This is a luxury belief. You cannot envision someone who is wholly unable to wield self-control, introspection, etc. These tools have major downsides specifically because they fail to really account for human nature.
These tools are broadly forced on everyone. Can you really avoid smartphones, social media, content feeds, etc these days? It's not a matter of choice -- society is reshaped and it's impossible to avoid these impositions.
Smartphone didn’t take off because it was forced on people. Otherwise we’d all be using Windows Mobile. Smartphone has real benefits, to state the obvious. The right course is to deal with the downsides, such as limiting using it in classroom, but not hint its development. Same with LLM.
It’s not about the tool itself, but more so the corporate interests behind the tools.
Open source AI tools that you can run locally in your machines? Awesome! AI tools that are owned by a corporation with the intent of selling your things you don’t need and ideas you don’t want? Not so awesome.
Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise, so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook, which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform. Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me. I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is a cesspool.
I was trying to solve the snaps problem right before I finally abandoned Ubuntu. I was running some Ubuntu de-crapifier script from GitHub, which sort of worked but also caused some weird problems. It occurred to me that if my first steps for a new OS installion were to get rid of all the vendor-forced crap, I was lurching towards a Microsoft experience. I bounced around to a few OSes before settling on Fedora, which as been good but not perfect.
I dropped Ubuntu for Debian, then dropped Debian for Fedora and now I'm frankly very very happy.
Ubuntu had hit the proverbial last straw for me when they started shipping even the dumbest things as snap: the fu--ing calculator. Opening the calculator (a 250kb binary) took 10-15 seconds because snap had to download the images, mount layers etc. I never hated a linux distro so much.
Debian was fine but very stale, and a lot of things i use every day were broken or non functional. Particularly Firefox and bluetooth stuff.
Fedora... It's just great. Software is fresh but very stable. Anything bluetooth works. Whole distro-upgrades don't break my system.
Updating Ubuntu basically always meant reinstalling everything. At some point i was going LTS to LTS.
I run Debian stable on my desktop and haven't really noticed any downside to it being a bit stale.
For the core system I don't mind not having the latest version, and for the apps like 1Password, Tailscale, Firefox, Zed, VSCode, Ollama, Obsidian, Slack or Spotify (to name a few I use), I install them from upstream repo (or unpack into /opt) directly.
The only real constraint is kernel version, which may not have the drivers for the latest and greatest hardware, so new laptops might be a problem. I do use a snapless Ubuntu for that very reason on my laptop.
Fedora is not related to Debian or Ubuntu, so is not a true replacement.
PS I hear this release cycle thing quite a bit, what's the benefit? What software are you using that requires bleeding edge packages that can't be containerized?
For me, it's gaming which means updated Wayland and Nvidia drivers. I'm sure there are ways to do this with Debian, but I just went with Fedora to test it out, and I've liked it enough to keep it.
I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.
> I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.
Was it missing updates, or was it just the ESR (LTS) version that only gets security (and maybe bug) fixes but is still maintained?
Debian unstable is bleeding edge. Tested snapshots of Debian testing are not. Containers have many of snaps' inconveniences and some of their own. And desktop environment and virtual machine software releases have often bug fixes and improvements I don't want to wait for 12 or 18 months longer.
I was a heavy Ubuntu user for a few years as well and had a similar experience. The Fedora way is a little bit different and does take a bit of getting used to, but I've been on Fedora now for many years and am extremely happy.
My impression is that the first Trump presidency left everyone at a loss. If you react with outrage, you're labeled in some negative way. This is really an extension of online trolling, where any emotional reaction proves that you "lost." Everyone has a chance to speak up now, but this actually diminishes the power of everyone's voice. You're one drop in a few billion or a few hundred million now. And to the extent that you do speak up, it's fully partisan; the complaints of "the other side" are never heard nor granted legitimacy.
I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.
> I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think there's a way around this: pair attempts to speak up with base-broadening stuff that controversial within your faction and will alienate the "most extreme voices from your faction."
Basically: DEI is a goner (for instance), stop defending it and throw it in the fire, too. Advocate for literally building the wall. Support tariffs, but say you'll do them more competently and actually bring the jobs back. The focus and energy should be on protecting the basic constitutional order, everything else is a distraction. The people toward the extremes need to be the ones holding their noses to vote, not the guys on the fence.
