51–60 of 102 posts
I agree with the article fully, but: > These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
Food trucks are all the rage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe. But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.
It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary. Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as poten…
From the same article:
“Do not rely too much on your own judgment.”
“human editors and writers often use em dashes”
Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise…
Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…
> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, eith…
Connecting to SSH seems like something a "power user" should be able to learn but not necessarily know already (probably more likely they know what a VPN is)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely basically because the cut off for atdt being any use to most users was mid 1990s. I still like the fact that it is still being used millions of times per day by cell phones. DNS and SSH were/are things 'techie' people know. I can assure you most people had no idea what their IP was or what a DNS was. Being the "hey my computer is acting kinda slow can you look at it" guy. It felt like they actively sought…
What I'm saying is that being a 'power user' is not a static thing, it's relative. It changes and evolves (or downgrades) over time. But most importantly, and what the author missed, is that it works both ways. I know how to connect to a BBS, but I was literally paralysed by the fact that there is no LAN game in Counter-Strike 2 . Where is LAN?! Why do I need a Steam account for every player to play with friends sitt…
There's an attempt to deny the need for IT knowledge and expertise at every level, Big Tech does it out of self-interest, while most others do it out of ignorance. They often claim, "Oh, it only takes a few minutes or days on your own; just a couple of clicks and you can do everything." Yet, those who say this don't actually know what they're talking about and refuse to even try to prove their own theory.
The outcome is even worse: nowadays, doing it yourself is a struggle even when you have the right skills. All recent software is built to be unmanageable because there's no operation/infra vision. Don't even get me started on documentation; everyone talks about the need for a "documentation culture" yet what actually gets documented ranges from nothing to total garbage (basically text that's useless unless you feed it to an LLM and hope it can make some sense of it).
To make matters worse, standard hardware is getting more and more expensive, first it was graphics cards, then RAM, and now NVMEs, with the result that many people simply don't want to or can't afford to buy, so they're literally living on someone else's computers even if they don't like it. This is especially true for students, who are at the best stage of their lives for learning and who won't have the time or energy to do it later on.
To complete the picture, the business model just isn't sustainable; no matter how much is invested, a real digital evolution isn't possible while living on the computers of four giants limited by their own services, and this implies that a social collapse awaits us regardless.
For me, the solution is managing to have enough leverage so that we can push for mandatory FLOSS and open hardware de jure in response, in order to limit the damage and geopolitical upheavals who push anyone to relocalize, which necessarily implies starting over on a small scale. I see something coming: Nostr, Meshtastic, the Fediverse, the rise of self-hosters and their average age show that there's still an active group of people who want a different world. But they are few and far between, burdened by significant technical debt in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile,and that's exactly where things need to change.
The problems caused by centralization, from various companies getting burned by relying on giant third-party providers, to banking scandals driving crypto (not stablecoins), to the need for resilience that requires cutting down on SPOF might actually make a difference. I hope it'll be enough, and I hope anyone who gets it does their part to spread that understanding while we still can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary. Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as poten…
> Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing From the same article: “Do not rely too much on your own judgment.” “human editors and writers often use em dashes”
It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.
> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, eith…
> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. I feel like when I was twenty two I would have been very surprised if more than a couple of my peers knew this stuff.
DNS is a phone book, I think!
But yeah, maybe "bad examples" by the author.
The one that really confuses me is this, though:
> You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
Sorry, what are you saying? Software exists to unzip files. It used to be a "dedicated app" like WinZip, 7zip, WinRAR, etc. Now it's built into Windows. Or you use the 'unzip' command in Linux.
Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise…
But my kids call any internet connection WiFi. My wife didn't understand why she couldn't print with the WiFi switch off (back when we had switches). And every time I try to tell them "how the internet flows", I take them to the hotspot and tell them what WiFi is, how the UTP cable goes to the modem and the fiber goes into the ground and somewhere it gets information from some other computer. And I tell them why they have less issues with our local Minecraft server then when he gets invited to a worlds on someone's Playstation across town (in Bugrock).
It's tiring in a way, even more so for people around me. And still, it also brings me many nice things.