The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won.
The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners.
The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour, and social safety nets for workers displaced by machines. The problem was that unions hadn't been invented yet and people working in these textile factories had little leverage. So they made leverage by destroying the machines in an attempt to intimidate the capital holders to the negotiating table.
It didn't work in the end.
History might not be repeating today with AI tools being foisted upon us everywhere but it sure does rhyme.
This article misuses the term Luddites, or at least references an erroneous use.
I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can do it, I'm just not going to take it very seriously.
I'm glad we use electric bulbs instead of paying the lamplighters union to light our streetlamps at night... even if those jobs are lost.[^1] If we can replace superfluous work with machines, we should. The issues of capital capturing all of those gains is obviously one we should fight against politically, but the idea that we have folks doing jobs that don't need to be done by humans pretends that humans can't do other things.
Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it. We can support redistribution of wealth and social safety nets while also trying to reduce the amount of labor needed to do mechanized tasks. To do that, however, we need an electorate that is actually interested in progress and change, rather than an electorate that wants nothing to change ever, because they are riddled with nostalgia about life before these darn kids came along with their technology.
> Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it.
not all technological advance is beneficial
generative AI reminds me of tetraethyllead
it made a couple of people fantastically rich, whilst silently causing immense damage to both the world and society
It's not a meme, it's history. The machine breaking was a form of collective action by violence to form solidarity among workers who were under threat of losing wages and their livelihoods by the policies and actions of capital holders, not the machines themselves.
The capital holders spun the tale in retrospect that the movement was about the machines. "They just can't see progress! How daft do you have to be to not see the value of these wonderful machines! The productivity allows these people new leisure and the chance to do meaningful work... and they want to tear it down! How backward!"
It was about rights, liberties, and solidarity of workers. Some people did care about the quality of the textiles. But that's not enough to spark violent action in order to negotiate for better... textiles? No, it was for better working conditions, abolishment of child labour, etc.
Consider also that at the time, England was fighting Napolean on the European continent as well as the War of 1812 in North America. The textile industry was not good at allocating capital to survive the ups and downs: the factory owners only allocated enough to produce the next order. Layoffs were frequent, workers were over worked, and often paid little. Children were often employed because they were cheaper and had no bargaining power.
And where did the textile workers get displaced to? The myth from the capitalists is that they'd find new productive work elsewhere! It turns out... workhouses, the legally sanctioned indentured servitude that lasted up until the 1930s.
Had the Luddites won I doubt they would have destroyed all of the looming machines and forced us back into the days of hand-crafted textiles. The idea is preposterous. But maybe the workhouses wouldn't have developed, maybe there would have been more sensible labour laws earlier on. And we'd still have a more predictable and sensible textile industry.
I'm a big fan of agriculture as a civilizational stepping stone, but apparently the diet (and height, and risk of malnutrition, etc) of the average hunter-gatherer was richer in vitamins, minerals, etc, than the diet of a the average farmer.
Since most of the world switched to farming around 5000 years ago (I think), that means that our average diet regressed for at least 3500 of those years.
So, if you think about it, assuming the much larger farming tribe next to you did not kill you and your entire tribe, agriculture was a bit of a mistake, at an individual level.
I agree with the other commenter, there's a chance the current incarnation of LLMs (and social media, etc) might be looked upon, in the future, as equivalent to the discovery of tobacco or leaded gasoline.
There is a no-AI audience because "AI" is now associated to jumping on the latest bandwagon for no discernible reason (and if there's a reason, it's usually for getting VC money). And price increases as a bonus.
There is a no-AI audience because vendors turn this crap on by default and I don't know where my data (which may not even belong to me but to a customer!) goes.
"AI" is the new Clippy. Except MS didn't charge extra for Clippy.
What’s interesting about this take, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, is watching Apple get skewered by fumbling AI integration on the iPhone. That’s obviously of their own doing since they turned on their marketing machine on full blast and made promises. But some users seemed really disappointed in their lack of AI features compared to Android. I don’t think anyone would be disappointed for removal of Clippy.
It's also synonymous with bad art, bad writing, climate irresponsibility, and hallucination. The problem is, people want to do the least amount of work possible and go home at 5, so they're all too happy to use the tech that their employer is forcing down their throats.
Art is good or bad if it expresses what the artist wants it to express or not. It is not strictly a matter of quality / fidelity. It is terribly difficult to produce good art through the common chat interface used to create art with AI. Tools that allow iterative refinement like ComfyUI are far more capable for allowing people to create art with AI, but they are also far more capable at producing something that is low quality.
