User of the Day - 6 year & 60 post user goes ballistic!

Rob, are you able to share data of now vs 10 years ago on number of daily posts and number of new members signing up on Fchat? I think that would give a really good idea of how things have changed, or not, in the period

 

I hated moving from the app to web based. Still prefer it, but now just keep an open tab on my browser with my iPad and iPhone. More steps to checking some things, less for others.

At least I didn’t yell at you! LOL.

My own use varies. Lately, I’ve been mostly checking some of the specific model forums. I read some in P&R, but more so in Silver. A couple of threads in Rossa now and then. I forget about the non-subscribed areas and rarely check these threads. There are a lot of fun and interesting people here and I would really miss it if FChat went away. Even though Rob can get a little cranky at times, he still does a great job keeping things in line.

 

This is hilarious.

Don't you know how important that guy is.

He over spent at the Ferrari dealer. They told him he would be a big deal.

 

Who knew Gino had four Ferraris?

 

Came for the cars, stayed for the people.

 

Social media and videos are no substitute. They do a different job, entertainingly sometimes, but not the same at all. Fchat remains a trove. For now.

Sadly the lesson of digital revolution is that good stuff gets wiped out by, mainly, crap, and the idiots take over. Like newspaper opeds have been replaced by shouting people on X and the like, wise heads on Fchat to be replaced by revving creators on video.

Really hope I’m wrong there.

 

Gresham's law seems to apply to the internet as well as money.

Internet: bad information drives out good information. Bad information is often more sensationalistic, engages more viewers emotionally, and therefore more readily amplified. Good information is often boring, doesn't excite people, and therefore doesn't get amplified.

 

Totally right. The problem is now that AI is giving answers that 10 years ago I would have asked about on Fchat. So now no one will ask questions and no one will provide answers. So there’s no good information. So AI will get worse and worse because garbage in garbage out and still people will rely on it and not take the time to do this.

I asked AI a couple of qs about Ferraris and its responses were great, all the info stolen from Fchat. In 10 years if people just do that and there’s no new info…depressing.

 

AI will likely result in the majority of people no longer learning or being able to think for themselves. Kind of like how some people couldn't do arithmetic once pocket calculators were allowed free use in schools. The few who go beyond and actually continue to learn and solve problems themselves, will have a competitive advantage and be the expert resources for training new AI models. But then you have competing and disputing experts.

Issac Asimov wrote a story in 1958 warning about the atrophy of thinking skills because computers had gotten to the point that they were able to design their successors and humans no longer had any mathematical skills because computers did it all for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I took Bernard Widrow's course on adaptive learning systems (perceptrons, Widrow-Hoff algorithm, then back-propagation) back in the early '80s, and even wrote a commercial neural network application in the late 80s. It never went anywhere because the computational horsepower wasn't up to anything really useful then. But when I look at the current AI responses to queries, there's a superficial glibness and polish to the results, but on any subject I feel competent in, there are still multiple bad inferences and relationships made in the responses, just as happened back then.