gdulli

The tech giants owe their success to people accepting this new business model in which revenue can scale without the company having to scale headcount proportionately. In other words, automated customer service, automated everything.

Most people don't want to think any more than they absolutely have to.

My idea of an alternative to a modern phone would not let Meta/Google anywhere near it. I'm curious how many people would go out of their way for this kind of hardware but still use those. I thought the point should be making your own choice about what apps are "essential", not going down the path of least resistance and using the ones we're told are "essential".

How could you think that anyone would argue that arbitrary doses of any medication are safe? Drinking too much water will kill you.

You're never going to watch it, but you're waiting for it to be on Netflix? You can start not watching it already.

It's hard to believe that in the late smartphone era there are people who think they're not online enough already, and want smart glasses so they can be even more online.

Something I appreciate about Samsung phones is that having a Samsung account is completely optional. I've never had one. If I accidentally click on one of the dumb AI features I'm not even allowed to use it without an account.

Steam gave me similar problems. In the process of trying to get in for the first time in a while to delete my account, I completed a successful 2FA but still couldn't log in because I had to prove I owned the account by providing extra information.

We've fallen so far from the days when the retailer let you just have the game you bought and then they were out of the picture forever.

What could be more representative of this community than the hubris of believing a simple algorithmic change could fix something that's actually deceptively complex and better off living with?

People are so desperate for this to be true. Maybe it comes from a subconscious recognition that their own self-imposed deskilling will inevitably catch up with them.

Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.

A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.

The values are not what they once were. Curiosity and creation have given way to summarization and generation.

It's been weird finding out how many people don't see media past its finished surface text. People for whom the subtext of its creation is so unimportant that the concepts of coming up with a prompt and creating a work are mutually fungible.

I have usually permitted that when it comes up and sometimes declined it. But when I permitted it I didn't have to worry about them entering everything I say into a permanent history from which a random sentence could get used, datamined, hallucinated into something that could be used against me years later.

Automated everything is here to stay. AI is a blanket of austerity.

What will actually happen is that instead of a person being accountable and taking a reputational hit, errors will be shrugged off as bugs and accountability will go off into the aether. Like all the other reasons to distrust the tech giants that have not meaningfully damaged or corrected them.

Every fridge between mine and the nearest Papa Johns would need to be empty before I'd consider eating there.

Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.

Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.

I wonder if that's because there's a downward price pressure on physical inventory because it needs to get liquidated to free up physical space for new inventory.

We talk too much about hallucination and too little about the more mundane elephant in the room that AI, whatever its effectiveness, will simply be used more for scam and deception than positive uses.

Usually you have to chastise someone for not reading the article, but this time they only needed to have read and understood the headline.

One of the scariest things to me about getting older is that there's entire generations younger than me who don't realize a growing number of things we used to have and lost. Because, like you said, they grew up without it.

And they don't believe things even can be better because they regularly hear one of the dumbest ideas of our time: that the past wasn't actually better, we only remember it that way.

Maybe the point is to trick people into thinking they're buying a version that they have the right to resell. The online version is a lesser product.

Dropbox did this to me with my actual data. I misunderstood it as a service where I could upload some data, uninstall the client, and expect the data to be there as long as the company still exists.

Advertisement or idea. In whatever ways they can make it subtle enough.

It's not like brand names and arbitrary ideas won't have ways they regularly show up in LLM output organically. So how would we ever know when they become ad placements?

It's very true that successive generations of technology innovate qualitatively worse hostilities that people accept in exchange for the surface convenience or novelty.

Regular TV has non-targeted commercials you can skip. Streaming has surveillance and unskippable ads.

AI can take it a step further and make promoted editorial content a seamless part of a conversation, without disclosure. It's the holy grail of advertising. To think they'll leave that money on the table is ridiculous.

Tools can also dull human capability. Calculators made it less important to be able to do math in your head. But how many people are pulling out their calculator at the grocery store or in other everyday situations where it would be helpful but not crucial? Now imagine this effect but for general thinking and creating.

There's plenty of "elitist gatekeeping" and excessive nitpicking of software in this community. But architecture isn't my area so I don't judge the line of where the criticism gets silly.