CM30

Same reason people watch any streamers; they either enjoy the streamer's personality, the games they play, or both.

For a lot of people, it's basically like watching one of your friends play a game you enjoy, and a way to become part of a community of others interested in the same thing.

Meanwhile in other cases it's a matter of just not having the time/energy/skill to play the games they're covering, but being interested in seeing how they pan out. For example, I often watch people play extremely difficult mods of games like Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 and New Super Mario Bros Wii. Yes, I could easily go ahead and do the same thing, and I do play mods of those games which are a lot easier...

But I find a good player's experience of these games fun to watch, and don't feel like spending hours on every level trying to match that myself.

Hmm, I don't think the art/media examples really work as well here compared to the scientific discovery ones. Whether a piece of art or fiction does well doesn't really correlate that heavily to any objective form of quality in that work, let alone something that can be entirely replaced by automation.

I don't see how AI means that something like Hollow Knight: Silksong or Donkey Kong Bananza wouldn't do well. What is the actual reasoning behind say, the next indie game or movie not being appreciated because AI can design or create games or movies?

Honestly, it's kinda overdue. If a normal shop or business sold as many counterfeit or illegal good as AliExpress (or Amazon), they'd be shut down and the owners/board charged. The fact these companies seem to be able to just get away with having no quality control at all and ignoring every law in sight because they're eCommerce 'marketplaces' is absolutely insane to me.

Hopefully something similar happens to Amazon as well.

Honestly, the reasons could mostly be summed up as "we already used WordPress for the blog, we now need to add a shop onto the existing site, might as well extend the former rather than rebuild or maintain two systems".

Alternatively, folks that aren't particularly technical hacking together a solution that works 'well enough' for what they need, and agencies that only have the interest/capacity to use one platform deciding that each and every customer needs to use that platform.

If you're a skilled programmer WordPress is probably not a good solution for your issues, but if you're more of a designer or hobbyist that wants a somewhat hacky extendable blog system it's pretty easy to use.

Fair enough. The way they added Gutenberg was a complete mess. Like yeah, the idea is a good one, and the editor can be pretty good if used correctly. But the way it was built was certainly not ideal, and was probably the worst of all worlds. Felt like someone saw SquareSpace and co, thought WordPress was falling behind and decided to push for those features to be added as quickly and inefficiently as possible.

Eh, I feel like the issue with this logic is that being technically savvy and having interesting things to say aren't really that heavily correlated. Plenty of people are incredibly knowledgeable about non-technical fields and have tons of things they could say about them, but aren't technical enough to setup a website (or in many cases, edit videos/run a YouTube channel/etc either).

Meanwhile there are also plenty of tech folks that have zero empathy or interest in quality that can easily get past any technical barrier you put in front of them, like the more talented folks at companies like Anthropic or Meta.

Making things difficult to set up tech wise doesn't select for intelligence or skill or creativity, it selects for people that work in tech as their day job.

People like having a WYSIWYG editor, being able to update their posts in the browser, having comments and being able to use plugins. They're also not particularly skilled with the terminal/commands, and a lot of hosts provide a one-click install setup for scripts like WordPress.

It's just because they don't want to break anything in existing sites, sorta like how Microsoft doesn't generally want to break programs on Windows. So, changes are fairly incremental, and the quality is about what you'd expect from a piece of software that's decades old with no plan for what happens if it got this far.

But what do you do in that situation? If they change the structure too much, then either they make it impossible to upgrade an existing site, or potentially break a whole bunch of things said sites depend on (mostly themes and plugins). And that ease of upgrading is likely what stops a lot of people just migrating away to other solutions.

I mean, I'm not surprised. If you have an easy way to get 'information' about any topic, then you're going to be a lot more confident that you know everything you need to. I suspect just having the internet and Wikipedia available had a similar effect in the past, just on a smaller and less dangerous scale.

Having to stop, realise you don't know and need to put work into looking up the answer probably does a lot to moderate overconfidence.

Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.

True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.

Perhaps if employers were better at identifying people's skills from their CVs, they wouldn't need to use AI to rewrite them. A lot of the time, it feels like if your profile doesn't match 100% of the keywords in the job description, it's just automatically denied on sight, even if you've clearly got the ability to do the job. Heck, a lot of the time these systems can't identify synonyms or recognise when a skill is blatantly obvious from the description (like knowledge of Git meaning they have knowledge of Version Control).

