....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.
LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives.
That's democratization.
I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word.
Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.
....are you being dense on purpose? Just because something takes time and effort to learn doesn't mean it was monopolised and undemocratised lol. It's the natural course of things, and I cannot believe I have to explain that to you.
The knowledge was freely available for the past few decades, way before LLMs - ergo democratised. The skill was freely available to learn - ergo democratised.
By your logic,
- cooking is a skill that is not democratised (despite the fact that you can do it everyday).
- A person who doesn't take time to learn cooking from cookbooks or youtube tutorials is somehow "lacking access" and in an undemocratic position
- An experienced chef is monopolising his mastery of cooking skills bc they dedicated time to learning them
- a robot that manufactures food is "democratising cooking skills"
See how silly that sounds?
Not to mention, using an AI to do a job is NOT equivalent to learning the skills of the job. Me having a printer doesn't mean "painting skills were democratised".
I'm a 30 year old and I have a similar experience. Facebook has almost always been a pleasant experience for me - not just updates from friends but also the new stuff that comes in the feed, which is why I kept getting confused about the reports of fb being a hell hole, until I understood the rabidity & variability of their algorithm.
FB Groups are one of the best corners of the internet imo.
My blood always boils a little whenever I read about Netflix's "Not second-screen enough" business model.
What shitty point we've enshittified to, where we prioritise passive slop consumption over active enriching one.
All of this is a result of the algorithmic media addiction people have been engineered into, in my opinion. Every moment you're not consuming something is a moment you're wasting, and a moment you have to spend alone with your thoughts (which is too terrfying for people now apparently).
A proper solution to current video content landscape used to be piracy - Netflix literally succeded early on in streaming because they were more convenient than pirating stuff. But with these Media Moguls lobbying hard to crack down on piracy (at the risk of privacy), it does look pretty bleak.
To be fair people used to have their tv (or even radio) on all the time.
I’m not sure this is that much different. If anything the quality has gone up in the sense that maybe you have a bit more choice about what you put on in the background
Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont network vanished and Ed Murrow took that government job.
Then you should take a better look. Each local ISP has their own self-designated territory or "area". They don't let any other ISPs establish themselves in their areas, beating them up or cutting their wires if they try - you can talk to any ISP technician and they'll tell you about it. 90% of the fluctuations in network are from a cable cut, often by competing agencies.
It's also one of the big reasons why AirFibre is becoming more prominent - can't cut cables if there are no cables.
The above commentor uses "mafia" not in the literal sense but he's talking about the mafia-like system where each ISP has territories they fight over.
Tbh, it's manageable in Bangalore, since the territories are already established and there's not much interference but much more horrible in other areas - we had to suffer with a shitty ISP in my hometown for years bc they kept cutting cables & bullying any other ISP that tried to come in.
Actually, I am talking about a literal mafia. In my area there is just one "official" internet provider (Airwire) which is partly owned / controlled by a politician who was recently accused of killing a property owner who refused to sell the property for peanuts to him.
If any other internet provider enters this area, their people get beaten and their lines get cut. They cause problems for even BSNL which is a government-owned provider. They periodically cut their lines.
So yes, this is an actual mafia. I have been warned by them that I don't any choice but take their lines. They even threaten you if you take products like Jio airfiber.
I have access to airtel, act broadband, jio fiber, bsnl and earlier hathway and I have switched between them and no one cut my cable and gave me grief ... no mafia present in our and the surrounding areas. Ofc the kinda ppl you talk abt may be there, but we shld not generalize.
This is India. If people are informally reporting corruption in some institution, you'll be on the right track if you believe it to be true. There will never be any formal studies of such cartels. Journalists who attempt to report on such things are regularly murdered. Most people are simply oblivious. You saw in the main e-waste story how the journalist seemed oblivious to the cartel in front of his eyes. If you stay in an independent house, not a flat, you might want to look into cartels of water tankers too.
I shifted to Telegram a few years ago, and it was such a rich experience for me. Off the top of my head:
- much much better performance
- a good desktop client
- open source message clients
- scheduling messages
- better search
- many small gestures/UX features that feel thoughtfully implemented
- better channels
- message threads
- chat folders
- very easily programmable & deployable bots for moderation or implementation into your work flow
- a lot of customisable settings
Telegram is so much further in performance and feature than it's counterparts it's laughable. Almost all of the new features in Whatsapp/Signal were first implemented in Telegram.
Some of them, as you said, are feasible because of the non-e2ee chats, but a lot of them are just plain universal.
Nope, not at all. Not only are most of these features unavailable, getting anything "business-related" done (apart from the template they offer you) is a huge pain.
I use revanced, smarttube, and yt-dlp. but I also have premium, because it is an exceptional service.
It's about 2 things
1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.
2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere
If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.
Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.
I didn't mind the ads on YT but this year the unskippable ads on TV platforms is abusivel, eg., a 20-30 seconds ad(s) for a 1.5 minute video. Ive seen unskippable breaks of up to 200 seconds with 5-8 advertisers in some long form YT vidoes. YT claims the breaks are less frequent but I dont beliveve it.
That was it and I side loaded STN. I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
I agree. That is quite painful and is obviously motivated to force people towards premium, which I highly disagree with. I think such actions should be regulated though I don't know if that can legally happen.
>I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.
I dont think they want us to transition to Premium, they like that on smarttv platforms they can sell unskippable ads that are similar to cable/broadcast TV
YouTube wants you to transition to Premium because it is more profitable for them; they earn less with selling ads on the CPM and the CPC basis than they get from Premium. And they are pretty intrusive about it e.g. when you watch videos and you exit the YouTube app and shortly after that come back, pop-up says: "Wish videos kept playing when you closed the app?", "Get background play with YouTube Premium". Also when comments are disabled by content creators on music videos, they sort of hijack comments section and say: "Listen on YouTube Music", "Timed lyrics, sleep timer and more". Plus on top of that, they also got pretty aggressive with blocking ad-blockers....so definitely they want you to purchase and transition to YouTube Premium.
I've heard that Premium viewers account for a better income for content creators in comparison to ad-supported viewers. That's enough for me to be happy to pay.
Not going to say you are wrong (+1), but look at the streamers who now overcharge for an ad-free version of their services. Part of that is to get scale for the ad-supported tiers.
>Also, IGNORE anything on Twitter, Reddit, or HN (ironic ik). The lesswrong/credibledefense/zeihan types are all idiots ime. Using an "objective" tone doesn't make rubbish "objective"
Not to mention these sites are FILLED to the brim with bots. Eg. In 2013, the most "reddit-addicted" area was Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, with largest amount of activity [0]. Eglin was one of the few places used in a study for testing social media manipulation by Pentagon [1]
And not to mention the Russian/Chinese/Indian bots
....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.
LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.