AI generative output seems to have similar output to when you flood a creative field with capital and demand returns off a flourishing subgenre. A lot of mediocrity from trying to simulate that magic with a great lack of inspiration.
I think AI will raise the floor, which is sort of good.
That will make things a LOT more unequal. When everyone is very mediocre, the few that stand out, stand our a lot more, and since everyone is used to the sameness, they'll reward difference a lot more.
In context I wouldn't assume so. An opt-in experience assumes someone has provided proactive, affirmative consent. An opt-out experience assumes no such consent.
By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.
I have been working on this idea of a curators only social media. where instead of algorithms delivering you content, you follow people whose taste you appreciate. The original idea came from having your own "tv station". If you think about what cable tv is, it's basically a 24 hour block that the station manager could decide what to put on. Station managers with good taste (and perhaps deep pockets) could put on consistently great content. Like, it was actually nice to watch Comedy Central or Cartoon Network at some point. So I had this idea to build a website where you get a timeline where you can add youtube videos that you think are important and they will play during the day when you set them up to play. So a person could watch your channel and watch whatever you wanted to be on at that time. Everything would be curated instead of algorithmically delivered. I guess it's not a novel idea, but I haven't put it all together yet, i have been just working on this repo: https://github.com/mnky9800n/timeline-tv-studio
I had similar idea but applied to anything that uses some sort of “recommendation engine” internally.
The things I wanted use it for was for Netflix for TV shows and movies, and Yelp for restaurants.
With the restaurant example, the curation can become as strict as dietary requirements (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, halal, etc) that are in some cases regulated by NGOs or government bodies or as flexible as having the same spice tolerance as a friend.
To be honest, I’d treat your service like I treat IPTV. I would use your service for exposure to things I might enjoy and for curated lists and then go watch those things somewhere more convenient. Or I’d leave it on for my dogs.
TV schedules, the things shows had to do for those schedules, and advertisements feel like something I escaped from and I don’t see the appeal of going back at all. The only two benefits to me are: Knowing someone else is also watching the same thing (which could be done for streaming with a simple “viewers” count; and limited selection “forcing” me to watch something I wouldn’t otherwise watch. But that doesn’t really exist in this world anymore.
Yeah that's all true and I agree with you. I just thought it would be fun to be able to create a television station. I always liked the weird al movie UHF as a kid, and I thought maybe it would be fun to have some kind of tv station manager simulator.
Crazy that you bring up UHF, because it is tradition for us to watch it on the 4th of July.
The idea definitely appeals to me, I just know I wouldn't use it properly. On the other hand, it might be fun to run as a personal service for my own stuff. A Plex plugin maybe.
Wouldn't just sharing bookmarks be more usable / efficient than forcing a time when they are played (and might not match others timezone or schedules - say I want to follow someone at the other side of the planet because I like their tastes)?
Asked differently, what does the TV channel-like model brings to the table?
I always thought it would be fun to have a television station when I was a kid. Now I can build the technology to create a facsimile of that. I guess what might be more fun for people would be a game like those game studio simulator games. Then you could just play it when you feel like it.
but yes, i think you are correct, a curator's list maker would be a better version of this idea.
you are probably right. i just was building this as like a side project thing. i never thought anyone would use it. But I do think I would be interested in a kind of curator focused social media.
FWIW, a podcaster that I follow believes that the future of social media will be kind of what you are describing. I didn't think much about, but after getting bored of AI vídeos, texts and images, I agree with you. People not only will search for human curated lists, they will pay for it. However, as others have commented, the TV station part is not that appealing.
I think the right tool for the job eventually emerges victorious. Right now AI is shoe-horned absolutely everywhere because it's trendy and no company wants to be seen as lagging -- eventually, it will only remain in product contexts in which it's useful and represents a step forward. At least that's what I hope.
Right now I think there is an audience for no-AI because it's in a lot of places it doesn't belong. After the great rebalancing, maybe it won't be as big of a segment.
I work in decompiling and reverse engineering. One of the important aspects from a legal liability perspective I that anything I produce and share should be a new creative work and not merely a mechanical transformation. I’ve avoided anything with LLMs related to those projects.
I have asked for help on some other projects where I got stuck and thought I’d give it a try. The LLM hallucinated and answer, but then admitted it was wrong when i pointed out the mistake and didn’t help me get any further.
ok, I do not want AI in every product either, but the slight trouble I have with some otherwise thoughtful anti-AI takes is that they are increasingly out of touch with what is possible today (or what is the standard practice today).
