Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI Usage of Elon Musk's X social media platform is declining in the UK, and adult Brits aren't particularly interested in generative AI tools. That's according to Ofcom's Online Nation report, an annual publication looking at what UK citizens do during their hours online and how much time they spend glued to gadgets. According …
Correct. A few days ago Elmo replied to what is obviously a propaganda bot if you look at its posting history and it made news here.
Stop paying attention to "the fucking news".
The economy is fucked. The climate is fucked. Most men in positions of power fuck too much. Democracy is fucked. Nobody "in charge" gives a fuck unless it affects their fucking wallet. And thousands upon thousands of people are dying for fucking stupid reasons that amount to somebody thinking "fuck you" and backing that up with fucking bombs.
And there's roughly fuck all we can do about it.
It's fucking depressing. Just fucking turn the fucking news off.
Icon, because even fucking nukes are in the fucking news now. Fuck my life...
> Chin up tiger! You've still got the El Reg commentariat, and if there's one thing guaranteed to turn that frown upside-down, it's... ah, no, actually. You're fucked.
Indeed! :-D
Maybe Heyrick would like to read my favourite fucking doomscroll probable fucking russian fucking propaganda site:
https://londonlovesbusiness.com/world-news/
Interesting thing about that "news" site is that its articles go back to just before brexit, June 24th sitting on page 3981 of 4304 pages of "business "news""..
I stopped taking it seriously a long time ago, but like the former TV channel RT, it does give a perspective on what Vlad Putin and his GRU wants us in the UK to think. Twatter and other "fucking news" outlets do too of course, but with more 'noise' so you can't tell what's propaganda and what isn't, whereas it's much easier to tell on LLB (and RT) because it pretty much all is
>it does give a perspective on what Vlad Putin and his GRU wants us in the UK to think
...objectively for a moment - how much time do you think Putin actually gives to consideration of what people in the UK think.
>its articles go back to just before brexit,
Brief moment of relevance for our idiocracy, but Brexit wasn't about the UK - simply a means to weaken the EU.
I wish the media and political classes would spend a lot less time perpetuating the myth of UK global relevance.
"...objectively for a moment - how much time do you think Putin actually gives to consideration of what people in the UK think."
On am individual basis, he doesn't give a toss but as a collective "whole" I suspect quite a lot because being able to shift public opinion is key to destabilising a country and isolating it, weakening it's influence and position in the world.
Also shifting public opinion of his war in Ukraine would be important to him because political will to support the victims of aggression is largely dependent on public opinion
It's easy to fall into this nihilism.
But nihilism is what allows such dark forces to win. They are only able to ascend to (and hold onto) power because large numbers of people have given up hope. By contrast, maintaining hope is what unites individuals into driven social groups that collectively have the power to change the world.
Don't give up hope. Get inspired, get active, get involved.
Another downvote, but still no explanation as to why the downvoter appears to have a problem with my post. As it seems that you maybe don't realise, it is a quote from 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Attwood and is made up from mock-Latin and is approximately translated as 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'.
I thought it made a suitable addition to Mike 125's comment and a reasonable response to heyrick's rather downbeat and depressed earlier post. Perhaps the downvoter doesn't agree, but it would be good to know why.
Perhaps I should have used the equally mock-Latin alternative? :- illegitimi non carborundum, which infers the same meaning.
Have another one for
1) being such a smart ass
2) and having such a thin skin... sorta like most Trumpians in the news.
I wish Elmo would do as his 'T' shirt says, 'Occupy Mars' with him and Trump on the first rocket. The world would be a far, far better place without them. Just sayin'...
"Another downvote, but still no explanation as to why"
I get the feeling that there's a certain sort of person that is easily triggered and when triggered starts whacking all of the downvotes. Sweary post? NO! Replied to sweary post? NO! Used a funny foreign language? NO! Trying to be a smart arse 'cos it's Latin? NO! Asking why the downvotes? NO! And so on. NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! (oh mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go...)
As long as there are more ups than downs, I wouldn't worry about it. You can't please everybody...
