As I notice more and more people use chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude as replacements for human companionship, I was struck by the hollowness that this new trend is. ChatGPT is not only not anyones friend (except perhaps Sam Altman's), it cannot be anyone's friend. There is nothing there to be friends with. No one is actually answering questions, no one is giving advice. There is no one there.I am reminded of Blade Runner 2049, a world where preferring non-human companionship seems to have

I decided to make a short episode about the underlying scamminess of the idea that AI tools are essentially time-saving. This is doubly true for the office-goer being exploited by corporations. Because at the end of the day, no worker gains anything by saving time. If one becomes capable of doing a day's work in an hour, they don't get the rest of the day off. In fact, it probably means the exact opposite - that they will be expected to do hundreds of hours worth of work now. And if they

In 1928, EM Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops. It featured a future where humankind survives underground and at the mercy of a system known simply as 'The Machine'. In this world, humans have outsourced all essential tasks, including the task of maintaining and repairing the machine, to the Machine.And then one day, as the title says, the Machine stops, and a society that has grown fully reliant on it, meets its end whispering "Oh Machine! Oh Machine!".I have been

There are two types of writers. There are plotters and there are pantsers.Pantsers are people who pull people's pants down and plotters are people who have been wronged by pantsers and they plot their death. I am kidding of course and that's kind of the point because when I started this video I was going to say something else which should tell you everything you need to know about my writing style. I am a pantser and I make it sound like a confession but my point is when people ask me for

Every month, there is news of some Indian YouTuber losing their channel to motivated copyright strikes, quite possibly made due to political reasons. I have long been a proponent of content channel diversification by creators. Open protocols like RSS feeds (used for podcasts and blogs alike) as well as email (used for newsletters) are the way out. Creators need to understand that at the end of the day, their channels belong to YouTube. The only way to not be subject to the rules made by

In our time, political propaganda and conspiracy theories are kissing cousins. One opens the gates and the other drags you in. The way they do this is not very imaginative and so it is possible to squitn and see how the process works.Below is a full transcript of the episode.Hi, and welcome to another video on this channel.My name is Vimoh and here we talk about atheism, Indian culture, popular misinformation, that sort of stuff. And I want to talk today, not about any specific creator or

Hello friends.After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them

كيف تنجو من الاحتيال؟ نستضيف في هذه الحلقة من #بودكاست_نافذة غازي الزلفي الخبير في مكافحة الجرائم المالية، لنناقش معه عمليات الاحتيال المالي في الحياة الرقمية وملاحظة خطواته الأولى بوعود وهمية، ومراقبة واستغلال العصابات المنظمة للفترات التي يتحرك فيها الأفراد لإنهاء احتياجاتهم، ويسرد لنا جرائم بأرقام مليونية وقصصاً مأساوية كانت سبباً في إنهاء نفسها. ويتحدث ضيفنا عن مساءلات الضحايا التي تلاحق البنوك وحقيقة اختراق الأنظمة وتسريب البيانات، ودور البنوك في حماية أموال الضحايا وتتبع الأموال المنهوبة التي

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.And today I want to talk about followers, especially I, as you may already have seen in the title to this episode, I want to talk about losing followers.And when I say how to lose followers, it might seem like I'm trying to warn you about what not to do. Like I'm being ironical somehow. I'm being sarcastic. I'm telling you by saying how to lose followers. What I want you to think is that you shouldn't lose followers. But I'm actually

Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat

Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable.Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from now

Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity,

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who

A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new system

In the age of artificial intelligence, we encounter creators and content makers who are deeply optimistic about its potential. Their enthusiasm is understandable; their livelihoods often depend on the increasing use and acceptance of AI. Many of these creators actively encourage others to embrace AI, presenting it as a tool that can revolutionize industries and transform workflows.Recently, I watched a video where an AI advocate made a point that struck a chord with me. They said, "Customers don't

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.I wanted to talk about importance—about how we know something is important and how we know something is not important—and how that method of measuring importance has been somewhat impaired in our information superhighway age.I wanted to talk about letters because that is exactly what I found myself talking to my father and mother about some weeks ago. I was inundated with messages, and I asked them how many messages they had to deal with