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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#651

Post by smokel »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #442
smokel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 500 years ago, what were people worried about? It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed. Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

I think there is a difference in the shear density and speed of information. With modern news and social media apps, information can be pushed into someone in a way that just wasn't possible that long ago.

That may be true, but I'm not entirely convinced about the difference.

Just moving your head around in a forest also gives an amazing amount of input. And if you're being chased by a tiger through a jungle, you cross about 1,000 different species of plants and small animals.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#652

Post by duckilicious »

Mediocrity was here a long time before AI. In every field. And most people don't care. But yeah, it might get worse now that LLM output is also mediocre and they enable us to produce much more mediocre products.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#653

Post by Llamamoe »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612
gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

Thanks so much for this comment. It's something I've generally felt, but it really didn't crystallize in my head until I read your comment. As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optim…

When we imagined phones, we imagined global communication and building friendship. Instead, we got skinner boxes designed to addict us to a constant stream of algorithm-served content.

When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.

When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.

When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.

When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.

When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#654

Post by mierz00 »

sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #120

It comes down to what is "popular" culture. When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community. Now we have reality…

I don’t buy into this narrative.

Every generation has some form of “kids were better when I grew up” and there has been a very long history of kids not respecting others, your generation included.

Things are changing as they always do, but when it comes down to it humans have not changed that much.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#655

Post by alecco »

buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

> Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation.

They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.

But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#656

Post by Ekaros »

robotnikman wrote: post #488
thewebguyd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now. I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job…

It makes me wonder if there are still those "bike shop" jobs to be found in tech. I feel like I missed out on the golden years of the tech age where I would have found my curiosity and interests satisfied by my job, but maybe there might be a few niches out there somewhere...

I think some of the indie game studios have this. Think of team behind Clair Obscur. Not that it also isn't very hard place with lot of risk and on average more meagre rewards...

Re: The Who Cares Era

#657

Post by ruszki »

WalterBright wrote: post #214
layer8 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no contradiction between stocks going up and things being mediocre due to focus on short-term profits.

Looks like a contradiction to me. If you're sacrificing the long term for the short term, your stock isn't going up.

GameStop teaches us, that there is no causality link between performance and stock prices.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#658

Post by Ekaros »

Too wrote: post #636
mycall wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell, money is the root of our evil. I bet there are some 19th century books about this.

On the other hand, not paying with money for quality content is breeding the even worse cancer of shallow ad-driven content. Where the only thing that matters now is enough of an illusion to generate a click, horizontally scaled with AI-slop to trawl coverage of every possible search term.

Success of online advertising model seems to have destroyed a lot. It is now so bad that even if you pay you get the advertisements... So you end up with worst of the both worlds...

Re: The Who Cares Era

#659

Post by drw85 »

gecko6 wrote: post #399

CS Lewis on the dangers of caring too much: "It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do for…

I think there are different types of 'caring'. Of course you can't care about everything and everyone. but you should have some things in life that you care about.

Many people nowadays don't. Their job sucks and they don't care about it, they have no relationships, no real interests. They just distract themselves with meaningless things they don't actually care about. They watch videos/shows/streams they don't really care about. They play games they don't really care about. They eat food, but don't care about it. And they don't feel any motivation for anything anymore.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#660

Post by DavidPiper »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #578
e-topy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. Just thought about something: There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines vs word (took me a while to come up with an example, essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so…

> typing machines vs word That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do . This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds. In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd…

> but the work they did did not go away

I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care.

We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point).

These tools operate with or without time and effort from another non-specialist person. In the case that another human needs to do SOME work they didn't have to previously, this is effectively the definition of overwork in the presence of the same expectations.

This other person must now be the executor of whatever that work is because hiring a specialist in that area does not make financial sense.

And so gradually we erode the quality of all the intersectional work 15% (for example) at a time, while adding a small amount of work to the remaining (fewer) people.

Now maybe we can build a tool that is 99.9% the quality of a human for negligible cost. But it still doesn't take very many multiplications of 99.9% with itself to end up with shit.

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