brib ​ Mar 24
"without ai, how can ordinary people do this?!?" asks the tech pundit about a skill many ordinary people have learned
Show threadLoohoosaherMar 24

@brib the rapid onset of helplessness I see around me is troubling

This goes for so much tech. Once people get used to some little convenience they seem to forget how they used to just get along fine

Show threadbrib ​ Mar 24
@hwll Yeah... using tech for convenience is one thing (and sometimes there's a good accessibility reason for it), forgetting it was even possible without convenience is another
Show threadLoohoosaherMar 24

@brib yeah definitely accessibility (speaking broadly and inclusively) is a great reason for tech convenience in this context. But if everyone starts using the tech then the people who actually need it are kinda right back where they started, relatively.

I'm thinking mostly of accessibility to work or like be "productive"

Show threadbrib ​ Mar 24
@hwll Agreed, and what's worse with the AI stuff it leaves a lot of people very dependent on companies which do not have their best interests at heart
Show threadLoohoosaherMar 24
@brib it's such a poison pill. I feel bad for my fellow workers who feel, real or not, that they have no choice in the matter
Show threadbrib ​ 

@hwll Plus (and this is what gets to me personally) they complain about how hard it is to do things without AI while destroying the resources that help you figure it out without AI.

It angers me just how many search engine results are pure slop now

Mar 24 at 12:33pmWeb
Show threadLoohoosaherMar 24

@brib ugh yeah I'll be searching for something pretty mainstream that I *know* is indexed but just isn't coming up past all the similar hits for SEO garbage. And then the pages I do click are keyword baiting slop that are 10 slightly different 1000 word articles slopped up around the same tiny kernel of actually real information.

Then I think... I know of an LLM trained on the same corpus that is suited to exactly this kind of keyword similarity searching over a large area, and it's currently *free*.

So I get it. But as we know it's a bad trade in the long term.