People are relying on these things because hiring systems are rejecting their applications otherwise.

As for the AI generated portfolios and Git repos... that's not quite the same thing, but even then it's because expectations for employees seem to have become rather ridiculous in recent years. It's apparently not enough that you've got experience working in a field, you're expected to be obsessed with it in your free time too, and document every little thing you ever worked on online for all and sundry to see.

I try to keep my tab count to a reasonable number, and close tabs I'm not using on a regular basis.

Depends how serious the consequences are. A normal scrape which doesn't damage either car much or cause any real injury? That's something for insurance companies to figure out. A major accident that kills or seriously injures someone (especially due to drunk or distracted driving)? Someone's probably getting a hefty fine and points on their license at minimal, more likely prison.

If a self-driving car gets into an accident that kills a pedestrian or other driver, someone's going to have to take responsibility for that.

It's definitely been buggier for a while now. It's already been an issue for a decade or so due to the "release minimum viable product, fix problems with patches/updates model" (especially in the world of video games), but the rise of AI has only made the issue more apparent. Microsoft is the biggest example here (with Windows 11 seemingly screwing up something massive in every update), but other companies like Google and Meta haven't been as reliable either.

I think there are a few reasons to note here:

1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them.

2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public.

3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.

Apparently Firefox has a config option to disable this:

browser.theme.dark-private-windows. Set to false, and you're set.

I think there are a few things to consider here.

First, when a human screws up, it's obvious who takes the blame for the mistake. If an autonomous vehicle does, who pays the fine/goes the prison? Putting the blame on the owner feels like it takes away a lot of the incentives to buy a autonomous vehicle, but I suspect the companies making these things don't want to be the ones paying out for their mistakes, and will probably lobby to prevent it if possible.

Secondly, this isn't just a vehicle thing, it's a technology thing in general. For better or worse, the expectations for safety and security are much higher for new devices than they are for existing ones, or for manual human driven solutions. Some of this is definitely driven or inspired by vested interests (like how pollution and safety regulations for renewable energy sources and nuclear plants are higher than for coal/gas power plants, despite the latter being worse in almost every way), but a lot of it is just humans being deeply skeptical of new tech and major social changes, even if the benefits of the new system clearly outweigh those of the existing one.

Depends on the niche. For your niche of choice (energy, power generation and energy markets), I'd look for industry publications (both magazines and news sites), corporate press releases and news, academic papers on related topics, discussions on any energy industry specific forums or discussion sites, etc. Honestly, that's how I'd keep up with more traditional industries.

But that's an industry I imagine has an older audience and probably relies on more traditional sources of information. For something like a video game series (or game development project), musician/band, film series/TV show, book series, etc, my method of keeping up with the news would be more heavily centred around social media posts, subreddits, Discord servers, etc.

I do think it'd be useful if AI generated content was pointed out here, given that it usually indicates a lot less investment in the work than if someone made it themself.

But I'm not sure there's a great way to handle it. Flagging works as AI generated is good in theory, but it's become a bit of a witch hunt online, with plenty of human created pieces getting wrongly flagged as AI generated due to using em dashes in text, having the hands drawn awkwardly in artwork, or using other stylistic traits that AI content overuses. I fear half the site could end up flagged as AI-generated, just because a lot of people are hyper-vigilant about such content and assume the worst for everything.

At the same time, there's not really much of a way to incentivise writers to flag their own articles here, since revealing that a work is created by AI is a great way to both kill your credibility and drive away about half the people who'd otherwise enjoy it. So, if it's up to the authors, the incentives are for them to lie through their teeth.

I also don't really trust many AI detection tools, since they usually use AI themselves and misflag a lot of content.

But I don't think the site should change that much. Maybe add an option for AI content in the flagging system, and assume good faith for submissions in general. I'd rather not see the site get too paranoid or restrictive over this stuff.

Honestly, I've always thought that whether frameworks or vanilla JavaScript are better is very context dependent. If you're working on a complex UI where keeping everything consistent and understandable without a framework would be hell (like Google Docs or Gmail), then a framework like React is preferable. If you're working with a simple website that needs minimum interactivity, then vanilla JavaScript is probably the better tool for the job.

