My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
I understand the hostility against AI itself, but people are reacting with prejudice against AI users. People are building blacklists of "AI boosters" and their "tainted" projects. This is not fine.
It seems to me that when you choose to outsource your thinking to a machine, you cease to be a user and turn into a bit of a dreamer. The implication over time is that your cognitive skills will significantly deteriorate because you’ve decided to outsource your thinking. This is also not fine.
I don’t like the whole “lists” thing, that sounds like literal insanity. But I feel like I can understand the reasoning behind it, even if I think it’s a step too far. “No AI contributions” is easily enough IMO. But then all this is just IMO :)
Yeah I agree. I can understand the reasons behind it, I just feel like there should be more nuance. Some people on lobsters called my hand written projects slop because I allowed AI to touch them and repeatedly told me to get out, and it only spiraled from there. At this point I'm not even sure if I should share my work anymore.
> your cognitive skills will significantly deteriorate
This is a fair concern. I for one am trying my best to distill the AI's weights into my own brain. My human limitations make this process slow, but I am trying.
At the same time, I'm also vibecoding things I don't fully understand, simply because it'd be foolish to not spend the tokens I paid money for.
I think the key distinction is that it's difficult to determine whether a single commit or pull request is bad code at a glance, but it's easy to determine when the codebase as a whole has gone bad due to many low quality commits.
The latter often doesn't even require looking at the code, you can usually feel it just by using the software. From my experience, all software primarily written by AI is full of little bugs and inconsistencies that reflect bad code architecture (such as two very similar pieces of functionality in two different places behaving in wildly different ways, due to the AI being unaware of the first when asked to implement the second and writing the code twice)
I totally agree, and I agree with the article in general. I just don't think it follows that code that's bad because humans had to maintain it is necessarily bad by definition.
I've vibecoded loads of AI apps for myself and almost none of them are still in use. Not because I didn't really want them or they didn't work, but because the more I used them the dirtier I felt, as though I could feel the bad decisions and the bugs underneath just by interacting with it.
The product of an individual's mind is not the same as the mathematical average of the products of everyone's minds. The latter is obviously going to lack any of the uniqueness of the former.
Current models absolutely suck at writing fictional characters, by the way. And they're getting worse. Seriously, try it yourself: have Claude write a story with a decent amount of dialogue involving character A, then have it write another story involving a completely different character B, then compare the dialogue between the two. You'll quickly notice the same blatantly unnatural speech patterns in both.
> But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either
Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.
I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.
This problem has been around in tech for at least as long as I've been here, but LLM-mania has definitely thrown water on the grease fire. The arrogant programmer/engineer type who thinks everything else in the world must be easy in comparison to their vocation. The disdain of all things outside STEM as "soft skill" stuff for IQ-inferior beings. And the one that gets me most: the utter lack of taste in anything outside tech.
You can see it in discussions here daily. Look a at the things people use to make analogies. It's like an HN cliche at this point to invoke Ansel Adams as the pinnacle of photography. Great, so the people making our cameras and shaping the platforms we encounter visual art on are only at a National-Geographic-calendar-level of photo literacy. The AI bros telling you that LLM writing can be just as good or better than human writing if you prompt it right are making the Harry Potter fanfic make sense to me.
It's like listening to someone convinced that chicken nuggets are just as good as the best chicken, which they've had at KFC, so they know. I can't wait for the Grok-generated, historically accurate Odyssey to hit the theaters before the end of the year.
So I see two categories of people here. The first is "main character syndrome" - people who see themselves as real and everybody else as not. Self-centered, egocentric people are one flavor of this, and sociopaths are another. Other people aren't real to them in the same way that they see themselves as real.
The other kind is more of a philosophical position. If all that exists is the physical universe - say, matter and the laws of physics - then all that humans can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. Nothing more. Humans are just a machine made of atoms - a very complicated machine, but still just a machine. They aren't intrinsically different from an AI, or a car, or a toaster. When people accept that position, whether consciously or unconsciously, they dehumanize people, including themselves. This is people in your last paragraph.
And as more and more people slip over into this position, society becomes more and more dehumanizing, because people act the way they think. (Not perfectly, not consistently, but the correlation is greater than zero.)
Upvoted for the clear distinction and elucidation of the categories, but...
I have to disagree that a materialist or physicalist philosophical position is inherently dehumanizing. One can believe that we are just electrochemical mechanical beings made of atoms just like all the other matter in the universe, without having to also devalue ourselves and others. I am human and I like being human! I even like other humans and value them. I just don't think there's anything that special about being a human instead of a bonobo or a dolphin or a supermassive black hole.
I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before.
I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.
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