somethingreen (u/somethingreen)

somethingreen commented on AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger? elma.dev/notes/ai-makes-s... · Posted by u/elmsec

dgs_sgd · 6 months ago

The article says that more juniors + AI was the early narrative, but where does that come from?

Everything I’ve read has been the opposite. I thought people from the beginning saw that AI would amplify a senior’s skills and leave less opportunities for juniors.

somethingreen · 6 months ago

AI was supposed to replace juniors and then climb up the ladder with each new release, eventually leaving any work only for the creme of the crop. Which would make the current generation of software engineers the last, but who cares - stocks go up.

Now apparently we've switched to pairing poor kids with an agreeable digital moron that reads and types real fast and expecting them to somehow get good at the job. Stocks still go up, so I guess we'll be doing this for a while.

somethingreen commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward

anilgulecha · 8 months ago

Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.

Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.

somethingreen · 8 months ago

Every user in bittorrent network is self-hosting. All it takes is to launch an app.

Evidently, if you combine content access platform with a hosting platform and make running the latter a requirement for the former, it works out.

somethingreen commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward

mcosta · 8 months ago

How are you going to prevent that history repeat itself?

somethingreen · 8 months ago

Invite only, laws, law enforcement, exile. Federated sovereign clusters. Digital nations, ultimately. Except you don't need weapons and a piece of land to establish a new one. (We already have these, we just let corporations run them)

somethingreen commented on Now might be the best time to learn software development substack.com/home/post/p-... · Posted by u/nathanfig

somethingreen · 9 months ago

Now might be the last time to learn software development.

somethingreen commented on Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta dropsitenews.com/p/leaked... · Posted by u/jbegley

aucisson_masque · a year ago

I like to think we are in a better place than russia for instance with all its propaganda and jailed journalists, but then i see these kind of article come over and over....

Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media, like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to 'suck up' to the government because at the end they are business, they need to be in good term with ruling class.

you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that because no one has the time to fact check everything.

One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone can actually look for real information, but even in russia people have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.

Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream media and they enforce the government narrative, you can't speak there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe the government propaganda, your arguments won't be heard at all.

The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

somethingreen · a year ago

Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods of power grabs are also fairly universal.

The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.

somethingreen commented on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting bbc.com/news/live/c625ex2... · Posted by u/yakkomajuri

casenmgreen · a year ago

> 1. It provides a way for Ukraine to become a client of US defense instead of a an aid recipient. That is, it allows Ukraine to pay for the weapons it receives.

The text I saw was for the formation of a jointly (US/UA) owned entity which would decide how to reinvest 50% of the profits from UA State owned minerals/related infrastructure.

Unless "reinvest" means "give to US", I don't see this point happening.

> 2. It puts Americans on the ground in Ukraine in a non-military capacity. This introduces a new diplomatic dimension, as attacking or occupying land with significant American presence is not desirable.

In what way? we're not talking about any US State investment, and any US private investment would be crazy, given the war and possibility of future war. No one would invest there.

> 3. It provides money for an investment fund for rebuilding Ukraine.

It's money that exists anyway, only now it's in a fund jointly controlled by US/UA rather than being controlled only by UA.

somethingreen · a year ago

US gets to decide how at least half the fund gets spent, so it's US businesses who get the investment and eventually reap the profits. Ukraine obviously doesn't have the cash to give back and it will never have any without reconstruction. This is one way US gets anything at all back at a pace it has any control over.

But you are correct that without security guarantees there will be no development, no reconstruction, no investments. The deal just does nothing.

somethingreen commented on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting bbc.com/news/live/c625ex2... · Posted by u/yakkomajuri

gitaarik · a year ago

Thanks, I will check it out.

What I also don't understand is that I'm being downvoted just for asking a sincere question. What am I doing wrong?

somethingreen · a year ago

The only part of you post that can be steelmanned into what can be considered an argument is "NATO expansion". And that argument falls apart if you actually think and explore it for like 15 minutes. Like, what is NATO and its purpose, how does "expansion" actually work in terms of process, what events took place on the continent between 90s and new NATO members joining, what else could have compelled parties to go through the process and how durable that would be?

And then the rest of your "question" is straight up factually false.

somethingreen commented on AnandTech Farewell anandtech.com/show/21542/... · Posted by u/janice1999

Workaccount2 · 2 years ago

>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage

While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.

I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.

I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.

Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.

somethingreen · 2 years ago

The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.

The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.

somethingreen commented on The lie of music discovery algorithms zeynepevecen.dev/writing/... · Posted by u/zeynepevecen

diob · 2 years ago

I'm not sure how the Spotify recommendation algorithm works at all, but for some reason I imagined them doing fancier things than looking at my liked songs and finding similar ones. I would've thought they'd build a profile of you, and then find similar user profiles and show you songs those folks liked that you hadn't found yet.

That's gotta be how they do it, right? I'm probably wrong.

somethingreen · 2 years ago

I feel those are how Pandora and Last.fm (used to?) work respectively. Nowadays everything seems to just put a bunch of tags on a track and suggest you things with the same tags to the tracks you liked. Doesn't even need to match the same combination of tags, just some number of them. The problem is, you probably care about the small, specific tags, and the system cares about wide "popular" tags. If you like a couple niche genre covers of songs that happen to be featured in TV openings/OSTs, you are not getting more songs in that genre - you are getting a bunch of covers and OSTs.

somethingreen commented on Taking away iPhone made daughter a better person theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/hackerbeat

yedava · 2 years ago

If all the kids in the peer group have no cell phones, solving the mental health crisis would be easy. As long as some kids have access, the others will feel like they are being deprived of something fundamental, will resent their parents and will look for any opportunity to get on social media.

A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.

Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.

somethingreen · 2 years ago

I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.

Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.