If you use the broswer verison of apps you can also inject custom scripts. I have one for Instagram that completely removes the recommendation feed. Works great.
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
There is a difference between a run of the mill CRUD React app and solving specific, complex UI problems.
I have been a programmer for a long time and CSS is still the hardest language to master. There are countless quirks and APIs most people have never heard of that solve extremely specific problems.
For example, using @starting-style with allow-discrete to use display: none on CSS transitions. Knowing that you would need to use this API, what it does, and how to debug your CSS is a skill that will be hard to replace with an LLM because of the fine grained detail needed for CSS. If you do not know how this API works and you need to use it for whatever reason, and then need to adjust your transitions later, it's probably faster to have real CSS skills than to constantly have to prompt an LLM for you.
No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
I do this too. I generally skim PRs just to make sure the person isn't doing anything too crazy. I trust my team to write good code. Pulling a branch and testing the code is usually a waste of time unless it's a critical bug or feature.
What the author fails to understand is that merely consuming text is not the be-all-end-all of being an educated citizen. I am wary of trusting an author who is screaming from the rooftops about how the bad thing is coming, how the world sucks so much more now.
It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube, understand it, think about it, and then write out your thoughts and ideas and would be far more educated than someone merely reading a novel.
There is always a strange disconnect with egg head types where they fail to understand that information input is not the only way to become smart. And valuable information exists everywhere: a book, a blog entry, a podcast, a video, a movie, in the real world, etc. Thinking that text, which by the way is one of the most inefficient methods of information consumption, is the only way to be "smart" is incorrect. Critical thinking is what is desperately needed.
There's a further argument being made here that being literate changes the way you'd interpret and understand a YouTube video as you absorbed that information.
To be fair, author's point is more nuanced than "kids these days". He traces an evolution from: (i) an overly conservative but reality-based oral culture, to: (ii) a reality-detached and turbulent text-based culture, capable of envisioning our current technological era, back to (iii) another overly conservative oral culture. To me, the perceived threat seems to be how this second oral culture won't be based on direct experience of the real world, but on other people's (and AI's) interpretations of the former: taking the worst parts of both previous cultures (i.e. you can't think outside the box, and your box isn't even real).
Any website that isn't some landing page or basic blog is going to need human intervention in the code (craftsmanship, essentially). And any website that's a landing page or basic blog already has a million tools for GUI design.
I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.
Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications. My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The NY Book Review or whatever.
Both magazines and books are valid forms of information consumption and books are not the only way to improve your writing, reading, and understanding of the world.
I wouldn't count on current stuff in those publications being free from AI. We're seeing it in peer-reviewed paper submissions so why not in literary forums?
If you limit yourself to stuff from maybe five years ago or older, yeah it's going to be human-written and human-edited (ghostwriting still possible).
AI is much better at generating text that resembles scientific papers than it is at literary writing. Even if they're not all flagged as AI, the incidence will be much lower because they're simply bad writing. They won't make it out of the slush pile at places like GP listed.
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