Mx. Aria Stewart1d ago

Okay I know everyone hates this article but there's a nugget of truth in it. One of the possible futures we can gun for is this.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/

Make things. Make _personal scale_ things. The tools help bridge the truly high barriers we've managed to put in in the tech industry.

This will have a lot of problems! We don't have collective knowledge for this yet / again. The people with Sysadmin Mindset have been burned out or subsumed into the Cloud Computing machine.

But there's a chance here to take the web better places. We should take it.

(If you're worried about everything turning into paying to rent access to a digital landlord, I have bad news about where we've been since 2012.)

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web

I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…

Techdirt
Show threadDawn Ahukanna
@aredridel
OBSERVATION: people are using LLMs to code tools for personal projects, the same way they’d use excel for managing/keeping track of financial/numerical information or hire a rental car for transportation.
Most people don’t re-create spreadsheet software!or car but you still need to know how to use the tool effectively.
What most non-devs won’t appreciate: tool user using LLMs to write code, recreates the tool (excel) to manage data & also uses that tool to manage their personal data.
Mar 28 at 5:04pmPhanpy
Show threadMx. Aria Stewart23h ago

@dahukanna yes! For better _and_ worse.

Is an ad hoc heap of mess better or worse than an app someone is renting to you that they can yank the foundations of any time?

Show threadDawn Ahukanna23h ago
@aredridel
There’s value in investing time & effort to create personal digital tools that enable+enhance skills e.g. automatically sort & categorize your human authored content.
I’m more & more convinced that digital literacy is “self-sufficiency” human challenge underlying observed symptomatic behaviour because some of that LLM produced code could’ve been a human produced script/code using existing tools if people knew how instead of it being held to ransomeware by a “monthly subscription”.
Show threadDawn Ahukanna23h ago

@aredridel

Related to your “yank and rip out from under you” comment - https://23.social/@leyrer/116307853170954292

“To manage growing demand” … shift gear and then yank!

leyrer (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Time is an illusion, AI time doubly so"

23
Show threadMx. Aria Stewart21h ago

@dahukanna Hah yeah sigh.

this RAM shortage sucks.

There's a reason I'm not depending on OpenAI or Anthropic.

Show threadDawn Ahukanna23h ago
@aredridel
Would you pay thousands of your currency to buy a car whose parts have been created and assembled by an inexperienced, unqualified, individual person?
But the above scenario is acceptable if we swap LLM subscription for payment and “write code to instruct a computer” for a car creation & assembly.
Show threadMx. Aria Stewart21h ago

@dahukanna I am so the wrong person to ask that of. I have a hand-assembled e-Bike made by an unqualified person (me) out of random chinese stuff.

So I guess in a word yes, and I want to build a world where the context supports that.

Show threadDawn Ahukanna20h ago

@aredridel you hand-assembling an e-bike, motorcycle, car is your project.
If I were going to pay someone to build me a custom e-bike, motorcycle or car I’d expect some expertise, otherwise I’d do it my (unqualified) self & learn something.

But people aren’t learning knowledge (what & how), it’s churn something out+copy+paste.
I do think, if this tech is used socraticly at a personal level rather than sycophanticly en-mass there could have been some benefit from the unethical mass pillage LLMs.

Show threadMx. Aria Stewart19h ago

@dahukanna Is it though? Like, I'm watching people build stuff — and make messes — but they’re learning. They're not learning how _I_ learned, but people haven't learned that way much in fifteen years or so.

This isn't to say there won't be some bad effects (lots, too many). Having a bunch of crappy slop out there _sucks_. But not the personal scale stuff so much. The careless hustlers, as always, inflicting it on others are a huge part of the problem. Never mind the grifters who're happy to make the Dark Forest.

Show threadDawn Ahukanna8h ago

@aredridel
You are right about people having different knowledge acquisition modes - usually a specific mix of words/visual/kinaesthetic/auditory learning.

Learning new things is continuous repetition of (making a mess + failure pain course correcting feedback) - https://mastodon.social/@dahukanna/113658386310418928

It’s “cactus hugging” time!
#CarefulCactusHugging

Show threadjack21h ago
@dahukanna @aredridel the people who would rent a hire car, however, are freaks