There is some bad stuff happening to core pillars of what I understand as “the web”.
No, I don’t want to post a “recent bad events” doomer listicle.
Stay positive, here are my favourite platforms and Warez websites.
No, that’s… kind of the problem, at some point the meta switched from “Share and keep seeding so other people can download the stuff too, hopefully some of them see the [Donate] button.” to "Gatekeep quiet, if you bring too much attention to this it will get taken down". We can’t have nice things.
Then just create new things, that don’t depend on big players, with open licenses that will not get taken down. Then Bill Gates invented proprietary software and became head honcho.
Along the way, the concept of “power user” went away, from the dusty industrial 2000s
[You will be the next Bill Gates, learn tech]
to the very colourful, service-based present day where the user needs to be kept in the dark as much as possible, gotta use state-of-the-art technology to take power away from the users. A general atmosphere of powerless-ness and quiet, not out of censorship, but out of desire to conserve what little of the old web is left. //and the de-ranking in search results and shadow-banning and the infantilization of language surrounding history and…
Piracy circles aside, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the school teachers’s jump from “We can’t teach tech literacy because we don’t know either” to “We shouldn’t have to teach you this, you already know, you needed to have a phone to be here today and operating that should be enough.”
I’m back in university right, and there is quite a bit of talk surrounding A.I. going around, but the main points sound like:
-
“None of the current jobs will exist by the time you finish your studies, so this institution is kind of pointless.”
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A grand total of ONE teacher brought up the long-awaited death of homework as a concept, and the need for teachers to teach skills and how to make stuff, instead of just having students write from dictation for most of the course runtime. (This is 4 years after they were supposed to upload all the course materials and literature to the uni’s website)
Not even in the Computer Science profiles has been brought up once hosting LLMs, or the phrase Large Language Model. Teachers phrase it like “Have you been using The Chat 
for homework? 
”.
So I had to show a classmate how to use ChatGPT. And I explained it as “Its main purpose is to make believable-looking text, rather than to sort through facts, so it can be very stupid at times, I don’t like using it”. That’s… weird, right? To discourage umm… non-tech-savvy people from using the latest and shiniest. What is the alternative, regular search engines? I’m having enough trouble getting those to behave, even with all the search parameters. Lately GPT has been giving better answers than Google, I think it runs off its own training data, as far as I know OpenAI’s own back-up of… the internet? That’s at least generally immune from de-ranking, SEO and pages going missing suddenly.
Idk, lately the internet seems quiet, no? I think non-media people avoid leaving public comments now, be it on posts or group chats. Discord and Reddit took a lot of air out of the room from “The Open Web”, whatever that means these days, as far as I can see it’s only Mozilla that still uses that phrase.
It’s not The Computer Room anymore, the portal in and out of Cyberspace, populated by peer-to-peer netizens. It’s casual observers strongly picking between two teams in any topic. It is the rusted-out NFC terminal on the bus, and the top-down payment network that broke down somewhere in France and no one in this half of Europe can provide support for.
Yeah ok I’m a bit salty that my new “International Student card” arrived with a busted NFC chip. Twice.
Maybe it’s just me needing more time to come to terms with the switch from an Electronics/Networking Degree to a Business/Marketing one.
Once again, Xenforo Discourse tells me to think about what kind of replies I want. I dunno, who do I whine to for unlocked bootloaders and “sideloading”? (increasingly becoming my own “content” word, imagine being allowed to run your executables without a notary). It’s not even a “Switch to Linux you guys” thing, I have software that runs on Windows 10: 21H2 but doesn’t on 22H2, one of which was needed for university in the beforetimes.