p-e-w

The big picture here is that government thugs dragging a person away is now the default response to essentially any type of social disruption, pretty much everywhere in the world.

This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, during a time we are trained to think of as much more barbaric than the present.

> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.

There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.

Indeed, humanity proceeds largely through refinement of existing ideas, not through random leaps.

Some of these refinements are much more important than most new ideas.

And making a gerrymandering game is a relatively obvious idea that I’m sure hundreds of people have had independently.

> Read the words specifically on how humanity treats itself and its surrounding environment

I did read them. They sound incredibly generic to me, and actually more like a colonial parody of what tribespeople supposedly believe than like anything genuine.

Tribal membership today is often a formal status first and foremost. It’s quite possible that the authors spend their whole day on their smartphones. They almost certainly don’t live like the ancestors they invoke in this message.

Who is this person who considers himself an “elder family brother” to humanity as a whole? Imagine a technologist speaking in such terms; they’d get publicly crucified.

While I grant you that the authors don’t appear to express generic luddite sentiments, nothing in this letter suggests that their understanding of AI extends even a millimeter below the surface.

> So we ask a question we believe is more fundamental than yours: what other values could artificial intelligence really have? > > You are the only example it has. > > What did you expect?

Who are these people that speak of humanity as “you”, as if they don’t belong to it (or, considering the tone of this message, believe themselves to be above it somehow)?

> We have lived here and cared for this mountain before there was a Colombia.

So the authors of this “message” are simultaneously trying to claim the spiritual heritage of people who had no connection to the modern world at all, and commenting on the most modern phenomenon in existence.

I do wonder how they would react to a machine learning PhD telling them that he is concerned about their beliefs involving a mountain.

> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.

They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

> Yet there is a demand for version control for nontechnical people. And I know this because I’ve seen enough files called “copy of important thing” or “important thing 2”.

This demonstrates LACK OF demand for technical version control, since the system you describe has been used since forever and found to be good enough.

I thought this was a setup to a joke when I read it.

There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has version management built-in. Very few people use it. This isn’t a technology problem.

We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.

Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.

> Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL.

There’s no way this is even remotely true. JavaScript alone is probably 90+%, considering it’s on almost every website.