(Regarding the question about code editor. My primary code editor recently is Vim -- no AI features. But larger part of the code is produced by tools like Claude Code that does not even have the feature of manual edits. Traditional IDEs only have niche roles in my process at the moment -- e.g. debugging and stepping over the code.)
1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job
2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop
3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™"
4) is the output trustworthy?
For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.
It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).
When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?
> writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice
Right?!
One of the ads I saw for AI assisted comms recently was an example of making copy for a newsletter for a cupcake shop, who have a new flavour. You tell it that and it spins a whole newsletter for you.
All this tells me is that the information content of your letter is utterly trivial. I don’t want that newsletter.
As more waves of layoffs happen due to AI, there will likely be a growing market for "No AI" products, especially given how nasty some of the C suite are being about that short-sighted "unemploying humanity" objective they are being explicit about.
I recently confirmed that people have been fired this year for not using AI products in their work. The exec's reasoning: it's like hiring a carpenter that refuses to use power tools.
Never mind that the analogy makes little sense. We're not in the realm of enhancing labour power with additional tools to make us more productive. We're deep into alienation and exploitation. All of this added productivity and you'll continue working the same hours or more while your colleagues are laid off and let go. No labourer will see the additional profits from this increased, "productivity." Those let go aren't going to be protected from losing their homes and careers.
I’ve witnessed more people having breakdowns in this wonderfully productive world our glorious tech leaders are creating from overwork than at any other time in my career. And they’re all using AI extensively and are smart people. It turns out laying off team after team still leaves a lot of work to do and they’re using constant threats to keep people working endless nights and weekends to up the pieces from the endless chaos they are causing. Their calculations for how productive AI makes people is completely wrong.
Tech just feels sinister right now and without any ounce of shame or self reflection.
Except we have a thriving open source software ecosystem where you can have the software you want if you stop making excuses how the terminal makes everything literally unusable. No such thing exists for manufacturing high-tech OLED panels without malware attached to them.
I'm wondering, is there a law stopping me from buying smart TVs wholesale, extracting the parts, recombobulating them into dumb TVs and reselling them?
i dont think so. theres precendent to say that you can legally jailbreak phones you buy, so this seems similar
the financial aspect might not be worth your time if theres not enough of an audience. one risk is that the added price might deter your customers, who might just buy a smart tv and not use the smart part, which is what i already do.
This is true, and hacks of these sort are a cottage industry
The difference with smart TVs that might kill the value proposition is that the smart aspect doesnt actually impeed the user. You can just ignore it and hook up cable or your laptop to the tv. So would people pay to remove it on philosophical grounds. IDK
In my opinion the separation isn’t between AI vs. not. It’s between software that is restrained and well reasoned in their development vs. software that sticks unnecessary features in without enough testing that creates bugs and pushes useful UI features into a submenu. Software that updates just so they can sell a new version and get a product manager a promotion almost always sucks.
This is conflated right now with AI because every CEO and PM is pushing AI into their product as a first step to increased monetization once they figure out how. This is not well thought out and it ruins the experience of users who were previously happy with their software. A smart company would wait until the AI actually served a real use case and then roll out a well-tested update, but these companies are exceedingly rare.
I honestly don’t care if you add AI features, but make it so I can ignore them and make sure they don’t get in the way of the actual use of your software.
It’s sad that the best example I can think of such restraint is Apple, who was planning on rolling out AI on everything but realized that a lot of it sucked and halted the rollout partway through. It would have been better if they hadn’t made AI the key selling point of the iPhone 16 before failing to deliver, but at least they realized they should stop.
Microsoft also had a partially self-aware moment with their Recall feature, but it took a massive public outcry and their modifications only partially addressed privacy concerns.
But the volume of shit that gets funding because of AI overwhelms even the partial success stories- agents that don’t do what they claim, self driving cars that have never materialized, Rabbit AI, the Humane AI pin, Meta AI glasses, whatever shit Jonny Ive’s deal with OpenAI will produce- all of that makes people very skeptical because product managers and CEOs can’t hold back and wait until an idea is fully baked.
And let me continue my rant: pricing these things suck. You can charge $20-25 monthly for a general AI service like ChatGPT that has a bunch of features like image generation and is very versatile. You can’t cram a shitty feature into your single-application software and charge the same amount. If a PM thinks this is appropriate pricing they are insane.
Additionally, I said previously that I want to be able to ignore the features I don’t use. If you only have one premium tier, and the price went from $5/month to $20+ monthly because you added AI, then I’m probably cancelling because I have to now decide if the features I do actually use are worth the extra money. Plus, companies that do AI this way will inevitably restrict my usage if I do fine the feature useful.
