That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Especially as one could just as easily spin this in a more empathetic light: in acknowledging one’s own desire to be seen, we can realise that it’s likely that many other people feel similarly.

He looks like he’s the kind of dog who, upon finding another good branch, would attempt to carry even more sticks, even though his attempts to do so are silly are best.

A friend of a friend is the daughter of a Russian oligarch. It was a messy situation in which she was at risk of being drawn into the politics, even though her dad was an asshole who she would’ve been glad to see defenestrated. I only know the surface level info, but it sounds like a fucked up situation in many ways

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out

I don’t typically experience imposter syndrome.

However, it is my understanding that the majority of people I know seem to experience imposter syndrome (likely influenced by the fact that my social circle is mostly academics)

Thus I seem to be the odd one out in this respect, paradoxically causing me to feel like an imposter for not experiencing imposter syndrome.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Superficially, this book looks like one that I would enjoy (if not for your anti-recommendation causing me to steer clear). Because of this, I would wager that you would have an interesting answer to “if someone was considering the above book, what’s a book you would recommend they read instead?”.

In the spirit of “take a book, leave a book”, one of my favourite non-fiction books for a general audience is “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life”. This recommendation is beyond the topic of the current thread, but in terms of enjoyable books that made me feel smarter, I love this one; I read it as a biochemistry undergraduate, and I was surprised at how much I learned from it.

I think you’re highlighting two different problems here.

I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they’ve been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between “Cut and Paste” and “Copy and Paste”. It’s grim.

The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it’s larger than that. It seems like it’s not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they’re able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company’s success doesn’t matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.

It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn’t start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from “Tech Won’t Save Us”. The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that’s patently bullshit and it’s clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can’t blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it’s a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don’t seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don’t get platforms or access to ask those questions).

Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I’ve found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I’m exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental “rolodex” of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don’t necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won’t have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.

“I inspected RAM to double check.”

That’s an unhinged level of commitment. Respect — I dig it

Saaaaaame. I’ve heard that semi-colons are similarly associated with LLMs; This is another thing that feels like an attack on me personally.

Thanks for this perspective. I cringed so hard at the part about the guy with the PhD being listened to over you, because I know so many dumbasses with PhDs.

I’ve not listened to that episode, but I remember that when I first learned about Robert Maxwell’s legacy, I was astounded by also unsurprised (because it made a lot of things make sense in hindsight). As an ex-academic, I’m especially pissed off.

“Actually i think the effort they are making is cool. It goes well beyond piracy and I think is a good idea esp in face of the world rn.”

I agree. I remember recently their blog had a post about how shadow libraries are more important now than they’ve ever been, and it made a compelling case. I started reading that piece expecting some thin justification about breaking the law (like a guy I knew who argued that it was ethical for him to deal drugs because the stuff he sold was super pure so it was basically harm reduction. It’s not that I disagreed with that point per se, but rather that I knew it was just bullshit he told himself so he felt ethically okay doing the only job that was viable for him). In the case of Anna’s Archive though, I was quite quickly won over by their arguments about the societal importance of the service (I was already won over on the individual benefit side of things)

It’s an especially bad site because it also has links to other external naughty services, like Z-library.

Heck yeah. Rock on

I’d imagine salt would make it taste worse for the same reasons why salt makes food taste better, but this is just me being facetious

Whilst not open source, I appreciate that the notes are locally stored in straightforward markdown. I no longer use Obsidian, but I appreciated how there was next to no platform lock-in (the only snag I experienced in moving to a different note taking approach was a couple of plugins that gave additional features. But that’s easy to avoid if portability of data is important)

I’m inclined to agree. I hate AI, and I especially hate artists and other creatives being shafted, but I’m increasingly doubtful that copyright is an effective way to ensure that they get their fair share (whether we’re talking about AI or otherwise).

I don’t use Mastodon, but I wonder if you can follow the link to a Lemmy community from your Mastodon client, or search it from within Mastodon. Given that you found this post somehow, it makes sense to test using this community, so here’s a link to try: https://lemmy.world/c/news

My local library has a digital piano and headphones, which I think is very cool. I had a partner with a piano and since we split, I’ve missed having the opportunity to play. It’s a very cool idea.

I’ve been working at getting better at being mediocre at things. So far, it’s been a source of positive growth, but I do find it ironic how even when it comes to this, I feel compelled to frame it to myself as improving at a thing