25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • I know this is about hating on AI, but this seems like a typical company relying on SEO tricks to drive traffic to their site so they can display ads hates when the SEO algorithm changes.

    Good news: I’m already starting to see SEO experts giving advice on how to get cited by AI to drive traffic to your site, and for the first time the advice I’m seeing has more to do with providing quality content that answers the kinds of questions people tend to ask about your business domain.

    I recognize the problems AI is bringing to search on both ends. AI generated content is making the already bad signal-to-noise ratio on the internet much worse. And now AI is going to grab the knowledge content of your website, summarize it to users perhaps wrongly with at most a reference link, and the person who invested the time and effort to create the content is cut out. That’s a big problem.

    But I think this begs the question of whether search was any good before. It wasn’t. It isn’t. And to a large degree, all of the SEO bullshit is the reason why, although also the fact that every single site has to make money on ads to justify it’s existence is also ruining fucking everything. Journalism is all click-bait. Reviews are all advertising and referral links.

    This is a nuanced issue, but it really doesn’t matter whether AI wins or loses because the internet is going to continue to get worse. I miss the days of low-bandwidth forcing efficient website design. No bloated 500kb Javascript frameworks. No ad-sense tracking you everywhere you go. I’ll grant you that the internet is prettier now, but that’s really not going to matter if everything winds up presented by AI anyway.

    I’m really hopeful that federation continues to grow and bandwidth and storage costs can allow a simple hobbyist to maintain a site/node for minimal cost while contributing to the greater ecosystem. Smaller communities where reputation actually matters instead of being gamified into upvotes and downvotes as some sort of facsimile of trustworthiness or quality. I think with a more personal internet, AI becomes less of a threat anyway.





  • AI can be useful without being right about everything. But the user has to know enough to push back or just write it themselves when necessary. And in my experience the same is true when pairing with another developer, too.

    It’s a tool, not a solution. Though it’s valid to say the folks touting its miracle capabilities are full of shit. It is imperfect, but it’s not worthless. It’s not a con man, it’s just confidently wrong. I’ve worked with/for a lot of people like that.





  • I think researchers are trying to make AI models more aware, but they are trained on a whole lot of human history, and that is going to be predominantly told from white male perspectives. Which means AI is going to act like that.

    Women and people of color, you should probably treat AI like it’s that white guy who means well and thinks he’s woke but lacks the self-awareness to see he is 100% part of the problem. (I say this as a white guy who is 100% part of the problem, just hopefully with more self-awareness.)



  • I’m not sure I’d wonder any more about those developers than anyone else.

    Without getting into TMI I very much enjoy non consent fantasy to the point where I had a CNC relationship with my wife for the first five years. And two things I’ve learned about myself are: I’m not physically capable of even play rape, and that having the power was much more fun and exciting than exercising the power.

    So to me it feels perfectly normal to be aroused by fantasy rape but not at all by the manifestation of it. I’m sure it’s not mainstream or anything, and there are a lot of people out there, like Andrew Tate, who are exactly what they say they are.

    I think it’s fine to look into it and see which is the case, but I personally wouldn’t expect to find any girls in basements who aren’t there consensually based on the content of their games.