The issue is that much of the time, people seem to choose tools based on convenience/past experience, not whether it's actually the right solution to their current issue.

Have to be honest, while I like the concept of these services, I've never really found the motivation to use them. If I'd came across Neocities in the 90s or 00s I'd have been all over it, but it's hard to justify today when I'm already paying for web hosting elsewhere. It's like, if a more powerful solution exists elsewhere, I struggle to work within the limitations of a more restrictive one.

Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family.

That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.

Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.

Eh, somewhat. There are definitely more articles and projects created by AI tools nowadays, and those just feel uninteresting to me.

But at the same time, I have to question whether I'd feel the same way about any other era of Hacker News. Like on Reddit, a small percentage of submissions will interest me on any given day. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the others are bad, they're just not for me.

I do have to wonder if you're mostly just noticing that the majority of content here simply won't be something you're interested in, just like in any other community.

Probably a week or two ago, since I clicked on a Google result that led there. Don't think I've ever specifically seeked out Stack Overflow though, especially not in the last five years.

Not too surprising unfortunately. LinkedIn is all about the hustle, and for most people that's about putting as little as effort as possible into 'content' you hope will pay off. Mix a platform known for the get rich quick mindset with a piece of tech designed to make creating things as effortless as possible, and you get LinkedIn.

That said, I think there are two things worth noting about that site:

1. The content was mostly slop before AI became a thing, AI has just increased the amount of it tenfold. 2. It's still not the worst content on the site. As one check of LinkedIn Lunatics shows all too well, there's a depressingly large number of people who seem to treat the site like a personal diary, and rant about their political views on what's supposed to be a business focused network.

At this point, LinkedIn is basically Twitter/X wearing a suit and tie.

As for the other sites mentioned... yeah, those track too. Medium and Reddit were already being gamed like there was no tomorrow before AI entered the picture, now it's just become even easier for the parasites to flood them with garbage. Twitter/X is basically the wild west at this point, and Substack seems to appeal pretty heavily to the types of people that absolutely love AI and everything about it.

I haven't exactly counted it, but I'd say I've almost certainly have access to more than 1MB of my own writing. I've written articles about a variety of the topics for the last decade or two, posted far more on forums than is probably healthy, and have an untold number of my own emails in my inbox.

Only 1 at the moment. A media platform for posting articles that you could charge people access for, sorta like Medium or Substack. What I realised pretty quickly was the following:

1. Getting paid to pay for text based on content was extremely difficult, and there's a reason things like Blendle didn't work out.

2. UK investment into B2C startups is minimal compared to in the US, since the former tends to be a lot more... substainable than the moonshot focused investment landscape in Silicon Valley.

3. While I had some experience as a web developer at various agencies, I wasn't really technically skilled enough to implement the kind of features and systems I'd need for a system like this.

Use it to figure out faster than light travel and efficient space transport. The economic benefits of being able to quickly move resources between Earth and space would be immense, and open a lot of new opportunities.

This is one reason I'm kinda fond of a lot of fan media related communities. Since things like fanfiction, mods and fan games are in legally murky territory, you can't really make money off of them, especially not directly.

It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved.

Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.

I feel like it's more than a handful of areas, though I'll grant there are plenty where academia or mainstream media outlets are the most reliable/trusted source. If you're talking about astrophysics, the history of the eastern Roman empire or the US' government foreign policy, the Wikipedia setup will work perfectly.

On the other hand, if you're talking about Star Trek, the MCU, Taylor Swift or the Legend of Zelda series, the most reliable source is probably not going to be either an academic journal or the New York Times. Many of my videos and articles are about games in the latter series, and the reliable sources for that would probably be something like speedrunners, dataminers, etc. For most of those things, the reliable source would either be the artist or company that owns the rights, or some fansite/video creator that's been documenting them for the last three decades.

Plus, a lot of the time the sources Wikipedia accepts are just laundering the same info anyway. It would be very, very easy to get misleading or incorrect information about the next Pokemon game to go viral, just by sending a few publications a link to a random blog and letting them take it at face value. In a depressing number of fields, fact checking and research is minimal even from name brand publications, and some guy's post on Reddit can get treated like gospel.