The big one is the fact that you will likely be ignored by a large host of them. Even with modern spam filters, a lot of unsolicited messages are simply a waste of packets. Odds are, even your useful, inquisitive message will be buried under the more disingenuous messages, especially in an age of LLMs. Trying to get in contact with anyone that already has a large audience can be discouraging.
Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.
Or "you, but three years from now" in some cases. Logging my random OS changes or what were at the time "one-time shell scripts" in my journal has proven invaluable in some cases.
Well, I seem to have been spared, purely because I have not turned on one of my laptops in a week. Like a few people here, I should probably be rethinking how I use the AUR.
> These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.
@concinds, you yourself are being too empathetic. I am trying to view these websites on my $2,000 PC on high speed internet, and it still is maddeningly slow.
I like JavaScript-light websites just as much as anyone (my own website works on the same principle). However, I do wonder how much of the increased traffic has to do with AI agents that now have an easier time working with the more standard web forms. My own contact form had a bunch of bots quoting Scorpion lyrics before I added a rate limiter.
Ecclesiastes is an interesting one. It goes chapter by chapter, trying to find meaning in life through process of elimination, trying education, hedonism, labor, and wealth. While some things (usually wisdom) bring about more joy in the interim, he declares that they all will lose their charm rather quickly. In the end, all joy from these will leave us before death. Solomon's last hope for fulfillment lies in the eternal and supernatural.
Sometimes I wonder if we should consider using some sort of a hardware key going forward, like a Yubikey or similar product. Physical devices are fairly easy to understand, and a simple on-device PIN or fingerprint-reader adds a 2FA that prevents a lot of fraud. While an ID number is fairly easy to steal, a GPG private key is nearly impossible if handled right.
Of course, the flip-side, this would open up more opportunities for tracking (requiring the hardware keys to log into Facebook). However, in most societies, we do need some way of authenticating who is who, and at least this approach makes fraud much more difficult.