belochka

Eh, sorry, but that’s a valid instinct and interest. Yep, someone fully realized as a person and with good social surroundings won’t likely want that. Plenty of people are unfortunately not.

Now when you’re not getting any hints or do have good social surroundings yet go for such a bait, you are not very wise and might not be a good person.

But - sometimes English-speaking Web seems kinda puritan still.

If you are going to answer that last part with observation that such comments are cringe and unlikely to attract another person in a non-puritan setting as well, I am aware of that. Clumsiness exists, stupidity exists, various wounds exist. Have some humanity.

Not even CEOs, you can see various (at some point failed due to low quality high expenses workforce, that can now be replaced with AI, you get the idea) entrepreneurs and non-techies on Facebook write long excited posts about Claude.

About a computer program and a dataset running completely outside their control and scrutiny. Like white colonizers selling rifles to natives, but not machinery to make those rifles. Or ammunition, but not machinery to produce it. Or colored glass, but not technical processes to make said colored glass.

CEOs are right to be excited, they might be able to afford the real thing - self-hosted and with the accompanying processes, like healthy datasets, experienced people, nuances of adjusting models, stuff like that.

But people who are being shown that they can be replaced sufficiently well by a machine, that has another little trait of being completely adjustable - that I can’t understand.

Someone interested in humanitarian sciences and art being excited that there’s a machine parroting them well enough to replace them, except that machine can also be made to produce those things to fascist ends, - I don’t understand that.

I seriously hate this market so much.

People contribute to it. People don’t leave for alternative markets without central networked service dependency. Such alternative markets would need financial power to contribute to their survival (of course there’d be pressure to kill them), and for that they need to grow. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

Until enough people get burned by it, nothing will change. When they will, it’ll still be very uncertain, because there are harder and easier markets to make money. P2P applications make little money, because of their advantages being downsides for those trying to commercially sell them, for example. Providing infrastructure makes more money, but still less than platforms, where you sell infrastructure, connectivity, moderation and advertising simultaneously.

So when it’s only professionals’ and businesses’ choice, we lose and platforms win. They need to eat something, they prefer to eat better than to build a better world where someone else will say “thank you” to them and that’s all.

Conscious customer associations and education are mechanisms that might eventually change things, but that will take time, because both have been unbalanced by the insane amount of money tech industry has raised in the last 20 years and will raise more. Society takes time to adapt. Then it’ll be so-so, not good and not terrible, like with most things.

I was born in 1996, but the older generation (it’s Russia) that remembers Soviet schools sometimes remembers Soviet educational PCs. Those were a few series, I don’t remember names, the point is there were Apple II clones and there were PDP-11 clones (but in PC form factor, even with networking ability in the sense of there being one master machine and slave machines booting from it ; but those were not terminals).

So, that older generation remembers as if something normal being taught to program in BASIC, FORTRAN, later C or Pascal and operate machines. Soviet life was quite a lot poorer than even 90s despite all the retroactive disdain for that decade, still informatics classes were apparently at least educationally useful and had at least one operable machine usually.

The 90s generations at least got some computer instruction of general use.

And my generation got Windows machines and no real understanding by anyone what informatics classes are even for. Unless it’s some special school or at least with math focus.

Things people were taught in the 80s and which somehow don’t transition at all to their operation of modern PCs, that contrast still terrifies me.

So - it’s the same everywhere, it seems, because of the idea prevalent in the 00s that my generation is going to just wing it because of being exposed to electronics since childhood. An absolutely nutcase and absolutely winning (in the sense of popularity) idea.

I even have a pre-school brochure somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, with algorithmic problems and solutions. The earlier the better.

One can think in paranoid/cynical ways - “fools are easier to rule” or “so that’s why they were pushing hacker movies in the 90s to scare everyone”. I honestly think it was just fear of some day being less than capable of understanding the technology we rely upon to keep breathing. And that fear is unsubstantiated, because similarly to that most people don’t understand city planning, logistics, oil refineries, electrical engineering and one can go on. But due to that fear of singularity it was easier to start imagining that somehow new generations will gain hard knowledge naturally.

But even that wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for Microsoft. Hate them with passion. EDIT: For managing to sell, coerce and impose their monopoly upon the world and upon education most of all