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I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before.

This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it.

I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left).

To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm.

I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.

Do we know if this counts for Prime?

Though tbh the writing has been on the wall for awhile. It's really frustrating, because it otherwise just gets out of your way, which is why I like it.

I guess I have to dedicate an afternoon to finding an alternative.

Sorry I think I worded it badly. The OP is not the you, I mean the propaganda is. As in, a large part of the propaganda is the idea that people should have opinions about this kind of thing, as opposed to accepting the idea that there are people who are more well versed in these topics than they are. eg the scientific consensus is that global warming is real and it's a big problem. There isn't really an opinion to have there, broadly.

How does the climate crisis fold into that, or do you not think that's a problem, or do you think it's a problem with no ramifications?

> and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change

In case you didn't mean this, do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence? eg the propaganda is the thing that is asking them to decide on covid or climate change.

I don't think anyone who is genuine expects the public to have expertise in these topics. The propaganda seems centred around a constant war against intellectualism and expertise, such that people think they should have an opinion on things they are woefully unqualified to have opinions on, and politicians just align themselves to what they think will get votes.

Ironically, the pub it suggested near me that was the most fucked closed down years ago (it's not just them, quite a few databases don't know that), so yeah, good call.

I don't think with any confidence we can say it will be for the better. Or at least, not on balance for the better.

To be clear you believe that you do a year's worth of work in one week? Every week? So halfway through this year you will have done 25 years of work?

Yes, it is not fair. The entire gambling industry is unfair and exploitative.

Late to this, but my interpretation of the parent's point was eg: LLMs still often produce bad code, despite "reading" every book about programming ever written. Simplistically, they aren't taking the knowledge from those books, and applying them to the knowledge of the code they've scraped, they are just using the scraped output. You can then separately ask them about knowledge from those books, but then if you go back and get them to code again, they still won't follow the advice they just gave you.

More power to you obviously. But I have mixed feelings about this.

There is so much information that curation is inevitable. Sure. But I don't want that curation to be "fun". I don't _want_ tiktok in my life, or really anything whose goal is "engagement". I don't want time killers.

One of the reasons for getting back into RSS for me was to have a direct feed to authors I'm interested in.

But I understand that quickly can become unmanageable.

When that time comes, I think I'd be interested in the curation being about compressing content down, not expanding it out. That is to say: use the algorithm to select from a large pool of what you're interested in, down to a manageable static size (like a weekly newsletter), as opposed to using it to infinitely expand outward to keep engaging you.

Really disappointed that down detectors down detector[1] isn't detecting that down detector[2] is down

[1] https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/

[2] https://downdetector.com/

LLMs can't lie: they aren't alive.

The text they produce contains lies, constantly, at almost every interaction.

I've only read the abstract, but there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that people trust the output of LLMs more than other forms of media (or that they should). Partially because it feels like it comes from a place of authority, and partially because of how self confident AI always sounds.

The LLM bot army stuff is concerning, sure. The real concern for me is incredibly rich people with no empathy for you or I, having interstitial control of that kind of messaging. See, all of the grok ai tweaks over the past however long.

I really like it, but for the cost of a cup of coffee you could try it for a month as well. I highly suggest you just do that: commit to spending a month using it, and if you don't like it at the end cancel. Maybe it won't work for the way you use search, maybe it will, the only way to find out is to try.

Don't be intentionally daft. Skiing and sports aren't notably addictive, and don't notably cause harm in society.

You are taking a forklift to the gym. The goal isn't actually to move the weights from one place to another. The goal is the process.

For those who were not familiar with the licence they have switched to: https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/functional-source-license-...

Of those apps you've listed that I've used, none of them have been notable for being high quality to me, though as you say it's difficult to measure. For me I would rate them somewhere between unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote). If you asked me to guess what desktop software Apple makes that people rate highly, I never would have guessed any of those, except _maybe_ Logic[1] and Final Cut, though ironically those are two of the three I've never used.

I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.

I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).

[1] and now from a sibling comment I hear that perhaps people regard that tool as bad, so there you go, they jury is clearly out

I don't think it's the modern Apple, I think that's just Apple.

