shufflerofrocks

....are you being dense on purpose? Just because something takes time and effort to learn doesn't mean it was monopolised and undemocratised lol. It's the natural course of things, and I cannot believe I have to explain that to you.

The knowledge was freely available for the past few decades, way before LLMs - ergo democratised. The skill was freely available to learn - ergo democratised.

By your logic,

- cooking is a skill that is not democratised (despite the fact that you can do it everyday).

- A person who doesn't take time to learn cooking from cookbooks or youtube tutorials is somehow "lacking access" and in an undemocratic position

- An experienced chef is monopolising his mastery of cooking skills bc they dedicated time to learning them

- a robot that manufactures food is "democratising cooking skills"

See how silly that sounds?

Not to mention, using an AI to do a job is NOT equivalent to learning the skills of the job. Me having a printer doesn't mean "painting skills were democratised".

when I didn't know how to code

....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.

LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.

I'm a 30 year old and I have a similar experience. Facebook has almost always been a pleasant experience for me - not just updates from friends but also the new stuff that comes in the feed, which is why I kept getting confused about the reports of fb being a hell hole, until I understood the rabidity & variability of their algorithm.

FB Groups are one of the best corners of the internet imo.

My blood always boils a little whenever I read about Netflix's "Not second-screen enough" business model.

What shitty point we've enshittified to, where we prioritise passive slop consumption over active enriching one.

All of this is a result of the algorithmic media addiction people have been engineered into, in my opinion. Every moment you're not consuming something is a moment you're wasting, and a moment you have to spend alone with your thoughts (which is too terrfying for people now apparently).

A proper solution to current video content landscape used to be piracy - Netflix literally succeded early on in streaming because they were more convenient than pirating stuff. But with these Media Moguls lobbying hard to crack down on piracy (at the risk of privacy), it does look pretty bleak.

misconfigurations and networking fuckups that existed since Internet became more complex than 3 routers.

Yet there has been an uptick in frequency of outages only in the recent few months. Correlation correlation.

Why assume that these misconfigs are not the result of someone asking AI how to do them?

Your priority (in this comment atleast) is about the finger-pointing, while the parent's priority is wanting a fix to the issue at hand.

Then you should take a better look. Each local ISP has their own self-designated territory or "area". They don't let any other ISPs establish themselves in their areas, beating them up or cutting their wires if they try - you can talk to any ISP technician and they'll tell you about it. 90% of the fluctuations in network are from a cable cut, often by competing agencies.

It's also one of the big reasons why AirFibre is becoming more prominent - can't cut cables if there are no cables.

The above commentor uses "mafia" not in the literal sense but he's talking about the mafia-like system where each ISP has territories they fight over.

Tbh, it's manageable in Bangalore, since the territories are already established and there's not much interference but much more horrible in other areas - we had to suffer with a shitty ISP in my hometown for years bc they kept cutting cables & bullying any other ISP that tried to come in.

Nope, not at all. Not only are most of these features unavailable, getting anything "business-related" done (apart from the template they offer you) is a huge pain.

I shifted to Telegram a few years ago, and it was such a rich experience for me. Off the top of my head:

- much much better performance - a good desktop client - open source message clients - scheduling messages - better search - many small gestures/UX features that feel thoughtfully implemented - better channels - message threads - chat folders - very easily programmable & deployable bots for moderation or implementation into your work flow - a lot of customisable settings

Telegram is so much further in performance and feature than it's counterparts it's laughable. Almost all of the new features in Whatsapp/Signal were first implemented in Telegram.

Some of them, as you said, are feasible because of the non-e2ee chats, but a lot of them are just plain universal.

I think that's surprising... why wouldn't you consider it a scam? Hell, even a malware?

Honey does the following:

- Stealing the commission from an affiliate link assigned to someone else

- Cutting itself a commission by inserting an affiliate link, when there was none, essentially profiting off you without your consent.

- Gives you the worst discount code possible, while saying it got you the best deal

- Cheating the companies doing the affiliate marketing by taking credit for purchases that happened without honey's involvement

I agree. That is quite painful and is obviously motivated to force people towards premium, which I highly disagree with. I think such actions should be regulated though I don't know if that can legally happen.

I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.

Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.

I use revanced, smarttube, and yt-dlp. but I also have premium, because it is an exceptional service.

It's about 2 things

1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.

2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere

If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.

Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.

Also, IGNORE anything on Twitter, Reddit, or HN (ironic ik). The lesswrong/credibledefense/zeihan types are all idiots ime. Using an "objective" tone doesn't make rubbish "objective"

Not to mention these sites are FILLED to the brim with bots. Eg. In 2013, the most "reddit-addicted" area was Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, with largest amount of activity [0]. Eglin was one of the few places used in a study for testing social media manipulation by Pentagon [1]

And not to mention the Russian/Chinese/Indian bots

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644

HN and in general the software community has a hate-boner for Microsoft, it is almost tradition at this poin.

While the hate is valid in many cases, I've observed that the cribbing about it has also been unwarranted or unjustified a lot of the time (also no other corp is held to the same standard) - and this is a prime example.

MS cannot legally restrict third party kernel. Apple can, bc they didn't get struck down like MS did.