To be fair, once you've annoyed certain denizens of these boards, you'll always get downvoted, for even the most neutral and factual comment you can produce. If you deem to comment on any article which references Musk (or worse, Trump), in anything other than a positive and glowing light issuing effusive praise for those paragons of humanity, then expect to get down-voted in swathes. They don't seem to realise that posts here don't get promoted or demoted like they might on "X", depending on whether they align with Elmo's world-view. At least the down-votes mean those people might have read your post. Some of the words might seep in eventually.
It's exactly the aspect of human nature that they are exploiting. I believe it was Goebbels who said, "Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth" (obviously paraphrasing, because he would have said it in German for starters). This is exactly what those posters here are doing, and what is going on wholesale on Twitter, where the same opinions are repeatedly presented as fact, despite being demonstrably false. This is also why these people are absolutely losing their shit about people fleeing Twitter to Bluesky, where the same narrative is not algorithmically promoted.
Anyway, the counter to people repeating the same lies over and over again, is to repeat the truth back at them. They might not be affected, because the odds are they don't believe their own lies*, but the purpose of propaganda is not to convince yourself, it's to convince others, and it is for those people that we post eh rebuttals, and should continue to do so.
*It's usually obvious when people have started to drink their own kool-aid in this regard, because their behaviour tends to become increasingly erratic. Case in point: Elon Musk tweeting the word "Yes" repeatedly in the middle of the night. Perhaps we should have a sweepstake on which of Musk, Trump, or several others, such as Giuliani, has a massive heart attack first? Musk, from the side-effects of his (alleged) heavy ketamine habit, Trump, from his diet of foodlike substances, and so on and so forth...
You think companies such as First Essex gives a monkey about their "duty to inform the public"?
They can't even be arsed to run a barely acceptable bus service - what they currently run is shite and most of the information they give on Twatter is stuff like the vacous, content free "due to operational issues".
More like they don't care. Their attitude is like "We've put the information out there. Not our fault if you choose not to access it.". Never mind if "choosing to access" now requires an account on a toxic cesspool that many people would rather stay well clear of.
A few months back I was waiting at Leeds bus station for a Megabus which failed to appear. The coach station information screen was blank. The Megabus website "bus tracker" said it had no information about that particular journey. When I finally got home by train, I complained about the lack of information and was shirtily told that information about delays was always posted on their social media. But clearly not in the places to which all their customers have access.
Any company who uses that excuse will NOT have any of my business in the future.
More and more people are giving up social media and in particular Twatter so then insisting on using what is a rabid cesspit of racism these days is not a company/organisation that I will do business with.
It is almost as if some beancounter did a few 1+1=4000 sums and decided that if their only medium for complaints was a platform that is actively hostile to users, they could fire most of the complaints team and save money....
"Woke" would appear to be whatever the fuck you want to rail against today, doesn't it sweetie?
Being forced to acknowledge the existence of refugees fleeing for their lives? Woke.
Not being horrifically sexist or homophobic? Woke.
Recognising the existence of transexual people, and not belittling and victimising them? Woke!
Not denying the entire corpus of scientific research into climate? WOKE!
Young people wanting to be paid (proportionately) as much as baby-boomers were in the 1960s and 1970s, so that they can afford basics like food and housing? Wokey wokey woke woke woke...
Do you know what? I think I quite like this "woke" thing. I wonder what the antonym for "woke" is? Perhaps "cunt"?
It is surprising how wrong you can actually be. I would be re-thinking my sources of information if I were you. Stop reading 5th hand accounts of project 2025 :)
Consensus does not make fact. If 2 people in a group of 3 say the sky is green it doesn't make it so. And the views of the 3rd person do not become invalid as they are in the minority. As we've already gone through the biases inherent in peer review we don't need to go through that again. The ones doing the belittling are the ones who cry 'science denier' at anything that goes against the hive mind. What was amusing is that during covid the people most vociferously backing the completely deboonked false science were those who rabidly align themselves with the climate consensus.
Refugees are not the same as economic migrants. Re-focus your ire on the people smugglers. For less than the cost of the smuggling you can get into a lot of countries legally.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8d5334vmyo
As for your other points.... 50% of the population don't really appreciate being degraded to the point where you can't use the scientific term to describe them for fear of offending a tiny but oh so vocal group. Decades of work on overcoming gender stereotypes along with decades of work on fundamental rights has been erased in the name of woke. Lived experience of millions of humans is being deleted and healthcare is being put at risk for fear of uttering certain words.
