icyberbullyu

All this is going to do is destroy one of the last remaining ways of getting an unbiased review: word of mouth. It won't make people buy more {PRODUCT}, it will just make people suspicious of every recommendation they read.

Maybe companies should focus on actually producing products that are good enough that they don't need to be covertly advertised to via CIA level psyops.

This entire thing makes my blood boil.

We switched my grandmother-in-law over to Linux last year and the amount of support calls I've had to do has dropped to 0. All she does is use chrome to check her email, and occasionally edit a document. A majority of the time she phoned for me to come 'fix her computer' it was just a Windows update that had reset some setting, or was trying to get her to sign up for a Microsoft account before she could log in, or some other obnoxious crap that made her think that her computer was broken.

We put her on Debian with Cinnamon as the DE, and downloaded a Windows 10 theme. We even put the Windows 10 logo as the start button. For her, she has 0 idea that she's even using Linux except for the fact that her computer doesn't randomly "break" anymore. All this with the added benefit that I can do remote support far more easily now.

The other huge benefit is when other relatives come over and start poking and prodding, it's far harder for them to do any damage. A few times I needed to 'fix' things was because her 60 year-old son (who knows nothing about computers, but is a medical doctor so he must know what he's doing) would come over and install a bunch of scammy antivirus software, change a bunch of settings, then leave proclaiming that the problem was "fixed". Switching to Linux has helped at keeping his fingers out of the pot immensely.

This is just an assumption that generally, computers are doing what they're supposed to. It doesn't mean that you can't challenge it with evidence. With the amount of evidence being submitted being increasingly digital, I'm sure the intention behind this is to stop people from jamming up the courts by calling every single digital artefact into question.

Misanthropic narcissism, the article.

I'm smarter than everyone la la la la.

What's the solution? Just sit around and bask in how smart you are while the hoards of depth-grovellers endlessly toil away for nuggets of neoplasmid. You are smart. We are dumb. I get it.

Some people need to hear it. People who immigrate to the west almost always need to hear this. It's 11 bullet points, not War & Peace.

I really have to disagree with the disparagement of vim/scp at the beginning. It's a bit slower to start if you begin with command-line tools, but the dividends payed out by learning the standard command-line utilities are huge. Learning the command-line utilities means you have the tool-set to build your own tool-set; since it's a lot easier to using CLI tools as building blocks for larger tools.

At both of the last jobs I've held, it was rare that you would be in an environment where you had a full IDE. And in both cases I was asked several command-line oriented questions during the interviews.

Also big disagree on the final statement of the article. CS is not a vocational major, nor should it be. There are plenty of good post-secondary schools that focus on writing code and the tools you use to do so; CS curricula should not be focused on producing programmers, it should be focused on producing computer scientists. The recent insistence that we turn CS programs into job-mills is one of the big reasons for declining quality in my opinion, my local university CS program was recently told to "push more people through" and to make the curriculum "less theoretical" and more "career oriented". If you want that kind of stuff, go to a career college.

There's a difference between a company that overextends itself and fails to live up to its own promises, and the current explosion of LLMs. Are there some snake-oily VC pitches that over-promise what LLMs can do? For sure. The big distinction is that LLMs already have a whole bunch of things they're great at while Babylon was never really able to perform even one of it's promised features very well.

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.