people are so fucked up by consumerism that they expect to be just consumers also in their sociality... like they expect that social relations to be like commodities.

in consumer societies people flee real freedom's anxiety by conforming to market ways, treating connections as consumption not production. lasting bonds need effort patience vulnerability, all anti-consumer virtues.

Fromm said that in market societies love and relations follow the commodity and labor market exchange pattern. they want low-effort replaceable humans. So they became low-effort replaceable humans.

absolutely, the capacity of the US and their useless european minions to side with evil while cloaking geopolitical violence in the language of human rights is not hypocrisy by accident but policy by design, activated selectively when victims are convenient and ignored when perpetrators are allies. i am very sad for iranian protesters, but the west does not need to instrumentalize their suffering.

we should save the idea of general computing. fuck cell phones.

Cell phones are fine. It’s their locked-down non-open nature and Apple, Google, Samsung that make cell phones not general computing devices.

I really hope we can convince enough people to care about general computing.

please, developers are making terrible slop way before AI, look at the javascript infested frameworks in use on the web. they make NO sense. they are not making things simpler

The financial incentives of the Chatbots are always going to push people towards increased complexity, as well. The tendency will be for frameworks to become more complex, which will lead to increased LLM use, which will increase complexity.

We need better chatbots to fix the bugs from the current chatbots that fixed the bugs from the previous chatbots when they fixed the bugs from the previous generation of chatbots that…..

Just give Sam Altman more and more of your money and he’ll make a more advanced chatbot to fix the chatbot he sold you that broke everything.

You don’t even need to own a computer, just install an app on your phone to do it all. It doesn’t matter that regular people have been completely priced out of personal computing when GPT is just gonna do all the computing anymore anyway.

Clearly a sustainable way forward for the industry.

That actually might be an improvement over the JS frameworks...

Yes, so what? That's what I basically do, i need a little framework with this and that and API, 15 minutes later I get exactly what I need and want. Not more, not less.as long as it's not Auth, crypto or something like that, I don't see an issue.

i absolutely loved the story, thank you for sharing!

...and the absolutely unhinged reaction of many commenters to AI use is rich in sociological insight. i have the impression that native english speakers feel somehow threatened... but in general, it's rich for the HN crowd huffing and puffing about AI translation after having turned the world in the most inhuman technology mediated thing, way before AI...

I agree, computer graphics and art were sloppified, copied and corporate way before AI, so pulling a casablanca "I'm shocked, shocked to find that AI is going on in here!" is just hypocritical and quite annoying.

as a researcher, writing ended up being my job, and more specifically, writing in english. i never developed any sentimental link to the english language, to me it always felt bland, because i had to use it in bland environments, to write texts that had to be bland and manneristic.

chatgpt revolutionized my work because it makes creating those bland texts so much easier and fast. it made my job more interesting because i don't have to care about writing as much as before.

to those who complain about ai slop, i have nothing to say. english was slop before, even before ai, and not because of some conspiracy, but because the gatekeepers of journals and scientific production already wanted to be fed slop.

for sure society will create others, totally idiosyncratic ways to generate distinction and an us vs others. that's natural. but, for now, let's enjoy this interregnum...

ooo... i thought Last.fm was a rebranding of audioscrobbler; i didn't know it was a parallel project. and I am an audioscrobbler user since 2006! and I've used it to this day, i mean, last.fm.

very interesting article!