arthurfirst

Is this an article from 1997?

It makes a lot of people dumber -- they doom scroll, gossip, play childrens games, and on the high end post cat memes.

But it's a tool like any other and the results depend on the user.

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear it is (was) the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge of the world unfiltered without gate keeper trolls deciding what you can see and learn.

Getting on the internet in 1993 completely changed my life. Linux changed my life and without the internet there is no Linux. Before Linux you could not get a UNIX distro for less than $1000 USD which was a lot of money for me back then.

Before Linux and Internet all that was available to consumers outside of big institutions was Windoze and Apple was already on life support. The internet and Linux opened an entire world to me and I never looked back. Everyone at the time said I was wasting my time and should be doing an MCSE LOL but those are people in the 90%... they will NEVER get it.

Fast forward 4 years later I'm working in startups and leading dev teams and that was almost 30 years ago.

I can imagine what my life would have been without the internet and I prefer how things worked out.

So it did not make me dumber... but the filtered nannied corporate approved internet of 2026 -- that probably just makes anyone dumber.

Imagine thinking there is an option but to kiss the ring and still be allowed to play or that there are even two sides.

Imaging thinking it even matters what Tim cook or Trump do. Imagine thinking Tim Cook is anything but a stand in book keeper and stock promoter. Imagine thinking Trump is anything but a heel turn pro wrestler. Trump is bunkem for the masses and Tim Cook is irrelevant and a follower.

Steve was a an idea guy. Tim was a seeker of efficiencies and consensus -- boring and common.

I didn't buy one apple product during Tim's tenure but I still have my IIe and several old Macs converted to Linux.

Genius is often regarded as brutish or mean by lesser people. Your feelings on it do not matter.

Just like MCP is for Desktop users and useless otherwise -- GUIs are a solution to a created problem.. of users not being able to read and write very well because they don't practice.

Terminal, coding, and even prompt writing skills are language skills.

If you cannot use a terminal properly you are basically an appliance user. Like a toaster operator.

TUIs are not for everyone by design.

If you are using linux and cannot use a console to code...

The original software for the ISS (space station) was stored on a single floppy disk. Not sure about density but one of the engineers told me.

your comment made me smile like a grandpa :)

Also lighten up! oh... damn black hole...

it's already a black hole for funding

Windows 98 did the same for me

In Canada the police are pretty lazy and it's mostly due to who they hire, and also a LOT of political garbage as it's a federal police force throughout the country in most cases -- run from Ottawa.

Not much real police work happening any more unless you criticize the government or do something they can use as a reason to grow their budgets or otherwise further political agendas.

If there is a video of a crime they do like that...easy! Also they can show it to media for props.

Lazy cops just love centralized 'social' media and the fools who post their lives on it for them to snoop through.

Force multiplier and power projector.

Requires ammo (tokens) which can be expensive.

Requires good aim to hit the target.

Requires practice to get good aim.

Dangerous in the hands of the unskilled (like most instruments or tools).

Solution looking for a problem is why. No value is why.

Breaks NAT privacy and the extensions do not do enough.

Top down pushed solution NOBODY WANTS.

I have a claude max subscription and a gemini pro sub and I exclusively use them on the cli. When I run out of claude max each week I switch over to gemini and the results have been pretty impressive -- I did not want to like it but credit where credit is due to google.

Like the OP others I didn't use the API for gemini and it was not obvious how to do that -- that said it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would? Sure you need API for any applications with built-in LLM features, but not for developing in the LLM assisted CLI tools.

I think the issue with cli tools for many is you need to be competent with cli like a an actual nix user not Mac first user etc. Personally I have over 30 years of daily shell use and a sysadmin and developer. I started with korn and csh and then every one you can think of since.

For me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible. To say nothing of the physical aliments associated with excessive mousing.

Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

I'll play the devils advocate a bit:

IP is a form of thought control... Is that ethical?

Who holds who accountable? Is the one doing the holding accountable?

Like Stalin said -- it's not the votes that count but who counts the votes.

Bottom line is you are always required to accept someone's version of ethical -- whether it's obvious or not.

That instance is final... but yes you are not dead!

As a craftsman who has failed and started over believe me I have lived it.

Ethics course != ethical Corporate ethics ~= slavery with a smile

Lawyers will all tell you how ethical they are but I do not take them seriously.

