I always have a tinge of...perhaps 'sadness' when reading such articles because they are a lot like those large fishing nets that drag along the bottom of the ocean catching and destroying in quantities unneeded. From this list:

- Quietly/Delve/Tapestry/Landscape: they're all lovely words. I love(d) using them.

- "Serves as": I use this all the time too.

- "The result? Devastating". Perhaps it is a bit stilted, but "Outcome? Predictable." could be a nice turn of phrase.

- "It's worth noting": All academics everywhere use this in papers. See also: "Notably", "Essentially", "In general" and other such fillers that we reach for.

- "Think of it as": This is such a useful phrase to explain something. Analogy is how we learn after all.

- The fucking em dashes. I love them, and screw everyone who suggests one should stop using them. One big reason for using linux is the compose key, so the em dash is never far away.

- Same with the unicode decoration. Nah, screw you. I use these symbols all the time: °, ×, →, ⇒ etc. in my own notes. Again, compose key ftw.

Etc. (the list is endless)

I know what people will say, that everything is contextual, one has to study case-by-case etc. But I can't help feeling that someone is pointing a finger at me and accusing me before-the-fact. Just, AI has polluted the joy of writing.

Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?

Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?

This is rubbish. By that token, computer development is also facilitating biological weapons development. A better MacOS (or Windows, I don't know) leads to better weapons. They should clearly stop developing computers and OSes. Developers of nice test-tubes are also facilitating bioweapons. Your local O-ring manufacturer, your local medical-grade freezer manufacturer etc. are all culpable. The problem is the bioweapon, not the LLM.

An OS developer is just as culpable as a researcher directly training AIs that (1) are capable of building bio-weapons and (2) have shown consistent and increasingly severe misalignment? Among other things...

That doesn't make sense.

I'm a mechanical engineering PhD who works on numerical computing, data analysis and the like. I've spent several hundreds of dollars on fonts. Because I like things being just so, because I like seeing the artefacts I produce being nice to look at, and because they're just plain beautiful.

Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.

I believe everything you say. I hope you didn't feel attacked. It is just a feeling I often get when I'm online. Some people seem to spend more time on form than actual content, and while I agree that how things look is a part of the expression, I am somewhat of a brutalist because I feel that it rarely matters much, and most of the time it is a distraction.

but again, I am an old fart who is sad gopher lost.

This is an infuriatingly clueless comment. It gives nothing? It allows people to set their affairs in order, and that is an invaluable thing.

Alzheimers can lead to all kinds of other issues like impulsivity, or aggressiveness. People gambling away their life savings, not knowing that they are even doing it. Doctors unable to intervene due to rights around patient autonomy. All of this has big consequences in the lives of those affected.

When the symptons set on you'll have plenty of time to wind down your affairs.

And much less ability to handle the task.

This is fucking fantastic. I wish the whole of the internet was like this. People enthusiastically sharing their own enthusiasm about learning something cool, and other enthusiasts finding it and going down their own rabbitholes. The internet is multimedia. It should be nothing _but_ people sharing knowledge. Thanks for writing this up.

Pretty much sums up why this site is my last bastion of solace on the web

There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.

It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."

The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.

In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.

I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.

As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.

I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.

I travel a lot within Europe and socialize, and Signal adoption is pretty limited continent-wide. You are lucky. Even when people do have Signal, a stock response if I ask “Do you have Signal?” is “Oh, sure, I use it to buy drugs”, which probably doesn’t help the app’s image in the eyes of the surrounding society.

Now adjust it for inflation.

‘Real’ means inflation-adjusted.

I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.

Well the comment above was expressing disbelief that more people are not up in arms about this.

When you realize the tiny tiny percentage of people that have a phone that is not apple or google, you understand why few people are up in arms.

It simply doesn’t affect many people.

This feels like arguing that people wouldn't object to having a shock collar padlocked around their neck because it's not currently shocking them. You don't have to see very many moves ahead to guess what happens if you don't object.

Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.

I don't think this analogy comes even close to holding water.

So cementing a dependency on paperclip-optimizing foreign megacorps to intermediate all your purchases and communications doesn't allow them to influence your behavior?

A dependency on a paperclip optimizing foregin megacorp is not remotely compara le to a "shock collar padlocked around your neck"

So getting shadow banned into a depression spiral that causes you to commit suicide because you think everyone in the world is ignoring you, or locking the account that all your other accounts at all other companies and even government services are tied to with no recourse, or constantly spying on everything you do with all of the corresponding chilling effects... is your point that it's actually worse than a shock collar?

I’m not for one second saying I like it, agree with it, or support it.

I’m just saying there are not many people impacted, so there are not going to be many people making noise.

People are simply too deep in the trenches of day to day to object to things that don’t impact them personally