@octade
I signed up for Eternal September once. I saw replies to a news item without the OP. Evidence of censorship?

@nixCraft I remember this, *and* being blown away when it started coming on CDs - how could you fit that many books on one disc?!

@nixCraft I have that 25+ big book bundle at home. Got it in 5th grade cause my parents were very against Internet and we didn't have it at home. But then later the same year we got it cause they got annoyed by how often teachers kept assigning homework where we had to look shit up on the internet and it ment they had to drive me to relatives for it :p

@nixCraft In Turkey newspaper's were giving out Encyclopedia's to people collecting coupons. I am one of the very fortunate ones that had lots of volumes at home. Good times. It was a blessing to go through pages.

@nixCraft One of the things I loved about some encyclopedias was the transparent overlay pages which covered things like geography or anatomy.

Start with a basic page the turn the overlay and the graphics gets denser. Repeat three or four times to be fully amazed.

@nixCraft I remember Wikipedia being the largest worry of teachers...

@nixCraft I remember my parents buying a second-hand set of early 1980s World Book encyclopedia volumes in the mid-to-late 80s and spending countless hours reading through them. Even at the time I was amused/amazed at the pace of technology where the Computer article seemed so outdated even then.

@nixCraft growing up we were lucky enough to have a set at home. When my parents passed I inherited them.

@nixCraft 0ne of the advantages of a publically funded school system is that libraries would not have to beg millionaires. Even better to anchor that in the constitution.

@nixCraft Probably I am older, in this case. As such, sets were around 3-10 books and, especially smaller sets, were affordable. As a kid of a blue collar family I had a six volume encyclopedia at home, and it was the main information source for general matters for me, likely till the end of high school.

@nixCraft I remember mom and dad used to buy older encyclopedias from flea markets just to have them at gome for us kids.
I also remember when the first colour TV arrived in our village.
Damn. I might be getting old...

@nixCraft
That's why I always thought that Wikipedia was one of the biggest achievements of the internet.
Free knowledge to everyone.

@nixCraft I’m old enough to remember them in my school’s library and had to use them to research and write book reports.

@nixCraft Ah yes, and the index was so big it was itself spread in multiple books 👌

@nixCraft I have a full set of the French language Encyclopedia Universalis in my parents’ basement, with its distinctive white binding and extra long articles. I remember when Bill Gates helped Grolier launch the first CD-ROM encyclopedia and it was on display at Paris’ Pompidou Center. I had Britannia on CD-ROM (or was it DVD?). And I keep the 100GB ZIM offline dump of the entire English language Wikipedia on my keychain USB flash drive for use with the Kiwix app on flights or connectivity deserts.

So yes, very old.

@nixCraft I still remember the days of door-to-door encyclopedia sellers. You had the choice: one book a month or the entire collection in one go.

@nixCraft We had a partial set; my parents bought it one volume at a time from a grocery store. I read those suckers cover to cover.

But hanging out at the library after school was epic.

@nixCraft i remember my folks buying me cheap Funk & Wagnall brand as a callow.

@nixCraft
My were lucky to have The Book of Knowledge in our house. Many hours of reading and wondering.

@nixCraft

We had the prior year's set at home, donated by a neighbor who had a bit more money than we, when they'd buy a new set.

@nixCraft I remember having an encyclopedia as a kid, and not knowing who gave it to us. There were a couple of well connected relatives who might’ve been the source. And dial phones!

@nixCraft Someone else in the thread mentioned this, but "encyclopedia salesman" used to be a job up through the 1980s. They would go door-to-door through neighborhoods and look for families with kids. Most people couldn't afford the whole set, but you could buy a volume each month for 2 years. My parents did that. I remember using them for school papers, though I was often frustrated by how sparse and short the entries tended to be, a paragraph where I wanted at least a page or two.

@nixCraft My parents bought a set about the time I was born (1959). It was a 1952 edition; they may not have been the first owners.

I still have them in the basement, along with their wooden bookshelf. Haven't looked anything up in a couple of years. (-:

@nixCraft

Ahh, the venerable World Book encyclopedia set.

And if you've ever been fortunate enough to behold the full Oxford English Dictionary set in print, service edition 1989, all 20 volumes, it too was glorious fun to read, like the encyclopedia, for new words.

@nixCraft . . *All* screens were black and white. Period.

@nixCraft
I was blessed enough to have a full encyclopedia
I read the heck outta that thing

@eff I loved watching your whole show and will definitely buy the book. It reflects one thing close to my heart 💝

@eff Their share buttons are Xitter, FB and Mastodon 🤷‍♂️

@nixCraft they've outsourced all their thinking. It's kind of sad.

@nixCraft Not that extreme, but I've had offers to help declined in preference to llms

@nixCraft in an "at least the AI can keep up with him" kind of way or a "he might be wrong/lying" kind of way?

@nixCraft
I had similar experiences with consultants before, and now it switched to AI, well, but... I would say not so much changed 🤷‍♂️😁

@nixCraft It is almost the same thing as like: 'It was on facebook, so it is true!'