Nothing says tolerance like a man beating up an old woman for daring to voice her opinion.
I was going to read your response in full, but I got to the point where you mentioned project 2025, which I don't think I have ever mentioned, once, in this forum, and realised that you're arguing against a shibboleth in your own head.
I don't think I'll bother with the rest of your culture-war talking points. Free speech includes the right to ignore such nonsense.
Surely "wokeism", if it ever were a real word (and my spell-checker agrees with me in thinking it isn't), would, like other "isms" such as racism and sexism, refer to discrimination against "wokes", whatever they are. Since you seem to be an expert on this subject, perhaps you could enlighten us, as you seem to be "against the wokes" yourself, so surely, you have a type in your original post when you say "as opposed to"?
Or, perhaps, you are just a childish pillock, who thinks it's great to discriminate against others? In which case, I'm sure you're quite happy in the cultural desert that Twitter has become.
> They still haven't noticed that it is, these days, rather hostile to those who don't have an account?
On this side of the pond, it's usually Faecesbook
I got shocked pikachu at a restaurant where their menu QR code[1] went to a FB page I couldn't see because I don't have an account.
On the other hand, the restaurant only lasted 3 months, so I don't think I was missing anything.
Similarly on Google Maps, a FB link for the business is at least an instant indication of their lack of competence.
[1] Don't get me started
I would have walked out of the restaurant as soon as I saw that you had to use some shite app or QR code to get you food. Fair enough if it was pointed out at time of booking, that is by huge full web page or being verbally told of it at booking, not some tiny text somewhere on the website. Then I would have found a more sensible place to eat.
Places like these, run, no doubt, by some wanky hipsters so fucking dumb that they can't see just how stupid it is to make your customers install some crap on their phone just to pay for their meal deserve to go under.
They still haven't noticed that it is, these days, rather hostile to those who don't have an account?"
Yes, when I was reading the article, it crossed my mind that of the couple million no longer interacting with Xitter, what is the reason? How was Ofcoms question worded? I used to occasional read Twitter (no account) when articles linked to it, but now I don't bother because so often, as a non-subscriber I either can't read it at all or can only see a small part of it. Facebook seems to have done the same. Links to Reddit on the other hand, are fully accessible read-only, which may account for some of the uptick. A search result leading to Reddit might still be useful compared to Xitter/Facebook and people, especially non-subscribers, have taken note.
I first signed up to Twitter to follow the register SPB when they came to Darwin to report on the solar challenge. Didn't use it for years. Started using it again to follow news out of Ukraine. Blocked Musk a while ago though. Couldn't put up with his childish drivel.
>I first signed up to Twitter to follow the register SPB when they came to Darwin to report on the solar challenge. Didn't use it for years. Started using it again to follow news out of Ukraine. Blocked Musk a while ago though. Couldn't put up with his childish drivel.
Its surprising that despite being blocked and/or muted that the app isn't feeding you the latest ramblings from the South African ket addict. I deleted the app (and my account) when it decided that I absolutely had to hear from him, Tommy Ten Names and others of his ilk.
The good news is that sensible services and organisations and individuals have made the move to BlueSky, so as organisations transition across, what used to be Twitter can pretty much be found on BlueSky now.
The active population there has jumped significantly. I have followed various legal and science people over the years, and the vast majority gave their Twitter account the big red X. I'm only on Twitter now to check status updates; I've erased my tweets, I've unfollowed everyone, and nothing exists there anymore. It's felt very liberating to do that.
The decline co-incides with a change of ownership after Musk bought the business for $44 billion in October 2022, and it became a doyen of free speech - whether that includes more hateful or more honest content depends on the users' perspective.
meh... I'm not sure 'Free Speech' means what you, or Elon, think it means. :)
X's more 'Saying stuff that Elon doesn't dislike' these days isn't it?
Or has he stopped banning people for taking the piss or telling everyone where he is?
Free speech is not the same as being able to say absolute rubbish. If the powers that be, forbid you from telling other people at what temperature water freezes, you do not free speech. If people complain, block your post social media posts saying that water freezes at 1,000,000 degrees, that is their freedom from having to listen to you. If then are forced to listen to it, then again it is not free speech.
