I might be wrong or mistaken, but it seems like a big disadvantage for Figma that in order to use an agent with Figma, it has to be a specially trained Figma-aware agent and not just whatever agent I personally want to use.
Feels to me like a big issue that a smart competitor could take advantage of. I want to use my agent, I don't want to pay Figma to use their agent.
I'm also a bit salty about Figma ratcheting down hard on API calls, which creates customer service issues for any product that integrates with the Figma API. So maybe I am biased, but based on comments in here it also seems like the Figma MCP isn't very good either. Is Figma's long-term strategy to go full walled garden?
Tell that to the anti-AI people who go online and tell people to kill themselves for using AI. I'm pretty tired of it. People like the comment I am replying to only amplify and encourage other people to be hateful jerks on the internet, it needs to be fought against the same way people fight against all other kinds of bigotry at this point. It's not acceptable.
People who use AI do not go on the internet and insult, demean, and/or threaten people who do not use AI. It does not matter to us. Meanwhile the people who hate AI seem to spend every waking moment going on the internet to screech about how much they hate AI and people who use AI. And I'm the one who is told "it's not that deep", give me a fucking break LOL. Why don't you reply to the other guy and tell him that and see how it goes? Double standard bullshit.
"Not judging anyone here," then proceeds to list off every reason they are judging people who enjoy something they do not enjoy. Why is this always so predictable? "Not judging, but if you like this game you're a slack-jawed zombie who is wasting their life." Okay.
I wonder how long it will take society to move past the idea of intellectual property being a thing you can own / control / solely exploit. It seems to me that in the future, the spoils will go to the most motivated. Which is already how it works, but money has been the dividing factor: I am thinking of the web game Pandemic 2, it came out as an ugly flash game but it was a lot of fun. Then, another guy (who was on the Shacknews forum at the time) saw it, and I guess he had some money, so he hired artists and engineers and copied the game, creating Plague Inc, a much slicker and polished version of Pandemic 2. We should all be familiar with Plague Inc, as that guy is certainly a multi-millionaire now. But all he did was put more effort into some other idea he liked. It seems to me that this Total Annihilation port, and projects like Beyond All Reason, show that in some cases, humans can appreciate the idea that intellectual property isn't really locked up if the owners aren't exploiting it themselves. We just need to move the needle a little further: if you aren't properly exploiting your intellectual property, and someone else who is more motivated can do it better, that's fair game. Isn't that how it already works in so many cases, anyway? We're all just trying to build better widgets than each other, often just the same widget in so many different variants.
The push the past few weeks to start talking about AI with the same language used to discuss sexual assault seems to be in poor taste. It seems like saying "slop" all the time was not effective, so now people are comparing AI to sexual assault... Sentences like "AI bros don't understand consent" are obviously meant to suggest that people who are pro-AI are akin to rapists and predators. I'm not sure what benefit there is to doing this, well, I guess that's a lie, I understand the point is to raise the emotional stakes of this debate to such a level that people feel like they can't disagree.
Unlike when it comes to sexual assault, everyone being "assaulted" with AI can very easily choose to switch to Linux or use different services at any moment. There's really no need for such hyperbole. Software changes you don't like aren't akin to sexual assault.
The threads in here really make me wonder what the endgame is for people who have surrendered to pure doomerism. Saying stuff like "ai will suck the soul out of everything" is such a defeatist standpoint to take, but I see it all the time, like authors who say AI has devalued writing and there is no reason for them to write anymore. It all kind of goes back to the classic argument that if anyone can do the thing that you think makes you special, you are no longer special. But that's not true, it is the self that makes anything you make special. If you're using AI tools to achieve your vision, then your thing is special. But it seems like the assumption is that no one cares about making good things, people will just make bad things, and everything will be ruined. That's just not true. Digital photography did not make all photographs bad, because taking a photo became too easy. Same for switching from typewriters to computers with spellcheck. I just don't really get the intense pessimism overall.