Just ignore them..

@nixCraft
I can't be fired. So I often support my hierarchy when they want to use AI instead of my work. I just do my own thing and ask them to notify me If I should just drop a project because my boss vibe coded it. Not my problem, I'll continue to think for myself and I'll be ready when they realize they fucked up.
Or not and I'll die homeless, anyway I can't do anything to change the course of events I feel.

@nixCraft Well heck, it might be even worse than you think..

cf: https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/

@nixCraft what I really hate is any sentence that starts with "chat gpt says..." which is at the same time taking credit for anything that is right and useful and deflecting the blame for anything that is wrong onto an inanimate object.

@nixCraft wtf?

I can easily imagine that. Who wants to work in such a s-hole?

@nixCraft
It's very annoying on groups / forums when someone asks a tech question (any kind, not computers) and someone copy/pastes a big "authoritative looking" AI response. It varies from misleading to completely wrong and worst than non-AI search.

@nixCraft haven't experienced it myself but it doesn't surprise me.
what does surprise me is that they don't realise that the long term harm done by this behaviour, that i call AI-guessing, to their relationship with people far outweighs any potential short term benefits.

@nixCraft Here we even have a few cases among middle managers, and at least one regular grunt?

Advise on how to carefully guide these poor unfortunate souls back to reality would be appreciated.

@nixCraft Yep, same thing at my company.

It seems to be due to AI companies trying to make digital-god and they keep telling everyone they have.

@nixCraft also noticing it in the just average folk suite too.

@nixCraft <cough>Meta<cough> <- That's one of the primary reasons I left the company.

@nixCraft being constantly bombarded with stress (news, economy, social discourse) makes people lose cognitive ability, and humans take the path of least resistance, enter ai to help take a load off

@nixCraft yes. The way it is set up, it creates easily digestible plausible bullshit.

Easily, because there is no social, emotional or cognitive friction or effort needed. It starts responding immediately and pleasantly.

Digestible, because it is trained on the most often occurring sentences, contexts and words. No new language, no cognitive effort to understand or investigate underlying concepts, no awkward idiosyncratic language by other humans who think feel and express differently.

Plausible, because it is a language model, so the grammar and tone and words fit expectations, with a high probability.

Bullshit, because the output can be either correct or wrong, but it has no basis in reality.

Something makes a certain part of society very susceptible to this.

@nixCraft AI is like micromanager crack.

@nixCraft Trump's team is like this too. Trump squad probably be out here using some hyper-affirmation AI to make all their big brain decisions.

@nixCraft The asking the LLM in the middle of conversation is what gets me. Like, I'm here trying to tell you something and you have the audacity to fact-check me with a slopbot before I even finish my sentence?
Hell no. I've started simply walking away from such conversations. Go on, talk to your LLM, see how far that gets you.

@nixCraft Mine let you know which "agent" every document has to be run through to "correct errors" before it gets to that level. If you don't, they reject it based on believing the non-human more than the human.

@nixCraft yep, my colleague too. Stops listening and starts typing while I’m explaining something. It’s rude

@nixCraft Yes, I quit.

@nixCraft yes, was literally talking with my coworker about it the other day. After a big AI push from above for everyone to "use AI more", people using it for things it would have no way of knowing.

It might work for a while, but eventually people are going to forget how to do basic stuff, and feels like that's already happening

@nixCraft
While discussing ways to have a podman container autostart on boot (they've made a tool to generate a systemd service for your containers!), our ex-CTO/now-COO passed by and dropped "you know, that's exactly the kind of thing that AI is good for, you should use it!"

I left on the spot before risking getting fired.

AI is dangerous and I would fire any software engineer using it in my project.

One generation of this and we will have people who can't solve problems without having their hand held. It will be really bad.

@nixCraft 1000% yes

@nixCraft
I have quite similar experiences at my company. Here’s my take on it.

LLMs perform quite well on simple tasks such as vibe coding basic stuff (web page, scripts, small programs...), writing text or summarizing the information from the Internet.

However they fall short when it comes to more complex engineering problems that require combining skills and experience across different fields.

I fear that most managers cope only with the first category. As a result, they fail to see the limitations of LLMs and believe they can solve any situation.

@nixCraft outsourced their thinking and by extension have become as stupid as the machines themselves

@nixCraft I have. It's especially frustrating when people put too much trust into things like Gemini search suggestions.

@nixCraft yeah, it's like a plague. It's mental, tbh. Sad to see my beloved IT in such a state...

@nixCraft At the end of the year ask "AI" whether you should get promoted. When it says "yes", go to your boss, show him the chat and demand the promotion.

@nixCraft this requires some very basic undersranding of how things work 😆. If they fact check such things.... well idk, I feel sorry for them

@nixCraft I saw a very funny reaction when they had gotten one absolute truth from an AI, but it turned out that the opposite opinion they initially were treating as a human error was actually also from the same AI, just a different session. (This latter one was also the one which could withstand human review)