That's easy at the moment.... Mar-a-Largo with his lips firmly attached to El Trumpo's ass
Then he'll be taking up residency in the White House now that Mrs T is not going to leave Fla or NYC. After all, he calls himself '1st Buddy'.
What we want to know is... Does Elmo cheat at golf like his master.
My feed was full of tech-bros showing AI videos of humanoid robots pushing a plough or cutting wheat with a scythe and saying how this will revolutionise farming!
Whilst ignoring the last 3,000+ years of development in agriculture that makes such humanoid robots slow, expensive and redundant, because, surprise, surprise, the humanoid form isn't the most efficient way to work a field - as farmers and inventors have known for millennia and have come up with more efficient tools...
Tech-bros: We'll send out a humanoid robot to cut the wheat one row at a time!
John-Deere & Co: We've been using combine harvesters to cut the wheat sort, out the chaff and does it across dozens of rows at a time...
Tech-bros: We'll send out a humanoid robots to fertilize the fields!
Amazone & Co: We've been using long armed fertilizer spreaders that can cover over 50M in a single pass for years...
Tech-bros: We'll send out humanoid robots to pick asparagus, as it is so difficult to automate.
I've given up on X...
Dutch Researchers & German inventors: We've had an automated asparagus picker for nearly half a decade...
I spoke to one of our teachers a bit back, when we were looking at paying for a service to scan homework for AI content.
He said it wasn't a problem, because teachers should know their students well enough to be able to tell if they've written the answers, or just copied and pasted from an online source,
Seeing as the use of AI is impossible for external examinations, the kids are only cheating themselves anyway.
When I was in college I spent weeks on an assignment, only for my teacher to fail me because he thought I'd copied it from Wikipedia. I appealed and had the board ask him to point to the article I copied from. Needless to say I got a nice, shiny A for my trouble. I don't know how students would appeal in that situation if they're accused of using AI.
>>That's a worryingly high percentage.
It's AI so it must be True!
The default ,safe, position being "It's AI so I must check the AI output, taking almost as much time as it would to generate the information myself" which is, apparently, too much work for 18% of people.
Used to be a saying, back in the days of paper reports, "Don't worry about the content, feel the thickness" - seems like the contemporary adherents to that mantra are driving the generative AI models we all know and love.
Never mind the quality, feel the width I had almost forgotten this series. Probably not going to pass muster these days I suspect along with Alf Garnet (Until Death Do Us Part.)
I suppose on the left side of the pond twatter, twat by analogy with swat rhyme with rat but on the other side it's rot.
To be fair, I'd not trust the output of a lot more than 18% of people, and that 18% would definitely be included in that.
I'm more worried about children using it for schoolwork, because the point of schoolwork isn't to produce answers to assignments, it's to learn the material those assignments cover by doing them. The result of this will be that children don't learn at school, and an undereducated population is a danger to everyone (see current politics just about everywhere). On these grounds alone, I reckon the access to "AI" by children should be controlled in a similar way that access to alcohol and pornography (nominally) are.
Minor correction:
The point of schoolwork is to allow students demonstrate that they understand the material they've been taught well enough to produce CORRECT, WELL THOUGHT-OUT and WELL PRESENTED answers.
This is why any test that results in a mechanical response such as selecting tick-boxes is really just a waste of time compared with requiring students to write, essay-type answers: at best it can only check rote learning of isolated facts. Tick-box exams cannot show whether a student actually UNDERSTANDS the material they supposedly learnt: all tickbox exams really do is to make the examiners and test markers lives easier.
> The point of schoolwork is to allow students demonstrate that they understand the material they've been taught well enough to produce CORRECT, WELL THOUGHT-OUT and WELL PRESENTED answers.
Sure as hell wasn't the case at my school. If I didn't regurgitate the canned answers using the canned phrasing, it was wrong.
"Sure as hell wasn't the case at my school. If I didn't regurgitate the canned answers using the canned phrasing, it was wrong."
That is ***Exactly*** how the exams for many American companies 'Qualifications' work !!!
If you slightly change the wording or clarify it in any way it is considered 'wrong' ... this is easy to do as the original wording is often unclear and/or ambiguous in its 'original' american english.
