stereolambda

A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...

Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.

People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.

And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.

When some closed models are "retired", interestingly we might not even be able to extract all their tells. We'd be limited to people writing about them on forums (where they don't often specify version, and there's a lot of memes and confirmation bias) and I don't know, doing some statistical Bayesian guessing that given the likelihood it's FooGPT 10.5, maybe we should update our beliefs about its characteristics etc.

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.

When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.

Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.

Honest question: why doesn't the dumb TV crowd use old TVs (dunno, 10+ years old) as a replacement? Does image quality difference feel so dramatic? Maybe I don't care about this enough. To me the DVD fidelity was not earth-shattering but fine in practice. I do go to the cinema and see new TVs in stores, so it's not like I haven't seen better, just isn't worth a huge premium for me.

Other things I can think about is reliability of the screen (like dead pixels), and your family if not clued in may think you present as "poor".

To me these look like professional writing, and I've seen worse LLM'isms. I am with some people in that I don't usually want to read pieces where GenAI was involved. But this is one of the cases where I wouldn't want the remedy to be a life of constant purity tests and suspicion. There has been enough of that in contemporary culture. I want to trust people and let them be by default. I mean, I don't want writers to specifically memorize current LLM'isms in order to avoid them: or worse, to prompt an LLM to strip them. I believe from experience than GenAI texts have secondary bad characteristics, mainly being bland in style and thought, and often going nowhere, like mandatory student papers. This should be enough to bury or criticize them on merits more often than not.

I do see myself treating slightly broken grammar, typos as a slightly positive signal in writing in the recent years. I also see that this is messed up - I'd like to respect someone in kind if they put care in writing - and easy to fake if anybody wants to, with an LLM. If you do strongly suspect GenAI writing, I mean it's fair if a sincere opinion, but I'm tired of having those as top comments with a whole response tree. Ironically contributing to that now.

I think classic liminal esthetic would also include empty swimming pools, resorts etc. It doesn't need to be barren or cheap, could be relatively luxurious, but needs to be late Modernist as a base - i.e. mass produced and devoid of conscious symbolism or ornamentation.

With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.

By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.

I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.

[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.

Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.

If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.

This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.

I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.

You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.

Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.

There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.

This looks weird in the context, because the grandparent comment's argument was purely interest-based? You probably mean there's a propensity for tragedy of the commons.

Regardless I'd argue gaming may be the one media category left (after the recent decade's value decline) where piracy remains to seem like more hassle than buying a copy^W license. I would also guess it is more concentrated on a few popular titles compared to music or films. Nowadays I hear more of people collecting games on Steam, to never play them, than of legitimate pirates.

Entertaining to think that "that's too difficult to read for us nowadays" and "look at these unacceptable things" already sound pretty much like some poor Medieval literates who got their hands on Ovid or Lucretius, while under the rule of king Theodoric or something.

I don't have to say I don't question that we are very civilized and powerful.

I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.

Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.

I would see it as moving the baseline, which Europe and (more historically) UK was for many people in civil rights area. If we just say that authoritarian countries are still worse, this partly implies that what Western countries are doing is becoming acceptable, as long as it is still "better" or "less bad".

The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.

As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.

While you you're making good points, this shows that engineers and industry intentionally make work more complex than necessary in order to justify higher prices for labor. This is not so uncommon in today's economy, especially white collar and regulated work that most people don't understand, but worth thinking about regardless.

To be fair, it's hard to imagine economy and civilization crashing hard enough to force us to be more efficient. But who knows.

Functional programming languages (OCaml, Clojure, Haskell), are supposed to be somewhat like this.

The actual hard question is probably making even 10% of such wisdom and good intentions survive when the program is bombarded by contributor patches, or people taking Jira tickets. TFA talks about it in the context of strategy and tactics.

Organizationally enforcing strategy would be the issue. And also that the people most interested in making rules for others in an organization may not be the ones best qualified to program. And automatic tools (linters) by necessity focus on very surface level, local stuff.

That's how you get the argument for the small teams productivity camp.

Because if you present yourself as the author, it follows that the actual author is deprived of attribution. So you are actually taking something from that person.

LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.

I would just establish that all references to "theft" and "stealing" in the realm of copyright (with the notable exception of plagiarism) is metaphor and emotional rhetoric. Historically it would come from copyright interest groups who want(ed) to use criminal police to enforce their state-granted copyright privileges[1] against regular people.

Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans.

Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist.

[1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.

I sympathize with what you're saying. In theory Docker and Snaps and such are supposed to more explicitly package Linux programs along with their dependencies. Though Docker especially depends heavily on being networked and servers being up.

I'm not a fan of bundling everything under the sun personally. But it could work if people had more discipline of adding a minimal number of dependencies that would be themselves lightweight. OR be big, common and maintain backwards compatibility so they can be deduplicated. So sort of the opposite of the culture of putting everything through HTTP APIs, deprecating stuff left and right every month, Electron (which puts the browser complexity into anything), and pulling whole trees of dependencies in dynamic languages.

This is probably one of the biggest pitfalls of Linux, saying this as someone to whom it's the sanest available OS despite this. But the root of the problem is wider, it's just the fact that we tend to dump the reduction of development costs onto all users in more resources usage. Unless some big corp cares to make stuff more economical, or the project is right for some mad hobbyist. As someone else said, corps don't really care about Linux desktop.

Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve.

On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to.

That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.

I wouldn't automatically say this is bad. If the money that would end up being more profits percolates throughout society, employees, communities etc., and even the founders themselves (as opposed to concentrated capital), it is actually fine and could produce a healthier society. On the other hand, I grant you that it might (also) feed corruption. But then, I wouldn't bet on concentrated capital not being corrupt as well.

If there's an argument here, it's a mess. You first talk about speech. Commerce is barely speech--it's actually using the public market--and there is a legitimate opinion that applying civil rights to companies is already a corrupt abuse of our society. Perjury is strictly limited to one context existing since the dawn of time (courts), it is also very proceduralized what they can ask you, and even then there's a carveout for not incriminating yourself. Conspiracy and blackmail are only secondarily about speech. There's a criminal intent that you either made clear yourself or they have to prove.

The internet is like media (press) or communication by letters. Both extremely established in terms of guaranteeing freedom of speech and in the latter case, also secrecy. And the ID identification (that you then make your argument about) is only loosely related to free speech strictly. It's about being constantly searched and surveilled with a presumption of crime.

Moreso: what if someone fulfils it in a fork.

Honestly the SEO talk sounds like reflexive coping in this discourse. I get that WWW has cheapened quality, but we now have the tech that could defeat most of the SEO and other trash tactics on the search engine side. Text analysis as a task is cracked open. Google and such could detect dark patterns with LLMs, or even just deep learning. This would probably be more reliable than answering factual queries.

The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way, or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

I believe robots.txt was invented in 1994(thx chatgpt).

Not to pick on you, but I find it quicker to open new tab and do "!w robots.txt" (for search engines supporting the bang notation) or "wiki robots.txt"<click> (for Google I guess). The answer is right there, no need to explain to LLM what I want or verify [1].

[1] Ok, Wikipedia can be wrong, but at least it is a commonly accessible source of wrong I can point people to if they call me out. Plus my predictive model of Wikipedia wrongness gives me pretty low likelihood for something like this, while for ChatGPT it is more random.

People can choose not to be polarized by figures, especially where the controversies are firmly offtopic.

That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.

In the articles and talks from that time people often take the perspective of what the whole society (with its organizations) wants from the "automatic computers" and programmers as a profession. Compare also something like the 1982 Grace Hopper's talk on YT. Now I think it's mostly the perspective of companies, teams, the industry. This shift happened in the 1990s? I'm guessing here.

I guess there is still something left here from there from the concept of programming language as a tool for top-down shaping and guiding the thinking of its users. Pascal being the classic example. Golang tries to be like that. I get how annoying it can be. I don't know how JS/TypeScript constructs evolve, but I suspect this is more Fortran-style committee planning than trying to "enlighten" people into doing the "right" things. Happy to be corrected on this.

Maybe the hardest to interpret in hindsight is the point that in the sixties programming has been an overpaid profession, the hardware costs will be dropping and software costs cannot stay the same (You cannot expect society to accept this, and therefore we must learn to program an order of magnitude more effectively). Yeah, in some sense, what paying for software even is anymore.

But interestingly, the situation now is kind of similar to the very old days: bunch of mainframe ("cloud") owners paying programmers to program and manage their machines. And maybe the effectiveness really has gone up dramatically. There's relatively little software running in comparison to the crazy volume of metal machines, even though the programmers for that scale are still paid a lot. It's not like you get a team of 10 guys for programming each individual server.