What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.[0] The burden of proof is on the author to demonstrate that software quality is actually worse now. If they want to refute the argument that they are engaged in rosy retrospection, then they should offer more than a handful of personal anecdotes that demonstrate nothing.
Google Drive lost some data that one time in 2023? Cool. In the 1990s, Windows uptime was measured in BSODs per day, and data loss was predicated on how frequently you remembered to hit Ctrl+S before your computer crashed.
Your bank has a frustrating mobile UI? Cool. Ten years ago, they probably didn’t even have a mobile UI, or if it did, people were also complaining that it sucked[1].
Security is worse now because people don’t update their dependencies so leak user data? Cool. The largest known data breach to date happened in 2013[2]. Ten years before that, the entire internet nearly collapsed because of a computer worm[3].
Is any of this a more valid rebuttal to the original author? No. They’re just more anecdotes.
> If you supply your own encryption key, it's true that Backblaze can't read your data at rest.
It’s worse than this. The private key for data decryption is sent to their server by the installer before you can even set a PEK. Then, setting the PEK sends the password to them too, since that’s where your private key is stored. So you have to take their word not just that they never store the key and promptly delete unencrypted files during restoration, but also that they destroy the unprotected private key and password when you set up PEK. It’s a terrible scheme that seems almost deliberately designed to lull people into a false sense of security.
> Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause.
Similarly, starting with the conclusion that smartphones and social media must be the problem, you’ll deflect away from a lot of contradictory evidence that suggest a more complex interplay between other societal issues, and that smartphones/social media are—if anything—likely just illuminating and amplifying known and pre-existing root causes of poor mental health in young people: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and pressure to excel[0].
Literature reviews of social media and smartphone use show “conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” and “do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect”[1]. Some hypothesised alternative causes of increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms with some stronger effect sizes include: increases in online bullying, decreases in sleep, long-term effects of the Great Recession (and, by extension, the European debt crisis), biological changes[2], restrictions on independent activity[3], and climate change[4]. Even before the invention of the smartphone, psychopathologies in young Americans had increased by a full standard deviation[5] over the previous 70 years. The number of teens that report extremely high levels of stress doubles during the school year[6], yet there is little blame currently being cast in that direction, despite it being the overwhelmingly largest self-reported source of stress at 83%.
Claiming causation from such weak evidence is not merely foolish, it’s potentially quite dangerous. Despite the parent commenter’s incorrect claim that this is purely an American issue, they are almost certainly correct that smartphones and social media are currently being used as scapegoats so society can avoid confronting and addressing the deeply entrenched and deeply uncomfortable root causes of harm. I think this can be seen, at least in part, in the casual discarding of evidence that—especially for marginalised groups[7]—access to online spaces can be protective to young peoples’ mental health.
Trying to avoid discussing the root problems is bad enough on its own, since it means they will not be fixed, but the proposed solution of using restrictive mediation—that is, shielding young people from harm rather than educating them—is almost certainly worse than doing nothing at all[8].
> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.
They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
> The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally
The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:
> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...
> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.
> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.
> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.
> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.
The article states that adverse events were “twice as likely”, but the abstract of the study says that the hazard ratio was 4.53 (95% CI 2.00–10.27). Can someone who is hopefully more statistically literate than me explain what seems like an obvious discrepancy here? Did they just take the lower bound of the confidence interval and report that?
In searching for a non-paywalled copy of the actual study, I found that other news outlets like CNN seem to be doing the same thing.
> I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.
I’ve noticed a similar thing.
I had a 2005 Smart-UPS tower that never failed, but developed some transformer buzz that was annoying in an office environment—and hey, improved standby efficiency and an LCD panel would be nice—so I replaced it in 2013 with its latest equivalent. This one ran for about nine years and then started rebooting itself randomly, dropping the load each time. (It had no issues transferring and holding a load on battery, and self-test passed.) Its 2022 replacement now uses a non-standard USB-A male-to-male cable, is missing information that used to exist in the LCD menu, seems to have a problem charging from 98% to 100%, and has a broken event log (event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue). It works, but QA issues are evident.
I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.
Tripp-Lite’s consumer grade stuff seems to work well enough for what it is, but their higher-end equipment seemed to all be designed for environments where noise doesn’t matter, which makes it a non-starter for an office. Eaton (their parent) seems the same.
So it would be great to know what is an actually good choice these days. At the moment I’m not in the market for anything and hopefully what I’ve got will run for another decade, but if it doesn’t, I have no good idea about what else to buy today.
> event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue
Some UPS:es are adamant about wanting live and neutral on specific pins on the power plug and will throw that error message if they're swapped.