So I guess if I had the choice, I would prefer a company keep a lower premium tier even if I have no access to AI features. But what I would really like is an option to enable whatever AI you’ve developed and bring my own API key, and don’t change your premium tier pricing (or minimally change). But clearly there are enough people out there that are shelling out for the shitty $20+ monthly subscriptions (or getting their company to pay for it) that my opinion doesn’t matter.
Absolutely, many of us don't want AI shoved into every product we use. We know it's because tens of billions have been poured into it and they want their ROI.
It’s right I don’t want AI in my email client. Gmail now summarises threads, but I didn’t ask for that, and I have no reason to trust it any more than the frequently bullshit AI search results.
It still astounds me that the dominant search company, where people go as a first port of call when looking for information, is willing to put generated answers at the top of its results which are variously sorta-right, subtly wrong or outright fabricated.
Meta has started offering artists I know AI versions of their own work on Facebook. There’s no obvious way to turn it off and … frankly it’s pretty insulting.
So yes, there is a no-AI audience. At the very least a let-me-turn-it-off audience. And not just in tech.
> Well, good luck finding that setting buried several menus deep within their interface.
Howcome noone ever solved this problem? After all these years of UI evolution. It still mostly sucks to find the setting you need to change something that bothers you. There are no suggestions to customize your experience right there when it happens.
How about giving user opportunity to reply with a frowny face (or Thanks, I hate it) and if they do, direct them to a spot where they can partially or completely disable the thing that happened. Give them browsable and searchable history of the things they customized. Give them llm powered search for options in your app so they don't have to search what to click on random forums.
Why nobody figured out how to bake this directly into a default control library for each platform is a disgrace.
Was in the middle of writing something like this comment already. Heh, definitely something a bit ironic seeing multiple comments claiming an editor written in Lisp and descended from an AI lab as being ai-free. It's probably one of the most user-customizable environments around for building user-centric AI tool integrations.
Maybe people mean GenAI. Back then, AI meant stuff like computer algebra systems like Macsyma which produce deterministic, provably correct results. I'm totally OK with that kind of AI. What I don't like are probabilistic text generators getting shoved into absolutely everything.
notepad++ that i run doesn't have any features like that. I can't even get "run" to work. But vertical selection + search and replace are top notch, and it loads large files fast, even with control characters.
Even when i was running linux and windows side by side i did all my text editing in windows, notepad++ is just that fine tuned. even BBEdit wasn't as nice.
I rarely upgrade software that "works", so i have no idea if notepad++ has gotten worse.
Is it AI in a product, or you noticing AI in a product? Because I think that it is a bug when I notice it, because those are usually times when it is bad.
The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won.
The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners.
The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour, and social safety nets for workers displaced by machines. The problem was that unions hadn't been invented yet and people working in these textile factories had little leverage. So they made leverage by destroying the machines in an attempt to intimidate the capital holders to the negotiating table.
It didn't work in the end.
History might not be repeating today with AI tools being foisted upon us everywhere but it sure does rhyme.
This article misuses the term Luddites, or at least references an erroneous use.
I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can do it, I'm just not going to take it very seriously.
I'm glad we use electric bulbs instead of paying the lamplighters union to light our streetlamps at night... even if those jobs are lost.[^1] If we can replace superfluous work with machines, we should. The issues of capital capturing all of those gains is obviously one we should fight against politically, but the idea that we have folks doing jobs that don't need to be done by humans pretends that humans can't do other things.
Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it. We can support redistribution of wealth and social safety nets while also trying to reduce the amount of labor needed to do mechanized tasks. To do that, however, we need an electorate that is actually interested in progress and change, rather than an electorate that wants nothing to change ever, because they are riddled with nostalgia about life before these darn kids came along with their technology.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-drawn_boat
> Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it.
not all technological advance is beneficial
generative AI reminds me of tetraethyllead
it made a couple of people fantastically rich, whilst silently causing immense damage to both the world and society
TEL is now universally banned
It's not a meme, it's history. The machine breaking was a form of collective action by violence to form solidarity among workers who were under threat of losing wages and their livelihoods by the policies and actions of capital holders, not the machines themselves.
The capital holders spun the tale in retrospect that the movement was about the machines. "They just can't see progress! How daft do you have to be to not see the value of these wonderful machines! The productivity allows these people new leisure and the chance to do meaningful work... and they want to tear it down! How backward!"
It was about rights, liberties, and solidarity of workers. Some people did care about the quality of the textiles. But that's not enough to spark violent action in order to negotiate for better... textiles? No, it was for better working conditions, abolishment of child labour, etc.