This is why I do not consider *many* of these 'Qualification' to be worth much as the ability to remember text blindly without proving that the information is understood in its own right is not very useful. !!!
[Yes, I know this is unfair to the people that *DO* understand the information BUT how do I tell which is which if the test criteria is *apparently* memory ONLY !!!???]
:)
>the point of schoolwork _is_ to produce answers - or really just to pass exams.
The point of school work is to train people to produce the required answers in the required form at the required deadline ready for their future employers
Now excuse me I have TPS report covers to check
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I suspect majority of the largely dyscalculic world would recognise a real number even if one were to bite them.
You might get the odd genius that recognises per cent as so many per hundred and a veritable Fields Medallist amongst the great unwashed that recognises a decimal fraction when it's at home.
Real numbers, even the constructive reals are, if nothing else, counterintuitive especially when you try and count the blighters which probably put Cantor in institutions for those in need of an extended wee lie down.
I couldn't find the OP for this less/fewer thread but the distinction is probably now only of interest to the snarkish vulturati.
The problem is that so called AI, as it is termed, has no concept of 'knowing' !!!
It is nothing more than a 'clever pattern matcher' and this means it cannot ever reach a 'Don't Know' answer.
GenAI simply matches a pattern by whatever means it deems useful, this includes 'completing' the pattern by making stuff up [Hallucination].
AI, in this case, should be more correctly termed 'Quasi-augmented Search'... 'quasi' because the augmentation is incomplete/flawed !!!
:)
>18% trusting the output is 18% higher than it should be.
Depends on what AI you are talking about.
If its reading your cancer smear test it's several times better than a human expert. Diagnosing a heart heart problem from EKG better than a doctor. For abdominal ultrasound generally better than a doctor for a male patient, slightly worse for female (although I worked in the field a few years ago so its probably much better now)
Most signal processing tasks, like detecting a radar target among surface scatter - many times better than a human.
Well, the article was talking about "generative AI". You're talking about highly specialised machine learning which (probably) produces "I don't know" answers sometimes, and the answers they do produce are (generally) looked at by experts in the field and followed up with confirmation tests.
My money is on that sort of pattern-matching "AI" producing a confidence interval as a result, and those that are very high numbers (say, 99-100%) being automatically accepted, and those that are indeterminate (say 50%-70%) being flagged for review by a human. I'd be very doubtful about whether they are allowed to provide "answers" with no human interaction at all, as they are essentially tools for automating repetitive tasks, such as reviewing a large number of slides, where inattention blindness sets in in humans.
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Dip me in chocolate and call me a Mars bar
Given this started with Space Karen's hobby (Twatter) and the blighter was all in on Mars reminded me of another line of Australian confectionery which is exhibited in The Disgusting Food Museum" Malmö, Sweden namely the Musk Stick.
Most non Australians, presumably anyone whose taste receptors have been not been annihilated by Vegemite, find that the pink, sickenly sweet, overpoweringly musk flavoured confectionery rods totally disgusting. Hard to believe they weren't named after the twatmeister himself but they have afflicted the antipodes since at least 1900.
Although looking at the other exhibits in the Malmö museum Musk Sticks along with Vegemite are very much also rans amongst this rogues' gallery of what no sane person could ever consider bringing within cooee of their mouth.
For May 2022, Ofcom measured X's adult reach at 26.8 million…
How do they come up with this? Twitter always was a niche service that rose to prominence largely through the combination of celebrities and journalists. I don't know anyone who's been using it seriously for years as other forums are much better suited for the jobs: celebrities have largely moved to Instagram, niche fan clubs have Reddit or similar, which really only leaves the codependency of politicians and journalists, and a couple of companies who failed to get the memo that it was never a good medium for announcements.
>I don't know anyone who's been using it seriously for years as other forums are much better suited for the jobs
It's still unfortunately useful for things like traffic alerts.
Our local transit does have an email subscribe which will email you if a services didn't run - but often several hours later and even then you have to be constantly checking your email. They do Xit out a message instantly.
In theory they could have their own masterdon server just for announcing delays, but I would end up having to subscribe to 3 different transit authorities in 6 boroughs as well as federal and provincial. If only we could live in a world of universal peace and harmony where different levels of government in the same metro area could work together for the same people - but that's probably utopian nonsense.
