Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.
Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.
@richpuchalsky we feel this SO HARD this week. it is no longer possible to find answers to trivial technical questions with a web search.
we're very grateful we have a curated personal library of authoritative reference material, but a lot of key Unix ideas are socially-defined and not formally documented anywhere.... (for example, just now we were trying to remember the semantics of when chown is allowed, and the rationale for it)
[off on a tangent...]
I wonder if, for some technical systems, we could assume that we got incorrect information if the answer is "too neat".
(For example, my pet peeve: The number of dashes for different Unix commands.find / --name '*.sh'
"Wait. Two dashes? I now have docs for 10 programs who have consistent syntax. That is highly unlikely.")
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Irenes (many)
Not a Spring Onion