Consider also that at the time, England was fighting Napolean on the European continent as well as the War of 1812 in North America. The textile industry was not good at allocating capital to survive the ups and downs: the factory owners only allocated enough to produce the next order. Layoffs were frequent, workers were over worked, and often paid little. Children were often employed because they were cheaper and had no bargaining power.
And where did the textile workers get displaced to? The myth from the capitalists is that they'd find new productive work elsewhere! It turns out... workhouses, the legally sanctioned indentured servitude that lasted up until the 1930s.
Had the Luddites won I doubt they would have destroyed all of the looming machines and forced us back into the days of hand-crafted textiles. The idea is preposterous. But maybe the workhouses wouldn't have developed, maybe there would have been more sensible labour laws earlier on. And we'd still have a more predictable and sensible textile industry.
Machines aren't the problem, people are.
I'm a big fan of agriculture as a civilizational stepping stone, but apparently the diet (and height, and risk of malnutrition, etc) of the average hunter-gatherer was richer in vitamins, minerals, etc, than the diet of a the average farmer.
Since most of the world switched to farming around 5000 years ago (I think), that means that our average diet regressed for at least 3500 of those years.
So, if you think about it, assuming the much larger farming tribe next to you did not kill you and your entire tribe, agriculture was a bit of a mistake, at an individual level.
I agree with the other commenter, there's a chance the current incarnation of LLMs (and social media, etc) might be looked upon, in the future, as equivalent to the discovery of tobacco or leaded gasoline.
There is a no-AI audience because "AI" is now associated to jumping on the latest bandwagon for no discernible reason (and if there's a reason, it's usually for getting VC money). And price increases as a bonus.
There is a no-AI audience because vendors turn this crap on by default and I don't know where my data (which may not even belong to me but to a customer!) goes.
"AI" is the new Clippy. Except MS didn't charge extra for Clippy.
What’s interesting about this take, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, is watching Apple get skewered by fumbling AI integration on the iPhone. That’s obviously of their own doing since they turned on their marketing machine on full blast and made promises. But some users seemed really disappointed in their lack of AI features compared to Android. I don’t think anyone would be disappointed for removal of Clippy.
Yes, yes they did charge. The price was an agonizing wrenching feeling, as yet another small piece of your soul disappeared, each time you saw it.
It's also synonymous with bad art, bad writing, climate irresponsibility, and hallucination. The problem is, people want to do the least amount of work possible and go home at 5, so they're all too happy to use the tech that their employer is forcing down their throats.
If you think AI art/writing is bad, you should have seen what the people who produced it were producing before.
Art is good or bad if it expresses what the artist wants it to express or not. It is not strictly a matter of quality / fidelity. It is terribly difficult to produce good art through the common chat interface used to create art with AI. Tools that allow iterative refinement like ComfyUI are far more capable for allowing people to create art with AI, but they are also far more capable at producing something that is low quality.
[textbroker moment]
Oh, and even more aptly, do you remember "spinning"? This was a manual job, if you can imagine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
AI generative output seems to have similar output to when you flood a creative field with capital and demand returns off a flourishing subgenre. A lot of mediocrity from trying to simulate that magic with a great lack of inspiration.
Mostly they were producing nothing, which is certainly better than AI “art”.
You obviously didn't browse deviantart prior to 2022.
I don't think "AI" will either improve or worsen your average tv series.
The question is, will the samey bland series peddlers pass the cost savings on to whoever likes that kind of stuff?
I think AI will raise the floor, which is sort of good.
That will make things a LOT more unequal. When everyone is very mediocre, the few that stand out, stand our a lot more, and since everyone is used to the sameness, they'll reward difference a lot more.
There were bad hamburgers before McDonalds started to mass produce them, but now everyone is eating slop.
It's synonymous for you - not the rest of the world.
> [...] a growing number of companies have diminished the concept of opt-in by choice, it is now being turned into opt-in by default.
The term for "opt-in by default" is "opt-out".
In context I wouldn't assume so. An opt-in experience assumes someone has provided proactive, affirmative consent. An opt-out experience assumes no such consent.
By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.
I was going to point that out, but ... I'm still unsure whether that was an expression of cynicism or not.