Tell that to me mate who was convicted that "AI is real!" and did almost everything on his phone via voice commands. He had swallowed the bullshaite whole until he met me and I made him confront his own delusions regardless of the fact that he sees himself as a "techie"; he is now in the middle of de-Googlefying his life after meeting me :p
Generative AI's use of X, which is as direct and good a conduit of sensitive information and timely communication with Elon Musk RATs* as there has never ever before been,is a very public convenience, which has the possibility, and therefore then every likely probability of being an extremely private party troubling facility ...... for the spilling of secret beans, virile virtual seeds and virulent viral feeds ..... HyperManic 0days which ideally be akin to and/or indistinguishable from Majestic MAJIC.
Who Dares Win Wins ..... Per Ardua ad Mega Meta Data Astra.
* ....... Remote Access Trojans
most of the world had enough of this hype. X going down is no surprise when one comes in with "sinking" messages... And A"I" is known to be far from intelligent, and only useful for mundane tasks like typical beginner stuff in programming. No A"I" could ever solve my problems, or uttered complete bullshit. Each time I consulted the A"I": Does not work this way, I have to do it differently - and without A"I" since it is not creative enough.
have you ever considered the fact that having interlinked and out-linkered your sum existence on the web, that responses you get from AI are those that are tailored exactly to the desired result?
Maybe there is an AI profile of you, like the Google ID that tracks people. And that profile gives you what you want/need
I'm stunned its even that high. I can't think of a single acquaintance who's said to me "look what I did with genAI". Maybe I live on some sort of exalted plane...
Youngsters I can understand dabbling, they have essays to write after all...
It probably depends on what you mean by "used".
I've *tried* it, just to see what experience is like, so that I don't feel like too much of an old fart when others talk about it. I wouldn't say that I've *used* it though, because I definitely haven't used it *for* anything.
Aren't all the rest of the social media platforms doing this as well, including Bluesky, Facebook, etc al? Seems odd to point out (repeatedly) everything wrong with one platform and not others as well - unless of course you take into account that El Reg has a considerable bias given all of the other skewed articles.
Don't get me wrong: Using people's data for AI is not something that I want to see for privacy reasons alone.
The article is about the how long the British spend on line, what services they use and whether they trust AI.
What are you talking about? Doing what as well? Hemorrhaging users? Letting bots run wild? Silencing lefties and promoting fascists?
I'll chime in with this as well: Unlike X, or anything run by Meta (FB / Instagram / Threads / WhatsApp), BlueSky has been quite clear that they will not use any data for "AI" training; that's part of the reason for the flood of users from X, because Musk changed their terms to explicitly say that everything posted there will be slurped up and used to train "Grok". They can't guarantee that nobody else will be using their APIs to slurp up data to train AIs, of course, because the whole point is that it's an open platform for which people can build their own clients, via those APIs. I'd imagine that if someone were doing so, however, on a large scale, it would become obvious, and the handle associated with that slurping would get put on block lists pretty quickly (or just banned).
Reading the comments on here it's clear some people have no idea how mainstream media has programmed them. The constant accusations of Twitter as being "extreme right" is self-defence by the actual extreme right which lives in the mainstream. Yes Twitter has right-wing views, maybe some real extreme-right, I don't see those because the algorithm doesn't seem to pick them for me. If it's picking them for you, perhaps you should contemplate why. The point is Twitter is reasonably free speech now as opposed to being controlled by the CIA for the benefit of the deep state. So, if you don't like free speech which means you hear opinions you don't agree with, then keep away. Most will however come to regret not wanting truly free speech, but if you don't there is already a home for you in a place called China. Lot's of tech so if you can learn the language there'll be a place for you.
To give an example of what's been done. Look at the attacks on Trump. Is he a perfect human no, but do you really believe Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are better for the US or even the world? If you do, you are already lobotomised by the mainstream. The man who wants to stop wars vs those that want them? Really? Do you actually think Putin (or Trump) is Hitler? Have you ever listened to these awful people first hand? Why do you think politicians, in countries with large debt are so keen to fund war? It's because they get a slice of those billions, not directly but by very well laundered, seemingly legit routes. Why do you think top politicians end being very wealthy without having run a business or getting paid at that level?
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