We already live in Harrison Bergeron's world, for anyone forced to, say, watch the NBC broadcast of the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies. "Don't go having unsanctioned thoughts about that artistry, or forgetting about our commercial sponsors!"
I remember the 2010 Olympics were aired on pre-enshittified Youtube (in a few countries). You could click on icons to go to a live stream of different events, zero ads, no cutting to studio announcers (stayed on the fields), zero fuss. It was glorious.
I feel like living in a country advertisers don't care about makes your digital life better. For example the NBA league pass is very cheap in my country, all teams. For an amount I'd be glad to pay per month, I can watch all games for all teams on demand, without blackouts. And during game breaks we either watch the stadium feed, an animated NBA logo, or highlights and countdowns of other games.
As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text and art.
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.
> I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were...
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.
I mean, one can always get an older machine and code everything as holy binary chant not only impress the youngsters, but also impose level of distance from the 'limited by llms'.
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.
The problem is the high stress generated by the one-shot approach. There has to be a balance between the objectivity of a single test and practical concerns (like choking because you were sick or got bad sleep the night before).
Ultimately, the only "fair" outcome is an abundance of opportunity. The vast majority of people are worth something to their community and society. And even then, as long as there's enough food and shelter to go around, no one should have to justify their mere existence.
In many instances, attractiveness is tantamount to having social skills. It's not even a matter of developing a more sophisticated skillset; attractive people (and all the people who are subject to affinity bias) are just given the benefit-of-the-doubt more, and more consistently. This is where advice like, "Be yourself," and, "Don't fear rejection," and the idea that, "the only thing stopping someone from connection is their willingness to dare to try," come from: people whose attractiveness has preempted the requirement to really change or consider how they approach interactions.
Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling.
There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.
DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.
Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
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