It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
I think you just wrote "lots of things are more important than the hacker ethos, like [axiomatic rederivation of the hacker ethos]". That's not a persuasive argument.
I think it's just easy to dismiss "the hacker ethos" without considering the qualities it actually consists of. Maybe you'd disagree, but I think those qualities are very important and worth protecting.
I'm not saying it's not important, just that you can't reasonably expect to orient all of society around it. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about how computing is going to work for ordinary people.
I'm not expecting to orient all of society around it, but I do believe that it's harmful to remove or replace it where it does exist.
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
When you suggest that ordinary people should not use personal applications that they've built with AI because it robs them of the hacker spirit, that's what you're doing: orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference.
>We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizarre that you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
A lot of people use Wordpress for multi-user or business sites and there isn't a replacement that will meet their needs that also doesn't require a higher degree of technical knowledge than they have. Any alternative more complex than Wordpress's install or that doesn't have feature parity with Wordpress' plugins is going to be a no-go for most of them.
>Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote.
Yes they can. States can deny citizens the right to vote for "participation in rebellion, or other crime", as per the 14th Amendment and felons are often denied the right to vote. They can't do so on the basis of "race, color or former servitude" (15th Amendment) and probably not any other protected class reason (sex, religion, ethnicity) but that implicitly gives states the right to do so for any other reason.
>This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.
I can tell you that almost every single enthusiastic proponent of the technology I've ever spoken to has pretty much guaranteed this is where it takes us... But correct, its naïve as hell.
I used to do this with videos on DeoVR - they had a couple of long drive channels (usually across Korea) or biking in Japan - while on my exercise bike. After their app stopped working for me I looked for similar videos on Youtube.
I found a lot but unfortunately the VR ones tend to be badly compressed. There are a lot of 8K HD walking/driving videos but none of them are VR.
It is objectively better than staring at my back wall, though.
Somewhat related: Something I learned about South Korea is that a non-Korean service can't export detailed location data, so Google Maps doesn't work there. No turn-by-turn. Navar Maps is a local one to use if you're there.
They are still technically at war with the North, so some strange things like this come up. Awesome place to visit generally! Seoul is an awesome city, and Busan is gorgeous.
I use an app called Wander to do this in my Oculus Quest. With some lo-fi music it really helps with anxiety.
It really is fun just picking some random spot on the map, some random neighborhood no tourist would ever think to visit, and poking around.
I actually had a hobby of posting "virtual vacation pictures" for a while. Not any attempt at a business or going viral or anything, just literally cool things I found and took pictures of. No one cared but I thought it was cool.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
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