155 karma · joined May 6, 2023
"Consider the nested and divergent forms of literacy required for a 19-year-old trying to participate in the democratic process as an informed citizen today ... they cross-reference short-form video analysis, parse hyperlinked primary sources, evaluate the credibility and rhetorical posture of algorithmic feeds, and weigh the consensus within a comment section"
which seems like a huge stretch. This may be "literacy" in the sense of being "computer literate" but I see very little connection here to actual literacy as in being able to read. First of all short form video is not reading, full stop. "Parsing hyperlinked primary sources" COULD be, but is that really happening? Most of these feeds are just full of talking heads reacting to other talking heads. The only reading going on is the last point about comment sections, and I think the comparison of that to reading a book only makes the impression more depressing, not less.
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
I have my own experience with a similar issue as I work with regular expressions in multiple languages. Getting the cursor to behave while mixing RtL and LtR is a nightmare, and it's always a guess whether the regex engine will evaluate the text correctly. There's also the struggle between forms that look identical but are different unicode points e.g. between Persian and Arabic, as well as the issues with Persian zero-width non-joiners (ZWNJ) which are optional in the language but can look invisible (or nearly so) to the eye.
These are genuinely difficult technical challenges and I understand that there's no quick fix. But I wish there was more of a drive to solve them, rather than the default English-over-everything approach that's so common.
Good fun and a great new way to use a Go board to keep things fresh, thanks for making this.
That being said, it's still sad that this is the default new/returning user experience. Imagine a world where a new user was met with real posts about a variety of interests, rather than a psychic barrage of insane AI posts.
I'm not certain but I think the LLM is also generating the physics itself. It's generating rules based on its training data, e.g. watch a cat walk enough and you can simulate how the cat moves in the generated "world".
This is a pretty common fear, just look up thalassophobia (or don't! sorry!)