3 ms·

I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and enter

I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime. It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.

slipknotfan 6mo ago
"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers." http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
hresvelgr 6mo ago
> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation. > not puerile consumption. I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.
mercer 6mo ago
A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on. I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did. EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.

slipknotfan 6mo ago

"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers." http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

hresvelgr 6mo ago

> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation. > not puerile consumption. I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.

mercer 6mo ago

A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on. I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did. EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.