Crabber

I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:

- Does this affect me in any way?

- Was this my fault?

- Can I do anything to change this?

I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test

>It doesn't just let people know a product exists. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us.

I completely agree, and I wish people talked about this more. Even if you ignore all the manipulative messaging of the advertisements themselves the fact that there are now posters everywhere telling you to buy things, do things, be better than everyone else is corrosive in itself. Nobody is paying for an advert that tells you "you are fine the way you are, you don't need to buy anything, you should go for a nice walk in the park, it's free".

I've thought before about how the west basically abandoned religion and instead now we just get preached at by corporations and advertisements instead. Whether you like the idea of Christianity and religion or not, at least the message of Jesus was "everyone is equally loved, don't try and be superior to others, don't cling to material possessions". Now instead of just getting preached to at church we get preached to all day from all angles, and the message is the complete opposite.

I think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.

Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".

> In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for

I'm actually saying the opposite of this. To learn react you also need to know html, css and javascript, so I am saying if you need to make a static website that is just a single page you may as well just write it in HTML. I am saying you should use less technology.

Similarly to learn Docker you need to know bash so you already have the skills to just skip over docker and deploy your app directly by running bash commands on a linux server.

The "50 different technologies" is how I see the flavour-of-the-month cloud platforms that take something that's relatively simple (copying code to a server and running a command to start it) and turning it into a proprietary cloud platform you now have to learn. Whereas you could have just learnt how to deploy software to a linux server instead and have a skill that was valuable 20 years ago, is still valuable, and will still be the way software is fundamentally run in 20 years time as well I am sure. Meanwhile I have no idea what Dokku and Kamal even are - I'm sure they won't last as long as linux and bash have.

>The agent can influence you anywhere you interact with a computer or via anyone you know who interacts with a computer. So everywhere with anyone.

You could say the same thing about social media algorithms though, or scammers who target people directly, foreign agents posting propaganda campaigns on social media sites. People have been claiming for years that there are armies of russian or chinese or whoever bots online trying to destabilise and destroy the west. Some of that stuff probably is effective and probably has influenced people's thoughts and values, changed their voting patterns, put decadent ideas in people's heads. Even on social media other humans are constantly trying to manipulate you into following them, buying stuff from them or certain brands, putting political ideas in your heads.

I'm sure an army of AI agents could also do all of this but what I'm saying is it's really nothing new. And none of this has lead to the destruction of humanity so far.

Well I think the point still stands that a superintelligent AI would still be constrained to the digital realm.

And since we don't yet have a "superintelligent AI" we are just discussing science fiction at that point. Nobody has yet proven that a superintelligent AI is possible, or than an LLM is capable of creating one.

AI could definitely disrupt and destroy the modern digital world as we know it. But that's a far cry from destroying humanity.

We are talking about a humans vs AI scenario. There are probably thousands of humans in the world right now that could do exactly that right now if they wanted to (datacenter and OpenAI employees, power grid workers).

This is actually the most plausible situation I've seen someone present so far - the AI takeover would be caused entirely by humans falling for AI hype, that's hilarious.

I don't think the average human would be stupid enough to give an agent posing as another human access to their entire email inbox. But if an agent creates a fake website for a new AI tool that promises to automatically reply to all of your emails and allow you to be 12.3% more productive if you just give it access to your entire email inbox, millions would sign up!

For millennia evil people and dictators have been using manipulation, propaganda, threats of violence to get entire populations to try and do "things that they wouldn't do otherwise" and humanity has not been exterminated yet. Even in the modern world there's human scammers that try everything to coerce and manipulate people. Humans are resistant to this kind of thing because it's been part of human social society since humanity began.

I don't see why the idea of an agent (who doesn't even have a physical presence) trying to manipulate people is some kind of world-ending threat when humans with human intellect have already being doing that to each other with limited success since humanity began.

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity

Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world?

Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.

>Future shock

Looked up this phrase and found the book of the same name, not sure if you were making a reference to the book but from the short synopsis I saw it seems like a very prophetic book for being written 50 years ago and I can see how many of his predictions are coming true, I will order a copy for sure now.

Your post and this book describe a phenomenon that I have always felt but never seen described before, thanks

I think the internet makes this worse because I've noticed a lot of music content on youtube is theory related. But I think that's probably because of this bias the internet in general has of "you only see videos about things it's possible to make content about". What I mean by that is it's not possible to make a 10 minute video on "just sit down and play your instrument". But you can make 50 videos on theory.

Don't know if this phenomenon has a name, but I've thought about it before. Social media is filled with posts of people buying things. Because it's not really possible to make a video showing off something you decided not to buy. Same thing with music and people constantly buying gear. "I'm using the same guitar I've had for 10 years and decided to just sit down and practice for 2 hours this evening like the 2000 other evenings before" doesn't make good content.

Fair points, I should probably disclose that my comment is perhaps one of those "looking like I'm giving advice to other people but really just giving advice to myself" kind of comments :)

I have began learning instruments before and fell into the trap of asking too many "why" questions and then just got lost in music theory that a) didn't make too much logical sense and b) didn't help me actually get better at an instrument in any way.

