God. This isn't AI. None of this is AI. This is dumb sketchy LLM, and the fact that they are destroying the term 'AI' bu building things well short of it, and lying about it, makes me sad.
The original (computing/model railroad-context) meaning of "hacker" goes back to the 1960s at MIT.
The corrupted 1980s popular media meaning was "criminal". (I cast no aspersions here)
The 2000s PG/HN meaning was an attempt to point toward 1960s MIT, which was probably well-intended (and poorly received at the time), but has failed to convert the popular media, and perhaps has morphed into some gross sticky goo including VCs and tech bros.
I still believe this is a windmill at which we should tilt. I used to report to the CTO and he accused me of being "overly pedantic". I agreed with the pedantic part but no the "overly" modifier. Words matter, especially when they are communicated widely in an adhoc, unplanned manner from someone in power. I don't understand how these people can be so blind to the subtext of what they say; do they really only hear the literal message?
We've lost "hacker" and "crypto" and "literally" and "decimated". (plus every political word I can think of, but do not care to introduce into this well-mannered thread)
We will never get them back, so those of us who like words are stuck avoiding them, overclarifying our usage, and accepting that everyone else will use them incorrectly.
Calling attention to ourselves as the losers of these battles isn't particularly productive.
This. Statements like the grandparents are in the general category of
- "life isn't fair"
- "people are bigoted against the outgroup",
- "brutal wars of expansion are a thing".
Like, yeah. Obviously. But that's supposed to be the kind of thing you push back against, when you don't like the result, not fatalistically accept as some fundamental invariant of reality. That's how progress happens.
Yeah, and as a Black person in America, I'd argue that more care needs to be taken here.
Take "Woke" -- a perfect example of a reasonable term we had, like "hey folks, stay alert and awake to the issues around you and your people."
To what it is now -- a ubiquitous word with force that has ABSOLUTELY no clear definition and is thus a rhetorical blunt force weapon with no true meaning besides "how I can piss other people off"
So this pattern has played out before, many times.