> continuous UI updates are frustrating for users […] It's driven often by individual developers' needs to leave their fingerprints on something, to be able to say, "this project is now MY project", to be able to use it as a portfolio item that helps them get a bigger paycheck in the future.
Yes, although users also judge updates by what is apparent. Imagine if OS UIs didn’t change and you had to pay for new versions. So I’m sure UI updates are also partly motivated by a desire to signal improvements.
I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.
> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.
In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.
> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.
I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.
> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.
As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.
As a private individual, you didn't actually have to pay for anything once you got an Internet connection. Most countries never even tried enforcing copyright laws against small fish. DRM was barely a thing and was easily broken within days by l33t teenagers.
I think you may be looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. Sure, social media today is not the same, so the comparison isn’t quite sensible, but IRC was an unpleasant place full of petty egos and nasty people.
Indeed. Someone who is articulate is someone who is able to articulate ideas clearly and with facility. Someone who produces the mere superficial appearance of being articulate is not actually being articulate. He's performing bad theater.
> the good ideas I have to praise or agree with, and the bad ideas I cannot disagree with because they get offended
Why do you feel this need? You don't have to play people's games. Let people get offended. If you have not said anything objectively offensive, then morally, you have nothing to worry about. Any subjective offense taken is their problem and concern, not yours.
You can't lie by accident. You can tell a falsehood, however.
But where LLMs are concerned, they don't tell truths or falsehoods either, as "telling" also requires intent. Moreover, LLMs don't actually contain propositional content.
On the one hand, you have violence and pornography, and also other crude content. There is nothing good about exposing children to these. It does not contribute to their growth or to their maturity as human beings and it is ridiculous to think it could. On the contrary, this content will cause psychological harm, causing distortions in their emotions, in their habituated appetites, in their self-understanding, and their understanding of normal relations. When deviance like that is tolerated, it shifts the Overton window. Children observe this tolerance and roll it into their sense of normality. Individuals suffer. The quality of society degrades substantially.
On the other hand, we have political agitation. This one is more difficult to define and handle, especially in a liberal democratic society. There are examples of obvious political agitation, of course, but children should generally not be exposed to political agitation at all, except as a subject matter at an age appropriate level and in an appropriate pedagogic setting. Children don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to examine such material in the wild on their own where they would be at the mercy of unscrupulous adult manipulators who couldn't care less about the well-being of children. (Ask yourself what kind of person would want to involve children in their political agitation to begin with.)
So, there's a big difference between common sense things like these and coddling children. We want to prepare children for life, not teach them adaptation to depravity. You throw them into the filth of social and psychological pathology. Neither violence nor pornography should be normalized even in the adult world - it is harmful to the adults who consume it as well - so the idea that we should prepare children for life in some violent and twisted pornland is preposterous. Nobody has to put up with that garbage, and the law should be making sure they don't.
I would say it’s worse than that. Read Plato’s “Republic” and you may come to appreciate a much more expansive appropriateness of Comic Sans, beyond just the current administration.
Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a political or commercial context, but it should not be the only one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.
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