I think it's very unlike programming where you could start with a hello world program and keep asking "why does it work like that" questions and keep getting deeper and deeper and actually end up with a very good understanding of computers by the end of it that actually would make you a better programmer.

But when you're learning an instrument I think perhaps at the start it's better to just accept that "chords sound good because they just do" rather than going off down a complete rabbit hole.

I think a lot of programmers in the industry just follow trends, they don't really understand the benefits and drawbacks of the technology they are using.

I have coworkers who host personal projects for their own use and put them in docker, set up CI pipelines, host them on a cloud service, use an enterprise level database on the backend. One of my coworkers made a completely static portfolio website with a single page and used react.

I don't mean this in a judgemental way, people are free to use whatever they like. But it does sadden me that instead of seeing tools and processes as having certain benefits and certain overheads it's now just "this is the tool we use for everything", and therefore "everything now has this overhead". Where the overhead is performance, time, complexity.

I think music is a good "test" for logically thinking people because it requires you to put away your logical brain and just accept that music sounds good because "it just does" and music theory is the way it is because "it just is".

I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time. The fact that the author admits straight off the bat that he's never managed to learn an instrument kind of attests to this in my opinion.

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?

Searching for a niche topic on an internet without advertising: 10 results of pages run by hobbyists, who care so much about their topic of interest that they are willing to pay out of their own pocket to make information available to others

Searching for a niche topic on an internet with advertising: 1000000 results of SEO spam, senseless AI generated articles, 10 minute ad-filled youtube videos, posted by people who have no intent to actually provide high quality information but just see internet users as hoards of mindless meat to show advertisements to

Which kind of internet would you rather have?

70 million people in America are obese. Eating food doesn't make you obese, it's over indulgence of food and using food as a coping mechanism.

Redhat offers self-supported versions though, for half the price.

The term "unconscious bias" is based on the (false) assumption that every group of human is exactly identical.

It is 100% a political term that is shoved at people to make them feel like a bad person for noticing differences where there actually are differences.

If you want to eliminate "unconscious bias" you are trying to create a society where women talk to men in the exact same way that they talk to other women, women act the exact same way around attractive men as they do around ugly men, adults talk to a 5 year old the same way that they would talk to a 95 year old.

i.e. a delusional utopia that is completely detached from nature and reality, and which has never existed in any society.

I think one of the most egregious examples of this is Snapchat Inc's official mission statement being:

We contribute to human progress by empowering people to live in the moment

From my own observations of how snapchat makes people behave in the moment I couldn't think of a statement any more ironic

"open source" and "free software" are two words for the exact same thing.

Both of them are pretty poor descriptors. "open source" doesn't convey the legal freedom you are granted (as you have just found out), and "free software" makes it sound like it's just about price.

If someone lets you see source code but doesn't allow you to do anything with that code it's not what people would call "open source", you could probably call it source-available or something. "open source" has a specific legal definition that means code released with a permissive license.

Disc brakes were available in 1975, wide tires before that. Dropper posts I consider to be a gimmick. 1x drivetrains do have some drawbacks, but I consider them overall to be a good improvement to the simplicity of a bike so I will grant you that.

IMO the bicycle was perfected 20+ years ago

There is nothing left to be improved, only gimmicks with aggressive marketing

Just be happy with the bike you have, and ride

I don't think there's any market. The only people who buy macs are people that have no intention of playing videogames on that system.

I personally transitioned from Windows -> Linux -> MacOS, and each switch correlated exactly with how much I was playing videogames at that time. I don't play games anymore which is why I'm perfectly content using a mac. If I wanted to play games again I would go back to linux, or all the way back to windows.

The vendors are the GPU manufacturers. And both AMD and Nvidia offer full support for OpenGL and Vulkan.

There is no reason why I should have to use a different APIs to access the exact same graphics hardware depending on whether I'm running Windows, Linux or MacOS.

OpenGL and Vulkan work just fine.

So which way do you want it then? Multiculturalism, with all the "nonsense" that comes from those cultures, or do you just want every brown person to come to america and start acting white?

I thought one of the big benefits of multiculturalism (that all big businesses love to tout) is how it brings diversity of cultural values to the workplace. Well I guess mission accomplished because now you've got the indian caste system in the workplace.

I think you should read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543498

You consider "true counterculture" things like LGBT and veganism, that are openly supported by every western government and corporation? Really?

When you call other forms of counterculture "harmful" what you're really saying is "things that my culture has told me are harmful", or in other words "things that are counter to my culture".

I think the problem is that javascript has stopped being one language of many and has become the language.

There are hundreds of thousands of developers now who only know javascript. They have no perception of the parts of javascript that are badly designed because they don't know any other language. They think that computers taking 500ms to render a webpage is just how slow computers are because that's how it is with javascript. They think desktop applications that use 400MB of memory on startup are normal.

People no longer weigh up the pros and cons of javascript and decide it is the best option for a certain project. Javascript is all they know, and it shapes their entire view of programming.