For protests and movements to actually succeed, they will eventually need candidates in the polls. But the U.S. is a two-party system, and the other party has, with their many years in power, shown what they will do, i.e. not much.
Great comment, articulates something I've been feeling lately but didn't quite have the words for. (Not American, but similar situation in my country.)
Where do we go from here? What kind of action would be effective?
I came across a quote in a forum which was part of a discussion around why corporate messaging and pandering has gotten so crazy lately. One comment stuck out as especially interesting, and I'll quote it in full below:
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C suites are usually made of up really out of touch and weird workaholics, because that is what it takes to make it to the C suite of a large company. They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups, that basically tell them what is in and what isn't. Many marketing companies are now getting that data from twitter and reddit, and portraying it as the broad social trend. This is a problem because twitter and reddit are both extremely curated and censored, and the tone of the conversation there is really artificial, and can lead to really bad conclusions.
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This is only somewhat related, but if OpenAI did actually succeed in building their own successful social media platform (doubtful) they would be basing a lot of their model on whatever subset of people wanted to be part of the OpenAI social media platform. The opportunity for both mundane and malicious bias in models there seems huge.
Somewhat related, apparently a lot of English spellings were standardized by the invention of the printing press. This isn't surprising; it was one of the first technologies to really democratize written materials, and so it had a very outsized power to set standards. LLMs feel like they could be a bit like this, particularly if everyone continues with their current trends of intentionally building reliance on them into their products / companies / workflows. As a real life example, someone at work realized you could ask co-pilot to rate the professionalism of your communication during a meeting. This seems quite chilling, since you're not really rating your professionalism, but measuring yourself against whatever weird bell curve exists in co-pilot.
I'm absolutely baffled that LLMs are seeing broad adoption, and absolutely baffled that people intentionally adopting and integrating them into their lives. I'm in my early 40s now. I'm not sure if I can get out of the tech field at this point, but I'm seriously thinking about options at this point.
I'm 40 too and used to laugh at all those programmers who were switching to wood working for a living. Now that vibe coding is being advertised all over the place, and will most likely be bought by the CEOs, and the trend of stealing open-source software without attribution while making fun of people who are proud of their knowledge and craft, I'm starting to think that all those future wood workers may not be wrong.
Whatever happens, it will be the end of programming as I know it, but it cannot end well.
I'm very confused by this -- does the rate rate of carbon release matter more than the total volume? Won't the carbon in the trees eventually be released, just on a slower timeframe.
Sure, but it being delayed still matters a lot, particularly if it's "renewable" in the sense that trees falling into streams and being preserved underwater will be replaced over time by other trees that fall into that water on top of them.
It's the same logic for construction materials. A house has dozens of trees worth of lumber in it, and that carbon is now trapped in the house for however many decades it takes until the house eventually burns down or rots. Meanwhile the trees that were cut regrew, so the total "inventory" of trapped carbon has increased. (Appreciating of course that the lifetime carbon cost of the emissions required to maintain and climate-control a house will far exceed the modest value of what is trapped in its walls, but all of this is just for the sake of argument.)
I'm not sure what you question is getting at, but yes, the carbon will eventually be released from any wood. If wood-as-carbon-storage was going to be actively applied towards climate change, then it would be important to control the rate of released, by, for example, using the wood in buildings, burying it, or submerging it in water, so that it wouldn't decompose from fungus or termites.
On the "very-online right," there's a lot of "go woke, go broke," but there is generally not a lot of precision when it comes to actually measuring whether this is true. Certainly this has been true in some cases, but often overtly "woke" things are quite successful and popular.
The Bud Light controversy was interesting since the market for Bud Light seemed to be fairly cornered by the very people who were likely to dislike modern progressive and "woke" signaling. (ie, lower class and lower-to-middle class working class)
To the extent that the analysis from the article is correct, I wonder whether Target's market significantly skewed liberal and progressive, and potentially they have offended their constituency.
As I noted above, I am a bit skeptical that the causation is so solid as people make out. In the past few years on the right, the analysis has often been very sloppy an ideological, even if some companies have seen legitimate pushback for political signaling.
>On the "very-online right," there's a lot of "go woke, go broke," but there is generally not a lot of precision when it comes to actually measuring whether this is true.
In other news: Despite many chants to the contrary, the Cincinnati Zoo reported only two visitors trespassed for male full frontal nudity on the most recent anniversary of Harambe's death.
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