I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a modal blocking function that had to write to each and every MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a steady hand and I could have done it faster.

A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and the visual design has often been nice, but other than that I don't think their software has been notable for its quality.

I'm interested, both as a Fastmail customer, and a software developer: what does this let you do that a PWA doesn't? Perhaps not become the default email client? Is there anything else?

I am guessing this works for you because more people reading = more people talking = more readers discovering and potential sales?

It would be interesting to see at what point of notoriety that is no longer true. Like is this still a factor for Stephen King, or at that point is it really just lost sales?

There are plenty of ebook stores if you google around, that have a standard range and use Adobe DRM, so off the bat wouldn't work on a kindle. In theory you can remove that DRM using Calibre, but I haven't tried.

Other than that, not really? There are plenty of ways in which you can buy _a_ drm free book, but not some large range (or even bandcamp-quality range, where there are authors you've heard of, just not Dan Brown / Stephen King sized ones) site.

I haven't got around to solving this problem so am also interested. I already own a kindle, I don't want to generate ewaste by changing physical device.

> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code

I'm not deep into it, but I have not a single time seen that direction argued before this post. Maybe it was _really_ early on?

The narratives I always saw were, firstly, "it will be as a good as a junior dev", then "it's like pairing with an overly enthusiastic junior dev", then finally arguments similar to those presented in this article.

Which, frankly, I'm still not so sure about. Productivity is incredibly hard to measure: we are still not completely, non-anecdotally sure AI makes folk broadly more productive. And even if it does, I am beginning to wonder how much ai is short term productivity with long term brain rot, and whether that trade off is really worth it.

A lot of it is just that it's at the local maximum of popularity and relative user inexperience, so it's the juiciest target.

But also, npm was very much (like js you could argue) vibed into existence in many ways, eg with the idea of a lock file (eg reproducible builds) _at all_ taking a very long time to take shape.

So have they stopped having the >1 average remote drivers for each self driving vehicle as well?

The problem with these statements is language has so much context implicit in it. "driving around on their own" to me means with zero active oversight. "driving around" to me means not just in a small set of city streets, but as a replacement for human driving (eg anywhere a vehicle can physically fit). Obviously to you it means other things, but it's what makes these conversations and statements of fact challenging.

Yes, the audit trail that should exist is part of the package. Or more generically, Horizon should have had enough instrumentation, combined with adequate robustness, where they could detect the issues the lack of robustness caused, and resolve those issues without people dying.

My core point is that if you're designing a system, *any system*, you should be thinking about what is required to produce safe software. It isn't just "well I don't work on medical devices that shoot radiation at people, so I don't need to worry"[1]. You still need to worry, you just solve those problems in different ways. It's not just deaths either, it's PII leakage, it's stalking and harassment enablement, it's privilege escalation, etc.

[1] I have heard this, or a variation of this, from dozens of people over the my career. This is my core bug bear about Therac-25, is that it allows people to think this way, and divest themselves of responsibility. I am very happy to hear you are teaching a course about Horizon, because it's a much more grounded example that devs will hopefully see themselves in more. If your course is publicly available btw, I'd love to read it.

No, not surgery. Surgery wasn't gotten to by way of working really hard on a magic trick. I'm also reasonably sure surgery is not at a point where you can cut someone entirely in half and put them back together.

Since you brought up Penn and Teller, take the bullet catch. They are not actually catching a bullet. No matter how hard they work on perfecting their bullet catch trick, this will not allow them to catch a real bullet shot from a real gun in their real teeth. Working on the trick is not the journey where the end point is doing the actual thing you're representing in the trick.

> and sooner or later we'll stumble on the same magic tricks that we humans are running under the hood.

Right, so this is the extraordinary claims bit. I'm not an expert in any of the required fields, to be clear, but I'm just not seeing the path, and no one as yet has written a clear and concise explainer on it.

So my presumption, given past experience, is that it is hype designed to drive investment plus hopium, not something that is based on any actual reasoned thought process.

Thanks for this post. Can I just say I really miss when tech news was dominated by "here is a cool font we designed", and not "here is our new upgraded torment nexus".