It wouldn't have to be 79 websites, obviously - there's RSS, for example. But there's also ten other things that already exist, and probably ten other things that don't exist that neither of us could imagine.
I know that if you live in one place, in one time, and everyone does one thing around you and acts like it's the only thing that ever existed, that it's really (really, really) tempting to think it's the only thing that could exist. But it's completely false. Loads of obvious seeming things are totally false, and this is definitively one of them.
Not only is it possible that we'll have a totally different society one day, and maybe even one where we have no to extremely few middlemen, but since Pascal and de Fermat we've known it to be roughly 100% likely! You can completely depend on the fact it will happen!
I'm not saying I want them to run the whole service free of charge, I'm saying I'd consider it a gain for the species if the business closed down. I look forward to alternative ideas (with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment) being tested out.
The TV era held some promise but steadily declined, and the Youtube era has went similarly. The audiovisual onslaught continues. Technically competent people on here are innoculated against the realities of the average usage on these platforms, which equates to brain-rot of the lowest calibre.
It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc.
There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money.
We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers.
I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm".
I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.
This response is quite the surprise - I am explicitly saying that I think this article reduces travel to "a pissing competition", as you put it, and that it is shocking to me to see it done so shamelessly.
The author will be describing interesting things about the place in a neutral or respectful tone for a line or five, and then suddenly switch to a sort of review-and-compare-mode, as if it were not a real place with 12 million people in it, but a product that just arrived in the post with this feature and that.
Or like a pokemon card, as I said, but for grown-ups. I have a Tunisia, it does xyz. It's good at this and bad at that. I mean that metaphor seriously, I think it really applies.
I mention the idea of putting in the extra effort to interact with locals - through volunteering, or whatever - not to make some comment about myself, or make some appeal to purity, but rather because it's a very good way to avoid turning travelling into stamp-collecting. It's a way of forcing yourself to see the subtlety and variety in a place.
The one assumption I felt myself to be making was that he reads Wikipedia, but that's hardly a heinous crime or anything. It was of no relevance to my point anyway.
Otherwise, regarding ranting - that's just, like, your opinion, man
I have entertained a similar notion when imagining the direction industries that make software might go from here. There's a possible future where some sizeable percentage of companies goes extra hard in the direction of "LLMs in, costly programmers out", and end up getting completely smashed when the LLM systems fall apart.
There might even be a couple of months of "gains" as (pointless) metrics go up, and then we might see a proper crash when stuff stops working. Especially for software which businesses rely on, surely there must be a point where they'll say enough of this crap?
Maybe not, too. Capitalism is a very surprising system, capable of absorbing shocks and morphing itself seemingly endlessly.
It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference.
The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976.
The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't see how it would be logical to expect anything else, as long as profit lines go up why would they care.
Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users, we're cooked, as the youth say.
I wonder if it's merely some language or cultural difference, and I don't mean it as a snipe at all, but may I just say - software products have "features", human beings have traits! Maybe it's a confusion based on the fact that human beings as well as traits also do have "features", but that refers to things like having tiny ears.
Having a very strong liking for sitting reading books for long periods is a lovely trait, but it certainly is not a feature (I would say!).
Maybe one day I'll get used to people people putting pictures and videos of their 3-year-olds on the internet, but that day has not yet come. I see it there and can only think, oh the poor kid. It even says he's shy at one point in the article.
More on-topic - I recommend Grace Llewellyn and John Holt on learning, to anyone. Truly life-changing material. Finally got around to John Holt recently, and am very happy to eventually read his work.
You can't get back the years made painfully lesser by the school systems we put people through - myself included - and you probably can't undo all the damage done, either. But you can face the absurdity of the situation, and try to improve your own mental life, and that of the people in your life.
If the business school is silly enough to accept people based partially on the idea that they climbed Everest, perhaps he was right to treat the task of getting in to the place as essentially theatre.
I don't mean to be facetious here. It's just that if GitHub doesn't end up going through the usual enshittification process, it'll be quite the anomaly.
Now, maybe it'll be an anomaly, exceptions to rules exist. But it just seems to be an endless cycle, trusting these companies, getting burnt, trusting again, getting burnt again. Is there no end to the cycle? Is there some new pressure on these companies to behave better that was not there before, and therefore we should all give them (yet) another chance?
I don't see why we would, personally. It even seems obvious to me that we shouldn't. Like in an abusive relationship, no matter the regret and the promises, eventually you've to say enough is enough, and ideally sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, it's very common practice for people who appear at least superficially like smart people to trust these companies a second, third, fourth time.
Either these apparently smart people know something I don't, or they like getting paid large amounts of money so much that they'll stay quiet and use the popular services and simply use their tech savvy to jump to a new thing quickly when the shit hits the fan. Or maybe I just prefer being cynical, and it's a personality thing. Someone, educate me here.
Business emails, other comments here and there of a more throwaway or ephemeral nature - who cares if LLMs helped?
Personal blogs, essays, articles, creative writing, "serious work" - please tell us if LLMs were used, if they were, and to what extent. If I read a blog and it seems human and there's no mention of LLMs, I'd like to be able to safely assume it's a human who wrote it. Is that so much to ask?
I know that if you live in one place, in one time, and everyone does one thing around you and acts like it's the only thing that ever existed, that it's really (really, really) tempting to think it's the only thing that could exist. But it's completely false. Loads of obvious seeming things are totally false, and this is definitively one of them.
Not only is it possible that we'll have a totally different society one day, and maybe even one where we have no to extremely few middlemen, but since Pascal and de Fermat we've known it to be roughly 100% likely! You can completely depend on the fact it will happen!