If it's a reversible power plug, flip it around. If the power plug can only be connected in one orientation the outlet is likely incorrectly installed (which is not all that uncommon, as 99.99% of stuff will work perfectly fine with live and neutral swapped).
> I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.
I've never (n=4) had a stock CyberPower UPS battery last me 2 years. 3rd party replacement batteries have all lasted significantly longer than what shipped in the box.
Mine has been running fine for 4 years now. It's a PR1500ELCD so one step up from the CP1500PFCLCD. I also bought it directly from the official distributor in my country if that matters.
It’s baffling. When APC first added native USB support to their Smart-UPS series, they chose a standard USB-B port. When they introduced “SmartConnect” a few years ago, this port was replaced by a USB-A port which requires a non-compliant USB-A male-to-male cable for monitoring. The only ‘good’ reason I can think of for this change is that someone realised that these new cloud-connected UPSes would be easily bricked by some bad firmware update (since apparently that’s a feature now), and wanted to use USB thumb drives as a recovery mechanism, but I have no idea. I think even though they have a built-in Ethernet port now, one still needs to buy their network management card for non-cloud remote management, so it could just as easily be another attempt at some weird vendor lock-in.
> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.
But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.
Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.
Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.
This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.
Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.
Once again people think they can productivity their way to results as if it's a quantifiable and profitable resource. Culture, Creativity and Art are HUMAN expression of a HUMAN condition. To generate it with a computer means to create 'content' for the sake of profit. Not ART for the sake of expression. At the start of every argument reducing any human output to nothing more than a repeatable and reducible resource is the same arrogant fallacy thinking that, and anything we create just will appear in a vacuum. The worlds people benefit from standing on each others shoulders. This reduces that to the company with the biggest pockets. Otherwise, why secrets?
Everything you argue facilitates the reach of human expression. This pilfers and silences it. This plagiarism machine cannot even deal with 'current stimuli' in ANY way what so ever so it cannot express anything. It can only remember what you've told it, and it can barely do that successfully. It can't hold a fact for 2 messages. It cannot feel, it cannot predict, it cannot agree or disagree. It outputs based on master's filter and its expression based on financial agenda.
To think artists want to retain control over their own voice and ideas, and not have a company steal the aesthetics of it and sell its skeleton at a discount, and not realise the hypocrisy of trying to shift the power away from the individual to a private single for profit company is just... Beautifully poetic in its own right.
> the invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians
What history have you been smoking? The invention of a technology that could mechanically reproduce the message of an artist only sought to spread awareness and increase musical access and interest. It cannot replicate the aura of art which is why people to this day squeeze into expensive live shows. You argue the phonograph has completely cleaned live music off the table. It hasn't. It facilitated its growth.
You can replicate the art, but you can't create the artist. If ever I hear a balanced argument from the other side that includes the word 'aura' I'll have known they didn't just spend half a night researching these matters and deciding it's easier to remain ignorant.
"in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics."
I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.
I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.
As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
Hindsight being the premise for confidence in this context is precisely why the hubris of factual speaking on the what-if's of the future can be pretty easily ignored as self infatuated authority. The rest of your arguments are still conflating the problem. One enhances the voice of an individual the other extinguishes it.
Regardless your semantics on your phonograph argument the reality remains. The artist remained as part of the contract of societys growth. Once again, this isn't a blank vinyl or a canvas or an empty parking lot where freedom of expression takes priority. The priority is the financial incentives and retaining control.
For you to argue there's any creativity that would come out of that is like arguing I'm being creative when I put coins into a vending machine and receive cigarettes. I'm as creative as the conditions the puppets of profit have allowed me to be. Money doesn't own this world despite its deep and confused hope. It steals from it.
> They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
No, they were right then and they're right now. Otherwise based on your argument anything beyond a phonograph would be unnecessary. So why do people seek anything beyond their MP3? Why do they go to live shows? Why do people still visit the Mona Lisa even though they can see it at home for free with a google? Please, as much as you refuse to debate philosophy and art, those are the exact things being debated. So either listen to those who've spent their lives in their domain (it's why I don't falsify my Python accolades) or pretend you know better. But don't conflate. Do read Walter Benjamin's essay from 1935 on Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I know, you won't.
Next you're going to tell me AI hip-hop has the same value, incentive and understanding as the people from Cabrini Greens trying to escape poverty and violence by creating something beautiful and relatable out of the human condition. Then you'll tell me it's not your fault they haven't 'out created' themselves to keep up with the theft of their very self. If the vultures could at the very least just fuck off until the person isn't alive enough to bare witness to it, you could at least feign some IP argument. It's otherwise just hot air hoping.