I have been working on this idea of a curators only social media. where instead of algorithms delivering you content, you follow people whose taste you appreciate. The original idea came from having your own "tv station". If you think about what cable tv is, it's basically a 24 hour block that the station manager could decide what to put on. Station managers with good taste (and perhaps deep pockets) could put on consistently great content. Like, it was actually nice to watch Comedy Central or Cartoon Network at some point. So I had this idea to build a website where you get a timeline where you can add youtube videos that you think are important and they will play during the day when you set them up to play. So a person could watch your channel and watch whatever you wanted to be on at that time. Everything would be curated instead of algorithmically delivered. I guess it's not a novel idea, but I haven't put it all together yet, i have been just working on this repo: https://github.com/mnky9800n/timeline-tv-studio
I had similar idea but applied to anything that uses some sort of “recommendation engine” internally.
The things I wanted use it for was for Netflix for TV shows and movies, and Yelp for restaurants.
With the restaurant example, the curation can become as strict as dietary requirements (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, halal, etc) that are in some cases regulated by NGOs or government bodies or as flexible as having the same spice tolerance as a friend.
To be honest, I’d treat your service like I treat IPTV. I would use your service for exposure to things I might enjoy and for curated lists and then go watch those things somewhere more convenient. Or I’d leave it on for my dogs.
TV schedules, the things shows had to do for those schedules, and advertisements feel like something I escaped from and I don’t see the appeal of going back at all. The only two benefits to me are: Knowing someone else is also watching the same thing (which could be done for streaming with a simple “viewers” count; and limited selection “forcing” me to watch something I wouldn’t otherwise watch. But that doesn’t really exist in this world anymore.
Yeah that's all true and I agree with you. I just thought it would be fun to be able to create a television station. I always liked the weird al movie UHF as a kid, and I thought maybe it would be fun to have some kind of tv station manager simulator.
Crazy that you bring up UHF, because it is tradition for us to watch it on the 4th of July.
The idea definitely appeals to me, I just know I wouldn't use it properly. On the other hand, it might be fun to run as a personal service for my own stuff. A Plex plugin maybe.
Have you considered making it a game?
Yeah in another comment thread it came to me that this might be more fun ahaha. Like this game developer simulators.
Wouldn't just sharing bookmarks be more usable / efficient than forcing a time when they are played (and might not match others timezone or schedules - say I want to follow someone at the other side of the planet because I like their tastes)?
Asked differently, what does the TV channel-like model brings to the table?
I always thought it would be fun to have a television station when I was a kid. Now I can build the technology to create a facsimile of that. I guess what might be more fun for people would be a game like those game studio simulator games. Then you could just play it when you feel like it.
but yes, i think you are correct, a curator's list maker would be a better version of this idea.
...i dont think adding 'manage a tv station' to my day to day is going to help me be more social or help anyone i share it with.
you are probably right. i just was building this as like a side project thing. i never thought anyone would use it. But I do think I would be interested in a kind of curator focused social media.
FWIW, a podcaster that I follow believes that the future of social media will be kind of what you are describing. I didn't think much about, but after getting bored of AI vídeos, texts and images, I agree with you. People not only will search for human curated lists, they will pay for it. However, as others have commented, the TV station part is not that appealing.
I submit the term Nay-I as a movement
I think the right tool for the job eventually emerges victorious. Right now AI is shoe-horned absolutely everywhere because it's trendy and no company wants to be seen as lagging -- eventually, it will only remain in product contexts in which it's useful and represents a step forward. At least that's what I hope.
Right now I think there is an audience for no-AI because it's in a lot of places it doesn't belong. After the great rebalancing, maybe it won't be as big of a segment.
I work in decompiling and reverse engineering. One of the important aspects from a legal liability perspective I that anything I produce and share should be a new creative work and not merely a mechanical transformation. I’ve avoided anything with LLMs related to those projects.
I have asked for help on some other projects where I got stuck and thought I’d give it a try. The LLM hallucinated and answer, but then admitted it was wrong when i pointed out the mistake and didn’t help me get any further.
ok, I do not want AI in every product either, but the slight trouble I have with some otherwise thoughtful anti-AI takes is that they are increasingly out of touch with what is possible today (or what is the standard practice today).
(Regarding the question about code editor. My primary code editor recently is Vim -- no AI features. But larger part of the code is produced by tools like Claude Code that does not even have the feature of manual edits. Traditional IDEs only have niche roles in my process at the moment -- e.g. debugging and stepping over the code.)
To flip that around, is there any data to show that people *want* AI put into the existing products and services they use?
I am a Luddite holding on.
1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job 2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop 3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™" 4) is the output trustworthy?
For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.
It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).
When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?
I pretty sure I will lose, but, its worth a shot.
> writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice
Right?!
One of the ads I saw for AI assisted comms recently was an example of making copy for a newsletter for a cupcake shop, who have a new flavour. You tell it that and it spins a whole newsletter for you.
