This reminds me of the Hacktoberfest situation where maintainers were getting flooded with low-quality PRs. This could be that, but on steroids and constantly, not just one month.

If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.

Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.

If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.

I don’t type fast on my phone, so you’re getting responses as I can give them. I think I’ve answered your questions sufficiently to draw your own conclusions at this point. Feel free to ignore me. Physics doesn’t care.

It makes me sad that there are so many of these heavily-upvoted posts now that are hand-wavey about AI and is itself AI-generated. It benefits everyone involved except people like me who are trying to cut through the noise.

This is fascinating. I'll have to try those agentic tasks in the house.

Everything now has to be fully vetted before trying it as opposed to making something weird and quirky. Sad! I miss those days.

I hope he's right! I'm terrified that like 4 companies own my entire life now. I do love the movement back to analog single-purpose devices. Would be neat if they had just enough tech to make them useful but not weaponized against me.

As an aside, can they bring back Symbian OS and Windows Phone?

> Stuff like this reads to me like someone wants the internet to be happy fun time that only ever gives me an endless supply of good things to consume and filters out all the bad.

Would someone want the opposite of that?

I think the dichotomy is more "curated commercial ecosystem of mass-appeal winners" vs "the full spectrum of human experience and perspectives that requires effort on the part of the listener to find what is worth listening to".

Personally, I prefer the latter. You get out what you put in and the best podcasts (for me) have always been passionate people trying to share things with others. There are definitely some with high production value that I would (and do) miss but they were never sustainable to begin with so nothing truly lost there.

Podcasting will always be able to endure in its most basic form: two people, a mic, and an RSS feed.

I suppose that sentence would make sense if „good“ and „bad“ were in quotes.

I would read it as <<there‘s plenty unique and interesting shows out there which might lack some polish („the bad“). I don‘t only want polished, boring, mass appeal shows from large production houses („the good“).>>

It's that such a thing cannot ever exist. If you're relying on a curated experience, then there are going to be competing interests influencing how your feed is curated.

Boo LLM-generated comments!

But what [if the llms generate] constructive and helpful comments?

https://xkcd.com/810/

Hopefully we never see a photoid collapse us into 2D space.

When I let my kids have freedom in the various stores we go into, I get nearly instant looks of disgust from people. It's like everybody has forgotten what it's like to be a kid and why that kind of independence is necessary. Socially it's verboten.