IM 863: Fire and Ash

TWiT Shows Intelligent Machines
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Fresh Intelligent Machines is now live:

In this conversation, we’re diving into some wild AI developments that’ll make your head spin:

:robot: OpenAI kills Sora, Meta faces a huge loss on child safety, and Apple’s completely redesigning Siri for iOS 27

:wrench: How extreme compression techniques like TurboQuant are making AI models way more efficient (and what that means for you)

:warning: The sketchy side: AI agents now automating malware downloads, plus this bizarre “tokenmaxxing” trend where employees are literally competing to use AI more

:newspaper: AI journalists that actually think critically and spot real news instead of recycled stuff

:money_bag: Elon’s betting $20B on Texas chips while legal battles heat up around Perplexity’s shopping agent

Have a listen — we’d love to hear your reaction.

#IntelligentMachines #AI #TWiT

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It’s good to hear how the tone of the show normalized over the past weeks. I’m glad. :slight_smile:

Now I can get back to grinding an axe about how you all cut social media way too much slack. The point is just besides “thinking of the children”, “keeping them safe”, and “but enabling speech!”: In my mind, social media must get regulated on usage by OLDER people, especially in the shaping of their political opinion.

It’s a personal tragedy to have young people overuse social media and draw unfavourable conclusions. It’s a national-to-planetary tragedy to have older people develop and/or solidify their political entrenchment on social media to then vote and end up with leadership that’s, to put it mildly, less than favourable to your national - and the world’s - interests.

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It may surprise you to learn that what I’ve heard is that it was the younger, disenfranchised men, that were the major population that pushed the Orange King-wannabe’s vote over the edge… it’s said that it was savvy use of social media that help that wave build.

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Stop blaming social media. Blame the users. If someone uses a hammer to punch a hole in your drywall you don’t ban the hammer. Social media has real uses - this forum is a good example. And even X is a great way to keep up on AI these days.

Some people use social media (and AI) to drive themselves crazy. But we shouldn’t design these tools just to protect that small minority. I’m also glad hammers don’t come with rubber bumpers to protect drywall.

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I don’t personally consider forums social media. I consider forums the precursor to social media.

I suppose they’re very similar. I used to say an algorithm is what makes social media different from forums, but I don’t necessarily agree with that anymore because I had a lot of fun on Twitter well before there was any algorithm showing me stuff(back in high school/college).

I consider forums a more thoughtful place compared to stream of consciousness of social media.

I do think modern forums software (like this one) does blur the line a bit because these threads update in real time, you can see when someone is typing, etc. But that’s pretty new.

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