I really wish women and even girls of all ages would see their collective power. Imagine TikTok with no videos or women trying clothes or dancing? Imagine Instagram with no beautiful women posting every day to your feed. Wha would you have? Bunch of dumb as shit dudes talking about sports and how much they hate women/immigrants/trans/gay/black/asian/[insert rest of humanity] -people. Things would change very fast.
I do think social media bans are a good idea, but women have agemcy in this society, online or not. Ladies, you have power. Use it. You can just leave. Have a global women’s strike on social media for 24h, 48h, a week. Your bodies, minds and creativity is largely what men (and women) come to social media for (maybe apart from nerds like in HN, but I’m talking addiction economy’s mega apps, not geek forums). Without it all these platforms are just stinking gym locker rooms full of guys who never surpass mental maturity of a 13-year-old.
I wish I had a solution here rather than just an "I don't think this will work".
> Wha would you have? Bunch of dumb as shit dudes talking about sports and how much they hate women/immigrants/trans/gay/black/asian/[insert rest of humanity] -people. Things would change very fast.
I think people like that would post a lot of pictures of women, some of which may be real pictures of people (even though in this hypothetical that would be without their consent), some of which may be AI-generated; so unfortunately, I don't think it would shift anything.
Self-entitled jerks don't stop being so when faced with the consequences of their actions, they victim-blame. The men who are able to be better than you describe, and I hope I'm better than that, may not even realise something is amiss during such a strike until it gets pointed out to them.
I disagree. You would leave, because why would you watch bunch of morons circle jerking on AI-images? I left already long time ago. The way these platforms make money is selling adds. Next their advertisers leave, since they don’t want to hurt their brand and besides, the clientele left is not the demographic wanted by anyone except porn and gambling industry. Essentially you are left with Kick, which is just a scam and a front to a casino to rid losers of their money.
It is basically why girls get in free in some (seedy) clubs. And when the companies have to choose between women and rest of the population that showers every day or some really sad bunch of incels, they will choose the former.
I personally think “generative AI” is a misnomer. More I understand the mathematics behind machine learning more I am convinced that it should not be used to generate text, images or anything that is meant for people to consume, even if it is the most blandest of email. Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say if forced to be creative with a gun pointed to his head. It can help in multitude of other ways, help human in the creative process itself, but generating anything even mildly creative by itself… I’ll pass.
Precisely. If companies would just focus on what it could be good at - deductive search, coding boilerplate with assistance, etc. then it would be a great tool. Instead you have dario, altman, and co. trying to pump stock and give us more spaghetti agents.
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
I don’t try to ship quickly. I started learning programming 2024, I’d say I’m pretty good with Python, proficient in vanilla web tech, ok with C, and I know basics of React/Fullstack. Starting from nothing I’d say I have progressed very fast, I follow a uni CS course. LLM’s have certainly helped in explaining concepts and to learn, but I don’t use them to code pretty much at all.
I recognised that my weaknesses are more in understanding the mathematical fundamentals of computation, so now I’m mostly studying maths rather than coding, currently linear algebra and propability theory. Coding is the easy part I’d say. Hopefully I get to concentrate on the study of my sworn enemy, algorithms, at some point.
I’d like to be able to do low-code and graphics/sound -programming some day. Or maybe use that knowledge some other cool stuff, if we are all replaced by robots anyway.
This is unbelievably depressing. Why to learn any skills at all, since some model is going to do it pretty soon and companies only need bunch of sales people, your Musk’s and Bezos’, to sell that crap. Rest of us rotten our brains online living on goverment hand-outs and designer drugs.
Why learn to play the drums, when there are drum machines? Or play any music, when there are MP3s? Or cook, when there's microwave dinners?
If you can't answer the above, you might want to have a chat with a psychologist. We can and do create meaning in our own lives.
Programming will change, but I won't miss creating the same boilerplate again and again. I expect to focus more on translating the business & technical requirements to decent quality results. I expect good interfaces and separation of concerns will be even more important, as whole modules might be rewritten from scratch rather than being modified, changing the way we think about maintainable code.
I started hobby-coding, and that can continue if I want to do it. If the point is to get into the mental exercise and craftsmanship of coding.
But for most of the time, the thing I really want is the product, the program, the result. Being able to skip the coding step and go direct to the result by using an LLM is really freeing. I can try different approaches, experiment with different ways of presenting it, iterate on actual product ideas without having to spend months refactoring code. It's great.
As for the commercial stuff - I don't know if you've ever worked as a software dev in a large company. I have a couple of times, and it's a living nightmare of politics and compromise (hence only a couple of times, I prefer working in startups and small businesses). The average software dev spends their days doing pointless JIRA tickets in sprints designed to make their manager look good at their next review. Nothing valuable will be lost by replacing all of this with LLMs.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
> "The studies show that Meta has obtained extensive evidence, from many different kinds of research, that its products facilitate and enable vast direct harms to young people (e.g., cyberbullying, unwanted sexual contact) and that its products are likely harming users’ mental health, particularly for adolescent girls, particularly via harmful social comparisons, promotion of eating disorders, body-image problems, and increased depression."
I do think social media bans are a good idea, but women have agemcy in this society, online or not. Ladies, you have power. Use it. You can just leave. Have a global women’s strike on social media for 24h, 48h, a week. Your bodies, minds and creativity is largely what men (and women) come to social media for (maybe apart from nerds like in HN, but I’m talking addiction economy’s mega apps, not geek forums). Without it all these platforms are just stinking gym locker rooms full of guys who never surpass mental maturity of a 13-year-old.
reply