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Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you placing your neck under that boot is a free choice. I admit, sometimes a little tricky to avoid, but a free choice still. As far as I know, there is always an option but please correct me if I am wrong. With that said I think technology overall has become increasingly worse over the years in some ways. God, do I miss a TV without an OS.

Nah its not. You dont have a lot of free choice here, and your options are very severely biased. Its a bit like the old christian thing where you are free to choose, but if you dont choose JC you go to hell...

But you don't go to hell, the consequence isn't real.

So when you bring it back to big tech, you've defeated your own argument.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?

#53
post #16

I just finished a call with a friend who is a power user of Gemini, to great benefit. I delivered a PC with tensor cores for when he wants to do more locally. AI is a critically helpful and growing presence in his career. Conversely, I spent an hour one day trying to prevent Gmail from puking text onto every new email I begin. It turned out to be a Chrome feature and scrapping Chrome is the only way to stop it. Past…

Is Notepad++ an option?

It's not a good fit for most of the users I support. NP++'s array of options are things they'll never use; for them, that would be clutter to filter out.

Eventually I'll find a suitable replacement. I found one for paint if it can be trusted.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?

#54
post #50
post #34

I hope that what comes from the LLM (I can't call it AI) revolution is a serious society-wide look and discussion about the false economy we currently live in and some ideas to change it. Let's face it. Huge portions of the population are performing unnecessary jobs in order to sustain themselves. Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially),…

> Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially Can you provide some examples of this to anchor your argument? I can sometimes come up with a few niche jobs, but not really that many overall. I can also see a lot of bloat in large orgs, but those companies are typically providing big value somewhere. I just want to understand which jobs we're t…

Are you kidding? Most products and services on the market are tat. They serve no real purpose (regardless of whether they happen to have customers). It would be easier to list the few things which actually do have value.

If you go into a supermarket, there's only a fraction of aisles that are devoted to food worth eating (unprocessed or lightly processed, providing nutritional value). The rest is 100s of types of unnecessary and mostly destructive junk food and alcohol. If you walk into any shopping district or center, only a handful of businesses are ever selling anything with real value and purpose. The rest is superficial and if it were removed from the high street or never existed in the first place, nobody would miss it. The digital market is at least a little less destructive environmentally, but is still crowded with mostly pointless apps and software.

People always bring up supply and demand, but that doesn't negate the argument that these products are unnecessary, unsustainable and destructive. Add to that, they are often predatory and prey (or the marketing preys) on peoples weaknesses and insecurities.

For every one of these companies selling fast fashion clothes that fall apart after a handful of uses, shoes too impractical for daily use or sportswear, expensive hygiene products which hinge mostly on the way they are displayed in the store, and a million variations of CRUD apps for tracking water consumption and a myriad of other things you could just record in a note, whole teams of people are working away in jobs to produce, market and provide these unnecessary things. They're all polluting the environment (either through industrial production, energy use etc.) and peoples minds (for example, Instagram has been highly damaging to young girls self-esteem and similar services are causing unprecedented mental decline in their userbases), and unsustainable, because 9 times out of 10 all of these products and services are flashes in the pan that will be dead or out of trend (increasingly fast these days).

The only justification a lot of this stuff has is that it gives people employment and their livelihoods. Sometimes that element forces people to be okay with abetting something they fundamentally don't like. One of the largest employers in my local city is Sky Bet (a gambling company). Every single person (hundreds of employees) that works there is propping up a "service" which destroys peoples lives.

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