I literally filled out TPS reports every week at this place down to the hour, breaking down internal project billing and customer billing. In order get the charge codes from the PM, you need to give them estimates. That was the main driver for estimates - convince the non-coders.

30 years ago my boss at a large defense/aviation contractor told me estimating software projects was a very valuable skill, but all estimates were always wrong because they are simplifications and to keep that in mind -- his words.

Mainly they are useful to build belief and keep a direction towards the goal.

Models of any kind in whatever domain are necessarily always something less than reality. That is both their value and weakness.

So estimates are models. Less than reality. Therefore we should not expect them to be useful beyond 'plans are useless, but planning is indispensable' -- I think thats' Eisenhower.

what a great comment :)

I worded it poorly.

Unions should have more of a place... it is the right idea... but they were subverted in critical ways so they don't serve their members quite as they should. Instead they enrich middle men. Seems like the bigger the union the truer this is.

I am still shocked not to see the opposite order -- but those days are long gone.

> Sure, and advertising has zero effect on you.

Not possible!

But you learn over time and if you have the right though process, less and less it affects you.

Unions had a place, the idea sounds good, it's the practice people didnt like.

By all means do include FOX in that list of shame -- my mistake! No better. you are correct.

It's a game all empires/sides are playing. In russia we are the boogeyman -- everyone needs one! it helps to stifle dissent.

I reacted a bit to the OP when focusing on only one side.

> There are people whose job it is day in day out to influence Western opinion

CNN/CIA/NBC/ABC/FBI? etc?

Poison the corpus.

18 years ago I stood up at a super computing symposium as asked the presenter what would happen if I fed his impressive predictive models garbage data on the sly... they still have no answer for that.

Make up so much crap it's impossible to tell the real you from the nonsense.

Bang on.

> It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint.

Not an accidental 'viewpoint'. A deliberate framing to exactly exclude what you pointed out from the discourse. Sure therer are dummies who actually believe it, but they are not serious humans.

If the supposedly evil russians or their bots are the enemy then people pay much less attention to the real problems at home.

Most 'media' is produced content designed to manipulate -- nothing new. The article isn't really AI specific as others have said.

Personally my fear based manipulation detection is very well tuned and that is 95% of all the manipulations you will ever get from so-called 'elites' who are better called 'entitled' and act like children when they do not get their way.

I trust ChatGPT for cooking lessons. I code with Claude code and Gemini but they know where they stand and who is the boss ;)

There is never a scenario for me where I defer final judgment on anything personally.

I realize others may want to blindly trust the 'authorities' as its the easy path, but I cured myself of that long before AI was ever a thing.

Take responsibility for your choices and AI is relegated to the role of tool as it should be.

How do people learn then?

Personally I learn best by doing. If I study before I try something the results are poorer compared to the reverse. Make an attempt. Fail. Understand. Then study.

It's not an either or proposition, either.

Dockerfiles freshness is up to the maintainer, like any FOSS.

We do not have botnets because we share information about how to run servers. People run botnets and we have botnets because of mostly economic or political incentives-- the same reasons people do a lot of things.

You are not wrong about the complexity of something like running an EVE online server being beyond the abilities of the non-professional, but that should not preclude the information from being shared.

Script kiddies have been around for a long time. Borrowing the work of the better engineers and adapting it for their less idealistic goals.

> These are people who should not be running systems.

I lol'd at that :) I was just trying to be more inclusive! Results have been mixed.

I do build images from scratch but I also recognize I am atypical (like many around HN). As i get older (and older) I realize In another time and place I would have been someone completely different -- but I got the internet era. not complaining. It's worked out ok.

I wish you the best as well friend!

Defending? I am simply pointing out the obvious flaws in your logic.

If you think Raytheon is the apex evil corporation you are very mistaken. There is hardly any separation between mega corps and state above a certain level. The same people are in majority control of IBM, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc, etc.

Stop consuming marketing materials as gospel.

What you see as this or that atrocity on CNN or whatever that is produced *propaganda*, made for you, and you are swallowing it blindly without thinking.

Also the responsibility is of course down to individuals and their actions-- whether you know their names or not. Objects do not go to war on their own.

I've also worked in aerospace and aviation software but that doesn't preclude me from thinking clearly about whether I'm responsible for this or that thing on the news involving planes -- you might want to stop consuming that.

Yes of course I know all that. That was the whole point of the overlay first approach. i.e. Build a network that works over the existing network before adding any barriers to entry like specialized hardware requirements.