All this tells me is that the information content of your letter is utterly trivial. I don’t want that newsletter.
As more waves of layoffs happen due to AI, there will likely be a growing market for "No AI" products, especially given how nasty some of the C suite are being about that short-sighted "unemploying humanity" objective they are being explicit about.
I recently confirmed that people have been fired this year for not using AI products in their work. The exec's reasoning: it's like hiring a carpenter that refuses to use power tools.
Never mind that the analogy makes little sense. We're not in the realm of enhancing labour power with additional tools to make us more productive. We're deep into alienation and exploitation. All of this added productivity and you'll continue working the same hours or more while your colleagues are laid off and let go. No labourer will see the additional profits from this increased, "productivity." Those let go aren't going to be protected from losing their homes and careers.
I’ve witnessed more people having breakdowns in this wonderfully productive world our glorious tech leaders are creating from overwork than at any other time in my career. And they’re all using AI extensively and are smart people. It turns out laying off team after team still leaves a lot of work to do and they’re using constant threats to keep people working endless nights and weekends to up the pieces from the endless chaos they are causing. Their calculations for how productive AI makes people is completely wrong.
Tech just feels sinister right now and without any ounce of shame or self reflection.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but the lack of dignity we have in our profession has never been more apparent.
Tech still is rife with temporarily not-yet-founders who cling to not rocking the boat.
What do you do when the boat capsizes?
You see all of those HN posts asking where one can buy a “dumb” non-smart TV? That’s the future of software.
Except we have a thriving open source software ecosystem where you can have the software you want if you stop making excuses how the terminal makes everything literally unusable. No such thing exists for manufacturing high-tech OLED panels without malware attached to them.
I'm wondering, is there a law stopping me from buying smart TVs wholesale, extracting the parts, recombobulating them into dumb TVs and reselling them?
i dont think so. theres precendent to say that you can legally jailbreak phones you buy, so this seems similar
the financial aspect might not be worth your time if theres not enough of an audience. one risk is that the added price might deter your customers, who might just buy a smart tv and not use the smart part, which is what i already do.
I bought a PS2 from a guy decades ago, back when a chip hack broke Sony's copy protection.
His deal was you pay him, he'd then walk across the street to FutureShop, buy the PS2, and do the hack.
So he bought the chips, had them in stock, but didn't invest capital in the rest.
You could easily do the chip hack yourself, but you risked bricking the beast, due to lack of experience.
So the $50 was worth it, chip included.
I'm sure you could do the same with TV hacks, so upfront capital costs are minimal, with reduced risk.
This is true, and hacks of these sort are a cottage industry
The difference with smart TVs that might kill the value proposition is that the smart aspect doesnt actually impeed the user. You can just ignore it and hook up cable or your laptop to the tv. So would people pay to remove it on philosophical grounds. IDK
We're remodeling our kitchen, and for some reason so many stoves come with wifi and bluetooth.
In my opinion the separation isn’t between AI vs. not. It’s between software that is restrained and well reasoned in their development vs. software that sticks unnecessary features in without enough testing that creates bugs and pushes useful UI features into a submenu. Software that updates just so they can sell a new version and get a product manager a promotion almost always sucks.
This is conflated right now with AI because every CEO and PM is pushing AI into their product as a first step to increased monetization once they figure out how. This is not well thought out and it ruins the experience of users who were previously happy with their software. A smart company would wait until the AI actually served a real use case and then roll out a well-tested update, but these companies are exceedingly rare.
I honestly don’t care if you add AI features, but make it so I can ignore them and make sure they don’t get in the way of the actual use of your software.
It’s sad that the best example I can think of such restraint is Apple, who was planning on rolling out AI on everything but realized that a lot of it sucked and halted the rollout partway through. It would have been better if they hadn’t made AI the key selling point of the iPhone 16 before failing to deliver, but at least they realized they should stop.
Microsoft also had a partially self-aware moment with their Recall feature, but it took a massive public outcry and their modifications only partially addressed privacy concerns.
But the volume of shit that gets funding because of AI overwhelms even the partial success stories- agents that don’t do what they claim, self driving cars that have never materialized, Rabbit AI, the Humane AI pin, Meta AI glasses, whatever shit Jonny Ive’s deal with OpenAI will produce- all of that makes people very skeptical because product managers and CEOs can’t hold back and wait until an idea is fully baked.
And let me continue my rant: pricing these things suck. You can charge $20-25 monthly for a general AI service like ChatGPT that has a bunch of features like image generation and is very versatile. You can’t cram a shitty feature into your single-application software and charge the same amount. If a PM thinks this is appropriate pricing they are insane.
