It has certainly had that effect on me. When I heard that notepad++ was being flagged for something somewhere by someone, all I thought was "so they forgot to pay a protection fee?" Genuinely I thought it was being brought it up just as an indication that the developer may be absent or asleep at the wheel. There is literally no association in my brain between one of these warnings and the concept of software being compromised or not.
And I've seen other less tech inclined people click right through these without a moment's thought. They think it's just one of those things computers have to complain about.
It's weird how it does seem to do something even though it doesn't do anything. You can see the search indexer running and it's pulling a varying amount of power towards some kind of goal but nobody seems to know what it is. Does it build an index that always corrupts? Is it in a loop of crashing and restarting itself? And it's been like this my whole life practically.
It really shows how anything can be normalized if it goes on long enough.
Lately I have seen a lot of things coming full circle like this in a way that always seems positive for humans as well.
Many doomers are running around saying the future is grim because everything will be made for AI agents to use rather than humans. But so far everything done to push that agenda has looked more like a big de-enshittification.
Another one is Model Context Protocol, which brings forth the cutting edge (for 1970) idea of using a standard text based interface so that separate programs can interoperate through it.
If the cost of having non-user-hostile software is to let AI bros run around thinking they invented things like stdin and documentation, I'm all for it at this point.
If any AI bros are reading this here's another idea. Web pages that use a mostly static layout and a simple structure would probably be a lot easier for AI to parse. And google, it would be really beneficial to AI agents if their web searches weren't being interfered with by clickjacking sites such as Pinterest.
Almost every site for a new language that gets posted here does this. Every time someone points out how they don't care about anything until they've seen what code actually looks like. I'm surprised this still happens.
qalc is also a very good tool for this. I found it recently and have been happy with it. It's not just a really advanced calculator, it's a nearly full equivalent of the Google calculator. The only thing it doesn't really do is have awareness of variables like "current US population."
If I have to view an image on Windows, I've long been in the habit of right clicking it and choosing "edit" to open MS Paint because it's so much better and faster than the stock image viewer. It's instant.
I can't think of a metaphor that sounds worse than this in regards to how low the bar has fallen. It's just an image viewer. How hard could they possibly be making it for themselves?
Literally the best parts of Windows have been the parts they forgot existed for 10+ years and never changed.
That list is so hilarious and so vindicating. It feels great to know so many other people hate alternativeto.net. I wish we had a prominent place to name and shame sites like these.
unlock is great. So many standalone extensions turn out to be a lot better simply as ublock filters.
I would like one of these to block the community posts as well. I'm getting really tired of seeing screencaps of Twitter engagement bait from 8 years ago. There's one account that just won't go away, even now that I'm reporting it for spam when it comes up.
On one side you have people who know how to build deep nn saying one thing, and on the other there seems to be people who don’t even know what tanh is and are very sure of their “strong” opinions.
Do you have an example of someone who actually knows how LLMs work who has a tribalistic view?
Lol, I like that as a joke, but I wouldn’t think you are saying “a person who has no idea how something works” their opinion should be given equal weighting as someone who actually knows? Maybe you are - that seems to be how things work now.
I think you already get what I am saying, but it seems that there are maybe 3 groups. 2 who know how things work under the hood and have differing opinions and are curious to hear the other side, and one group who have no idea how things work, are very loud, have sci-fi fantasies, and spout strong opinions.
I wouldn't call that discourse i would call it ignorance.
It's weird though, the critics of LLMs have very good points, usually very reasonable but when they share them they get downvoted and criticized like someone who was critical of NFTs in 2022.
I wonder why that is, and what it portends regarding the future of that "tribe"
And I've seen other less tech inclined people click right through these without a moment's thought. They think it's just one of those things computers have to complain about.