MS has an option to not bundle Defender with their OS, which would let them lock the kernel to avoid the anti-trust restrictions, but that would be an insane decision to make.

Damned if they do, Damned if they don't indeed

Appreciate your thoughtful comment here. I only had an urge to post a biting reply

It feels weird how certain internet users (especially because most people on HN only started hearing about Irrawaddy after using junk subreddits like CredibleDefense or WorldNews) are following this horrible conflict with a sense of glee or at least entertainment. It's horrid.

Noticed the same as well and it's happening over all social networks! I've seen this happening since Russia invaded Ukraine, so I assume it's cause of social media campgains and propoganda that started at the time - conflicts were dyed black and white removing all nuance, and people got off on "supporting" the side they picked

I think you maybe taking it in the wrong context.

There was a hype for discord about 5 years ago for EVERYTHING - discord servers were made for every little thing and there was little to no objection about it.

But in recent times, I have seen many people complain about the lack of searchability, discussion-thread management, and other stuff in Discord and moving away to forums, especially for software projects. There is definitely a lot more disgruntlement with Discord today, so their statement makes sense.

Sure, we've all studied the Mexican-American war (1846-1848)

and Cambodia, Iraq, Vietnam, Cuba, and 50 other known instances with more than a few of them in this decade itself.

Given how good the US is at the sort of foreign meddling, and that supporting protesters hasn't ever worked in reversing regime-change (unless it was an extremely unstable country), taking control of a territory that US is using for it's operations isn't an invalid move, geopolitically speaking.

there's a "Russian River" in California just waiting for its own SMO: Славянка наша?

Lol. I'm not at all disagreeing with the ideological basis in your point, but Russia's wanted Ukraine for a long time, and US using Ukraine as a frontline provided a convenient excuse.

This only makes the current war that started in 2014 even dumber

Not sure about this.

US had been meddling with Russia using Ukraine as base, and the 2014 ousting of the Ukraine Prez at the time was only made worse by the US and EU flaming the issue.

Not saying the war was necessary, but given the large number of times US has been involved in regime changes of various countries (using this Modus Operandi of supporting protesters), taking back control of a region they used to govern (as USSR) is not something absurd to consider.

So much of talent is just really caring about something specific. Caring about it above other things

This is a really nice statement. Definitely agree with it. I've often seen so many fast-starters in many fields who just taper away, because the subject just isn't interesting to them, and it was the peeps who stayed in the field that ended up becoming really good at it. Definitely holds up the old "Average intelligence and persistence has accomplished much more than genius" quote

I think it has to do with the desire to consume organic content.

We're currently live in an SEO-optimised hell where everything is monetized. Years of wading through this swill has subconciously made us seek out spontaeneous, unplanned interactions and content, which seem more humane.

Thoughtless social media comments, quips, and many of the funny tweets are prime examples of stuff that is done for the fun of it, without any "ulterior motive" in mind, and refreshing to come across.

investors are simply off-setting the losses to the next investor they sell to. Musk brand is still valuable and his bubble keeps growing. It is only the investors present when the bubble bursts that'll be at a loss.

You only need to grow your investment, sell it off to the next person, and exit before it happens

don't give me Big Oil bullshit. I told enough of them my mind and my peers did to which is why we have a renewables boom now

Could you clarify here? Are you saying that Big Oil has reduced their interference in renewables research? or that it was never the case?

Can confirm - have been saying EVs much more on the roads in the last 2 years. EVs have a green license plate here, and traffic is becoming more and more of a equally green-white grid

Having an oracle that knows all answers is useless if you don't know what to ask.

This sentence summarizes the issue with the current AI debacle, along with the whole "just copy/pase code from stackoverflow and earn top bucks" meme that was going around in 2010s.

You're not gonna be a valuable dev if you're just write wrong code faster. Not only does chatgpt/copilot give haphazard code half of the time, it approaches seemingly random syntax and format. Even if LLMs are polished, you're gonna need stand software engineering knowledge to know what's right and wrong.

I've enjoyed using flutter and deployed 4 apps using it in the last 2 years.

Goddammit.

Exactly! The third-party apps used to load everything seamlessly.

Whatever it's coded in, the back-end of reddit is pretty robust and well-done (maybe excluding the video hosting part and whatever new laggy crap they put in)

It's the new front-end of reddit that's a huge dumpster-fire.

One thing is that the rigid terrific schedule of the modern-day residency program was designed by a cocaine addict who made the structure to fuel and hide his addiction, so all doctors start out with a skewed sense of normal working hours. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/)

Another thing is the toxic culture perpetuated for allowing medicos to stroke their egos - toxic cultures about overtime are everywhere, but medical profession is a class apart.

"No one wants full anonymity unless they are criminals, and we don't want customers as criminals" is a yikes.

I don't mind the financial misplay(?), the possibly unsustainable diversification, the lil bit of corporate hypocrisy, or the AI - they're endeavours that can't be avoided while trying to make a compaany profitable - as long as they do what they can do best, WHILE maintaining the stance & spirit taken for forming the company.

I find myself doing this more often recently. I enjoy posting/discussing/debating, but it's hostile right now on social media - it's exhausting.

You can't have a discussion with someone who wants to "gotcha" you for clout