The fact that most new programming services and products are oriented towards C-suite types, and not to the people who actually use them.
Most websites looks like [1] or [2] which are full of corporate-friendly buzzwords but don't help me understand what they actually do or how they work. To get a concrete understanding I need to go to github and find repos that actually use the product to even understand what it's for.
Well, that's obviously because the people using the software aren't the customers. The customers are the ones signing the checks.
I actually think it's the right approach for a tech business - your main landing pages should market towards the buyers and then you can have more technical documentation pages for the users. As an example from your comment: https://tailscale.com/kb/1151/what-is-tailscale
Yes, I understand why they do it, and I assume that doing it that way is the "right approach" for them, for the capitalistic reasons that you specified. It just makes me sad that the amazing capabilities of the web are being squandered and marketing fluff, when that same page real estate could be used to educate and enlighten.
Almost 30 years ago National Semiconductor had an early nicely done website that allowed you to search for products, get data sheets, ask questions, find reps and distributors. I used it all the time.
1997-8 one day I bring it up and it's been replaced by a glossy site extolling the value of National Semiconductor stock and lauding the CEO, CFO, and the board members and nothing about the companies actual product. A few months later they added a link to the old site down in the right hand corner.
I've come around to the idea that MBA's shouldn't be allowed to own individual stocks. Only through index funds.
Que Office Space: "What would you say... ya do here?"
Not just programming languages, all sorts of tech product websites really fail to answer the two essential questions "What the heck do you do and what does it cost?" while having lots of fancy words and pictures.
Even Cloudflare. Imagine you're one of the 10,000 people to discover what Cloudflare does today[1]. Can you go to their website and get an answer? Absolutely not. "We make websites, apps, and networks faster and more secure. Our developer platform is the best place to build modern apps and deliver AI initiatives." above the fold on their front page. If you don't already know what Cloudflare does, does this mean anything at all? Not in the slightest.
This doesn't sound so bad. I would much prefer to have discussions about politics, technology, or religion safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.
On that note, out of all the examples you could have given for discussion categories that are unbecoming to have with minors, you chose 3 relatively benign ones, lol.
> safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."
Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.
The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.
Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?
I don't care if they are 16 or 68, I discuss about topics, not necesarily with the person themself. the former can be insightful and the latter still be extremely close minded.
I also don't understand why the government should control who I can talk to in a digital space. Maybe start investigating the president's flight records if you suddenly care about children interacting with adults.
It's important to deconflate interpersonal vs. administrative deficiencies. In some ways, Obama capitulated to the JSOC endless kill-lists and endorsement of militarist projects to appear "strong" in an administrative sense. He could've ended the ineffective, expensive barbarism but didn't have the leadership initiative and/or political capital to do so.
> It's important to deconflate interpersonal vs. administrative deficiencies. In some ways, Obama capitulated to the JSOC endless kill-lists and endorsement of militarist projects to appear "strong" in an administrative sense. He could've ended the ineffective, expensive barbarism but didn't have the leadership initiative and/or political capital to do so.
I'd say your interpretation of events requires a lot of unjustified analysis of Obama's mental state, without any supporting evidence.
> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
> In that case, you're bottlenecked by the speed of the world
Why not have the AI train on a simulation of the real world? We can build those pretty easily using traditional software and run them at any speed we want.
Most websites looks like [1] or [2] which are full of corporate-friendly buzzwords but don't help me understand what they actually do or how they work. To get a concrete understanding I need to go to github and find repos that actually use the product to even understand what it's for.
[1] https://www.astronomer.io/
[2] https://tailscale.com/
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