If you only liked doing the thing because other people couldn't do the thing, did you even like doing the thing to begin with? Or did you only like doing the thing because you thought it said something about you as a person? This is probably at the root of all gatekeeping behavior, really.
I really disliked Blade Runner for a long time because I love the book so much. It wasn't until a humanities class in college that I learned to appreciate Blade Runner separately from the book. Now, instead of hating Blade Runner, I love it, and I hate Blade Runner 2049 instead, because that movie seems to have zero respect for the message of the first movie, and zero respect for the intention of Ridley Scott (it's obvious to me they changed some things just to get Harrison Ford back in the film). I know I am in the minority, but we are a minority that has extremely good and valid reasons for being upset about it.
In business there's 52 (4*13) weeks in a year and as a result, 2080 regular working hours in a year (40*52). I think these are just generally agreed upon ways to define time for simplicity. In some (most?) systems your 'hourly wage' is simply your salary divided by 2080, trying to divide your salary by other metrics to determine hourly wage tend to wonk the numbers a bit.
Considering how long OKCupid has been around, there's a good chance a significant majority of internet-using millennials have had an account at some point in their lives.
Why can't you just like an app, why do you have to turn it into a personal statement about your dislike of AI? If AI was not involved, why bring it up?
I didn't even post a link to my blog, I posted a link to my public traffic stats, and only in response to something you said. Way to prove my point, buddy.
Why are you putting words/desires in my mouth that I did not voice? No one said anything about moving the needle. I said that my blog will go into Google results and help people, you said that sounded optimistic, so then I provided you proof that my blog already shows in google results and receives traffic. I've received messages from real people who have been helped by my writing on my blog, so it's not just bots.
I do not know what "move the needle" means or why you think I am trying to do that. Your excessive negativity and pessimism is unwarranted and I dislike it. Honestly between you and that other guy replying to my comments with seemingly thinly veiled vitriol for my perspective, it's just further proof of my point that being able to communicate with large groups of anonymous people is typically a net negative. Most anonymous people seem to be quite nasty. I'd rather write on my blog where no one like you will see it, and if you do see it, you likely won't go out of your way to send me an email with your negative comments because it's likely you do this for public attention.
Every single one of your comments in this thread is some slippery slope stuff where you think corporations and federal government are going to work together to kill off the (public?) internet. It's okay that you feel that way, even if it's just a big ol' fallacy, but you don't need to repeat it in six different places. You made your point, you think the internet is doomed no matter what happens, great, let's move on.
Who cares if anyone knows my blog exists? I'm not writing my blog to farm engagement as I do not run ads on my blog. I write on my blog because I want to write my thoughts down and project them into the world. Whether or not anyone sees them is pretty unimportant.
If my writing helps someone via them hitting my blog directly or them getting the answer via AI aggregation, mission accomplished.
It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
I spend all day every day on the Internet and I don't share your perspective. I might dislike centralized social media and yearn for a bygone era, but just in the past two days I had a very positive interaction with multiple real humans in the Commodore 64 subreddit that helped solve a problem I was having that isn't documented anywhere else on the internet yet. So then I went on my personal blog and blogged about it, which will get it out there on Google and help others. In this way, I am helping to keep the internet alive, I guess. "Be the change you want to see in the world," and all that.
In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are.
I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.
Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
So why isn't it called "dead social media theory"? The internet is not only social media services, though I understand a lot of people seem to think that without centralized social media services there is no reason to use the internet.
Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.
Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
I use Claude Code a lot, and it always lets me know the moment I stopped thinking hard, because it will build something completely asinine. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say...
and...? it does not change the fact that this "app" would get 0 attention if it wasn't using nostalgic IP that does not belong to the developer. their are undoubtedly better, more original apps being posted to HN right now that likely deserve the attention more, but they're not using stolen IP to get attention, so they don't.