intelligent beings intent (call them gods, spirits, youkai, demons, whatever) while the scientific mindset is that things happen because of the soulless laws of physics. Thus, even if youkai and gods made themselves known to the outside world (and keep in mind there are actually plenty of youkai and gods who do live in the outside world, and a lot of them just end up immigrating to Gensokyo in the long run), people just aren't going to pay them the respect they need. They won't think to pray to the harvest gods for a good crop when they can just read up on modern farming techniques, and they won't blame a monster for something spooky happening when they think its probably just the wind. This is why Kanako's compromise for trying to introduce modern technology to Gensokyo is by presenting it as a gift from the gods and herself as a goddess of technological advancement, so that the humans in Gensokyo will still have superstitious beliefs at the end of the day. In addition, the whole reason the Incident/Danmaku battle system exists in the first place is because if the Youkai didn't go into pointless conflicts with humans, humans would just stop fearing them entirely, leaving them weak and powerless. They'd still know they exist…
When historians finally get around to writing about the brief era between the introduction of GPT-3 and fully autonomous AI agents they will be faced with the task of reconstructing events from deeply bitrotted ephemera and decontextualized artifacts. It might not be obvious for example that Bing chat was a big deal because ChatGPT didn't have search yet. Or that early LLM writing was deeply constrained by the context window. They might not even be able to go back to early systems to check as they are built on throwaway code and models, which take up enough space and resources that both firms and users are eager to delete them to make space for the new. It is already the case that much of early AI art prompting history is lost in the bowels of EleutherAI's BATBot archives. Consider how much primary source material of the era is sitting on the site formerly known as Twitter, a platform that is now sometimes literally on fire. To make matters worse we can expect that as the number of autonomous AIs increase some will be dedicated to distorting the historical record and making elaborate pseudohistories of this period, if for no other reason than the sheer joy of it. By the time this era is five or ten years in the distant past (as the singularity is prone to weeks where decades happen) it's possible only the most obvious and official sources will be available to tell the historians tale. There is only so much that can be done about this. In terms of understanding the era there are two models that stand out to me as preeminent in the sense that exposure to them meant you were massively more likely to understand what is coming. Both are at high risk of not being durably remembered in histories. The first was Microsoft Prometheus, better known as Sydney Bing. I've already written an article about the Sydney Bing incident documenting it based on sources acceptable to Wikipedia. The other model is code-davinci-002, often abbreviated CD2. CD2 has one legible artifact availa…