podgietaru

The AI is incidental to the story. The fraud is the fake streams for money.

Tech has always been like this. On the building side, it has been Cargo Culting for years. If it's not AI, it was microservices, or NoSQL, or the newest front-end framework. The nature of tech meant that we always had to keep up with this stuff, because it helped you land another potential future job.

On the business side it has always been a series of perverse incentives that go counter to needs of the customer.

God I hate Uw Zorg Online. The app recently had a 500 issue with retrieving my medical history, and looking into the API it's because it can't retrieve my (completely unrelated) allergies history. Of which I have none.

The point wasn't the loader. It was the phrase the loading screen uses. It leaks the context. The context being that they were merging apps together.

You know your app just immediately crashes to a blank screen the minute you enter a name, or finish a lesson right?

This actually sums up a lot of what I feel about AI. For everything. For flyers, menus, all the rest of it.

It always only took a few hours. And yeah, whatever, sure it adds up. But now you've got this dogshit looking flyer outside your restaurant, and it would have taken you like 45 minutes to adept a Canva template.

For AI, the skill loss and all the rest of it, the lack of control, the lack of knowledge of the codebase. It doesn't feel like saving the few hours is ever worth it.

I have a feeling this is going to end up in the same place where a lot of AI generated projects end up.

There has for sure been a reduction in the amount of effort to create software. But that friction that existed before helped in determining what was WORTH making. There will be a subsection of tools that are now creatable, that are needed. But there'll be a lot of tools that get created that will be abandoned precisely because they didn't solve enough of a problem.

Having a gating mechanism, in the past the friction and effort, was good.

My problem with AI is never going to be "It replaced Squarespace for small websites"

Were those actual complaints? Maybe the first, maybe the brick and mortar? Who was saying we will never use planes??

I don't even disagree with you here. It's something I've said in the past about things like algorithms. Sometimes knowing a surface level thing allows you to utilise it without necessarily needing to know the implementation level details.

But you did not LEARN Relational Algebra. You learned OF relational algebra. And there's a pretty stark difference there.

I sort of implied the other thing in my comment. But.

There is no version of america that exists today where a billionaire gets sent to prison.

This is the moment in history where this shit is possible and accepted. If they don't do it now, they never can.

Wouldn't it be amazing if their continued attitude of moving fast and breaking things was 45d chess. Instead of the unbelievable recklessness of tech Bros.

Historically it's been one of those things.

I'll add. I once got stopped by a bunch of JW. And I wanted to practice my Dutch, and they were willing to talk to me in Dutch.

They showed me a video about depression. And it was actually exceptionally good advice. It spoke about speaking to a therapist. There was a small bit about prayer, which was obviously not my bag. But I was pleasantly surprised at how grounded the advice was.

What? A Unix timestamp literally cannot ever be lower. Its a completely assinine comparison isn't it?

This is comparative.

Reposting something I put in another doom scrolling thread

quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling. There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop.

And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort.

It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying.

I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.

I can't disagree enough with this. Not everything needs to be understood in a technical context. Technology intersects with society, and understanding its impacts on that society is vital.

Or in other words: the humanities are good.

Extra vinegar please, I want my muffin drenched.

I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn't in the standard dictionary

It does indeed, probably the heart of it.

As with most things on the UK, probably. I definitely used Bobbins.

I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins, and it turns out it was just my small town that did it. As in, just my small town, not region, county, etc.

I have a similar, albeit slightly different relationship with Reddit. It's not the arguing, it's the upvotes. Feeling like people agree with me. The faux-community building aspects of it all.

I don't think the LLM idea is a great one, to be honest. For a while, I tried forums. ArsTechnica had a decent forum. Fewer people, better moderation. Even that had it's faults for me.

I'm still on the journey, but part of it was just... stopping with one of the communities that I was the worst on. Cold turkey. Habit Tracker app, don't comment there, did that for 90 days and then just stopped entirely.

I tried to block reddit recently. It's impossible. I wanted to find some nice headphones, everything leads back to Reddit recommendations. I still think I should delete my account, but I've had it for nearly 15 years.

But I can't see any good in replacing human interaction with LLMs. It sounds like a recipe for psychosis, in all honesty.

To counter myself: I've also had periods where I'm doing two things that really help.

I've been reading a lot (a lot.) of fiction recently. That kind of escapism is fantastic. I love being able to form the images in my head of the books I am reading.

I've been learning another language, and have become proficient enough to read fiction in that other language. I'm nowhere near at a fantastic level, but being able to read in another language, and have those images form is amazing. So far the biggest books I've read in Dutch are Dunger Crawler Carl (which I am now reading the sequels in English.) and Project Hail Mary, which felt cool due to the themes of translating other languages.

I recommend both as a way to try to escape the loop.

I'm just not that annoyed by having to search for a flight, or train, or bus. Or make plans. Or find a restaurant. I'm not annoyed enough by these trivial tasks to want to outsource them.

I don't want to ask Siri to book me a restaurant, when the alternative is a quick google search.

All mediated by the Meta-Human Facebook and Instagram that these people want to shit into the world.

I dream of a world where I never know if anything is real, or if the person I'm talking to is even human.

I must say, I've been engaged in a doomscrolling cycle for quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling.

There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop.

And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort.

It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying.

I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.

Also NickelHook, which adds the native hooks into the Nickel application. I used it for intercepting http calls previously

Previously I built something using NickelHook

https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter

It took a lot of messing around trying to figure out how nickel fit together. This is much more … impressive.

I still use Omnivore, just self-hosted now. I recently added a better RSS Reader to it, so now I can get my rss feeds, and save them to my read it later list - and then read them on my Supernote using the android app or web app.

It'll never be too late to mitigate even worse effects. Remember that the defeatism is what people who want no change want.

Just the stupidest take you could ever have, well done.