I haven’t yet read the article, but it may well be a comparison for which Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris can be united under the Unix umbrella as systems with monolithic kernels and similar conventions. Of course FreeBSD is much cooler than Linux and Solaris is much cooler than FreeBSD, but we get what we get.

Also ndisgen under FreeBSD. MS could have been nice for a difference and not broken compatibility.

Ban any advertising unasked for, even better.

Things were better because people would “go to a different brand” and sue morons more often. They’d also be more confident of their own knowledge in various technical things.

Things becoming more complex was used to gaslight a lot of people into questioning their own knowledge about what they need. Such gaslighting first and foremost works via people being ashamed to be stupid and pretending they know it all.

Most (even technical) people are like this - they feel that they don’t understand the world around them, it’s stressing, spying, rigged, chaotic in the wrong places and ordered in the wrong places, - but they are ashamed and pretend. And what they pretend to think specifically and what they try to follow is communicated to them via ads, via movies, via corporate bullshit. Because they have nothing else to turn to.

It’s a bit similar to the way some autistic people do imitation - they too imitate ads and movies more than people around them (well, maybe also imitate people they are romantically attracted to, or those they consider cool).

Or to the way state propaganda works in atomized societies - people don’t have good horizontal ties, but pretend to have them, while taking the material from what they hear on TV.

20 years ago would you use something like an Android phone with no buttons or would you crush it with a hammer? Would you use something like Windows 10 or would you ignore that crap? Would you buy a car that spies after you?

1. You’d open one only when you wanted it.

2. A database with various characteristics being the main component and the advertising text not being that is better, yes.

No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.

Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.

It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.

In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.

Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).

That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.

Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.

It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.

That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.

People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.

It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.

You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?

I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.

Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.

I regularly think and post conspiracy theory thoughts about why the “AI” is such a hype. And in line with them a certain kind of people seem to think that reality doesn’t matter, because those who control the present control the past and the future. That is, they think that controlling the discourse can replace controlling the reality. The issue with that is that whether a bomb is set, whether a boat is sea-worthy, whether a bridge will fall is not defined by discourse.

I’ve written something vague in another place in this thread which seemed a good enough argument. But I didn’t expect that someone is going to link a literal scientific publication in the same very direction. Thank you, sometimes arguing in the Web is not a waste of time.

EDIT: Have finished reading it. Started thinking it was the same argument, in the middle got confused, in the end realized that yes, it’s the same argument, but explained well by a smarter person. A very cool article, and fully understandable for a random Lemming at that.

It’s not about stages. It’s about the Achilles and tortoise problem.

There’s extrapolation inside the same level of abstraction as the data given and there’s extrapolation of new levels of abstraction.

But frankly far smarter people than me are working on all that. Maybe they’ll deliver.

So close, but not there.

OK, you’ll know that I’m right when you somewhat expand your expertise to neighboring areas. Should happen naturally.

Are you a software developer? Or a hardware engineer? EDIT: Or anyone credible in evaluating my nonsense world against yours?

I don’t think I’ve heard a lot of actual research in the AI area not connected to machine learning (which may be just one component, not really necessary at that).

He knows what this hype is, so I don’t think he’d be upset. Still filthy rich when the bubble bursts, and that won’t be soon.

you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it

No you can’t. Simplifying it grossly:

They can’t do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, “there’s no spoon”, “this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it” kind of solutions.

And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer’s time.

We need software developers to write computer programs, because “a general idea” even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.

That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.

If only they didn’t make them speak broken Russian (I suppose they used a dictionary with simplified transcriptions and maybe even a phrasebook). All the effort to do it with the less than satisfactory result could have been avoided. Even SG-1 aliens speak English.

As a Russian speaker, I wonder if there’s a version with only those parts dubbed to Russian.

It’s a very subjective question. Arguably some people do. That’s why we make bullets and the devices for sending them.

That movie is not very realistic.

You can take your porn collection on a few USB sticks. And games. And movies. And books. And music.