https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!

What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art, Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There was no way I could even filter out what read and even what to be aware of, there was simply too much.

I closed it and never went back. I also realized that even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.

first time i did that, i finally realized that this is probably the tiktok experience that so many other people are talking about. utterly terrifying.

  """ Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
  that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
  I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
  machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
  would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
  except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
  command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
  to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.

  I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
  will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
  most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
  anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
  "I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out.  But the one
  command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
  and all the little transistors just to go... """

  Rick Roderick 1990

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663

It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.