- 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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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?