CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@gwynnion My hometown is modernizing its entire fleet of public transportation. The main route now has regular (7-minute intervals most of the day) 24-meter-long bi-articulated electric buses, and they are *so* great. They don't spew out awful fumes, they're quiet, and they're a lot more comfortable to ride in than the old diesel buses.

E-bikes are *awesome*. I can't ride one myself due to my shitty balance, but seeing how much of the inner-city traffic has switched from cars to e-bikes is great.

(I wish I could still get excited about computers; they've been a huge part of my life. But nowadays they're mostly being put to use as surveillance and control tools.)

@mossmann But how else would Timn get in a new major featue?

@artemis I don't know if Chomsky abused anyone, but I do know that he remained friends with Epstein and sent him comforting emails, calling him a victim of the press, even after it was public knowledge that Epstein was a child rapist and trafficker.

And, well, much as I used to admire Chomsky, this is why I don't admire him anymore. Someone with such a catastrophically poor sense of moral judgment is not an admirable person.

@b0rk I stopped reading HN in late 2024, and I think that is the best decision I have made for myself in a very, very long time.

@Wyatt_H_Knott @thomasfuchs morge.

@ratfactor I was early to this, I think, and have been in a deep depression for a bit over 3 years now.

I can't do much of anything else than programming (at least not anything that isn't also currently being destroyed by AI), so - well, I guess I'm fucked.

@mikemccaffrey @Em0nM4stodon I'm going to bet you that some of all those billions taken from VCs are going into AI company CEOs' pockets, and also enough that those AI company CEOs are billionaires themselves now.

@timbray SY;DR

@Nead I have almost a full year to remember to invest in a shotgun.

@bakachu To be honest, I think both having one's brain rotted by LLMs and scrupulously avoiding having one's brain rotted by LLMs are both pretty cross-generational.

My mother is 70, and she thinks LLMs are precisely as intelligent as toasters. But I also know someone else her age who's absolutely convinced that they have developed sentience and are plotting to get rid of the humans.

I know a 20-something who has outsourced his entire brain to ChatGPT, and another 20-something who thinks the entire field of generative AI is, and I quote, "puréed brain cancer".

Since I commute by bus to work, and my bus route passes a high school, I get to listen to a lot of teenage kids chatting. Some of them have "AI friends" and are excitedly telling their flesh-and-blood friends about their long sessions with AI and how AI is doing all their homework; others are using the term "AI" as synonymous with "fake" and/or "dumb".

@bakachu I routinely have that exchange with young people!

@bakachu I mean, I'm an old man, and that's *why* I yell at Claude.

@paveljanicek You monster, now you made me imagine ClaudeFlare.

2010s: There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
2020s: There is no Claude, it's just someone else's code.

2010s: Old Man Yells At Cloud
2020s: Old Man Yells At Claude