I have seen this behavior from others as well, from all over the world, but Italian cuisine seems to trigger a special protective reaction from the hometown crowd. Perhaps it’s because it is (almost) universally popular?

But we’re combining probability of error creation (which is effectively constant) and the limits of human cognition.

Some things are impossible at one scale, become possible at another, and become inevitable at yet another.

- User X posts some very AI-ish comment: "It's not X --- it's Y, and the reason is important...blah blah"

- User Y responds, taking the original at face value, and disagreeing or otherwise putting time into parsing the ideas in User X's post.

- Me, thinking: User Y is being duped, wasting their time, arguing with a ghost, and otherwise being taken for a ride

That's not my problem, it's User Y's, and they may have knowingly decided to respond even though User X is posting AI slop.

But a forum where that happens a lot doesn't seem like a good place.

Simplistic thinking doesn’t help.

Most people will have a pre-conceived opinion about this, just like they would have an opinion about politics. Put "Trump" or "DEI" or some other word in the title, and the exact same thing happens.

You changed the future in this thread, by responding to me with an incredibly literal reading of my comment. So I responded and now you get to read it.

So here we are in the future, having a conversation about philosophy and time’s arrow. It didn’t have to be that way, you could have made some other comment, or I could have not responded.

> The type checking that matters most (and why you've probably got it backwards)

Honestly, I don’t care if the author got some AI help. But that click-bait style is ubiquitous and obnoxious.

IMO it’s a problem if doing that stops you from making new happy memories. Life is for living.

Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.

Everyone has regrets but my attitude is: I can’t change the past, but I can change the future.

Unfortunately other people hear the ideas, internalize them, and repeat them, without recognizing any contradictions.

Nobody ever said that, at least not as an assertion or prediction. The actual instances of similar language are from multiple people describing their earlier thoughts before they learned it wasn’t true.

The early popularity of Minitel, the continued popularity of ssh/tmux, and the web browser itself indicates that bespoke client applications are not the only way. He wasn’t directionally wrong.

If it wasn’t actually useful information, how would you know? How would you discover that?

As you say, it’s a bit of a black box unless you volunteer in the classroom (as my spouse did).