Additionally, I said previously that I want to be able to ignore the features I don’t use. If you only have one premium tier, and the price went from $5/month to $20+ monthly because you added AI, then I’m probably cancelling because I have to now decide if the features I do actually use are worth the extra money. Plus, companies that do AI this way will inevitably restrict my usage if I do fine the feature useful.
So I guess if I had the choice, I would prefer a company keep a lower premium tier even if I have no access to AI features. But what I would really like is an option to enable whatever AI you’ve developed and bring my own API key, and don’t change your premium tier pricing (or minimally change). But clearly there are enough people out there that are shelling out for the shitty $20+ monthly subscriptions (or getting their company to pay for it) that my opinion doesn’t matter.
there's still emacs.
vim has even had a command called “:set noai” for decades, which turns off messing with your code!
What’s incredible is even plain vanilla vi has it as well!
Emacs is practically a product of AI research.
Even if it didn't, it's distributed with a psychotherapist mode, hippie-expand (which I use almost every day) and dabbrev.
100%. I speak for myself.
Yes :)
Absolutely, many of us don't want AI shoved into every product we use. We know it's because tens of billions have been poured into it and they want their ROI.
I cancelled my very expensive corporate jetbrains ultimate subscription the moment it became infested
(and now just use the free one...)
I will not support any companies attempting to force this dogshit down my throat
if sublime text becomes infested I will no longer pay for those upgrades either
> if sublime text becomes infested................... I underslept last night, but that woke me up 0_0
It’s right I don’t want AI in my email client. Gmail now summarises threads, but I didn’t ask for that, and I have no reason to trust it any more than the frequently bullshit AI search results.
It still astounds me that the dominant search company, where people go as a first port of call when looking for information, is willing to put generated answers at the top of its results which are variously sorta-right, subtly wrong or outright fabricated.
Meta has started offering artists I know AI versions of their own work on Facebook. There’s no obvious way to turn it off and … frankly it’s pretty insulting.
So yes, there is a no-AI audience. At the very least a let-me-turn-it-off audience. And not just in tech.
> Well, good luck finding that setting buried several menus deep within their interface.
Howcome noone ever solved this problem? After all these years of UI evolution. It still mostly sucks to find the setting you need to change something that bothers you. There are no suggestions to customize your experience right there when it happens.
How about giving user opportunity to reply with a frowny face (or Thanks, I hate it) and if they do, direct them to a spot where they can partially or completely disable the thing that happened. Give them browsable and searchable history of the things they customized. Give them llm powered search for options in your app so they don't have to search what to click on random forums.
Why nobody figured out how to bake this directly into a default control library for each platform is a disgrace.
> After all these years of UI evolution. It still mostly sucks to find the setting you need to change something that bothers you.
In Windows 95 there sometimes was a `?` in the title bar, and you could click on things, and help would be shown.
Not a stretch of the imagination that it could a) document how to tune things and b) give you a link to jump straight to where to tune those things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxurwDW8Bto
But with yearly iterations it's a humongous task to have all these little tidbits of documentation stay consistent across time.
Because making it easy to disable something is bad for the usage metrics the people who built it are relying on to get promoted.
notepad.exe? Oh wait.
Emacs? :)
Didn't Emacs come out of MIT's AI Lab?
The irony is delightful.
Was in the middle of writing something like this comment already. Heh, definitely something a bit ironic seeing multiple comments claiming an editor written in Lisp and descended from an AI lab as being ai-free. It's probably one of the most user-customizable environments around for building user-centric AI tool integrations.
Maybe people mean GenAI. Back then, AI meant stuff like computer algebra systems like Macsyma which produce deterministic, provably correct results. I'm totally OK with that kind of AI. What I don't like are probabilistic text generators getting shoved into absolutely everything.
Oh, they really did add Copilot to Notepad... :')
notepad++ that i run doesn't have any features like that. I can't even get "run" to work. But vertical selection + search and replace are top notch, and it loads large files fast, even with control characters.
Even when i was running linux and windows side by side i did all my text editing in windows, notepad++ is just that fine tuned. even BBEdit wasn't as nice.
I rarely upgrade software that "works", so i have no idea if notepad++ has gotten worse.
"Yes, Emacs! Strange visitor from another subculture with powers and abilities far beyond those of plain-text code editors!"
I consider AI in a product a bug until proven otherwise. And it rarely proves otherwise.
Is it AI in a product, or you noticing AI in a product? Because I think that it is a bug when I notice it, because those are usually times when it is bad.