> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.

Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...

It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it

Wow, what a post.

> This is an article that only cites Zitron’s opinions about subjective model quality. You’re tisk-tisking people to be objective about a bunch of words saying that the author’s opinions are better opinions than the guy he’s talking about OP

Oh it's not just the author's opinions. They're the opinions of a bunch of LLMs he checked, too. Much better.

> Europeans would be far less likely to tip (or tip generously).

Southern europeans tip, there wouldn't be much difference there

Northern ones it depends, they don't tip at home but they usually do on vacations to southern europe (where tipping culture very much exists). Though some of that also has to do with currency conversions, at least historically, even if the tradition has stuck past the euro being introduced. So maybe that's why they don't tip when it comes to dollars?

> Southern europeans tip

No we don't. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy it's not common nor expected.

Deeply ironic that it sure looks like taking the original post, pasting it to an AI with the message "make this angrier" and then simply copy-pasting the output back to the website. In direct violation of their own (supposed) principles.

And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")

I actually wrote it all myself... The original version was the angrier one only, but people complained that it was too angry, so I tried to smooth it out with another version people could use.

See how perverse this "I hate the way AI sounds" thing is?

In the end everyone accusing everyone of being AI.

I sure hope you wrote all those em dashes by hand you asked claude to remove in the latest commit in the repo. And all the ones on the website

Yeah looking at the repo it's clear the entire thing is sloppified. I don't know what point the creator is trying to make but sincerity on being human isn't it.

I asked it to write the initial version and then refined it later on, there was an AI review on it yes, but anyway, hope the point is made

Half the audience perceives it as AI anyway. Does it matter if you spend the time or do not spend the time to write it? The result is the same.

The angry one is just as bad IMO.

the parts you wrote aren't what people are complaining about.

> In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications.

It also doesn't quite come around to the idea of something you might call "convenient" obsolescence. Not planned, not actively colluded to happen (the Phoebus cartel did do this, but are one of few examples), but very convenient for the manufacturer when optimizing for other factors (mostly cost) instead of lifespan.

> Yeah, that kinda dark pattern / malicious compliance junk ought to be straight up illegal.

It is illegal.

> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

> [...]

> - Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies

> - Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

7 clicks is not as easy as one "accept all", violating the last point. Not allowing you to dismiss the banner and access the site violates the other point.

The real problem is enforcement, unfortunately.

I have seen a few occasional sites that are even worse than this one.. Not only don't you get a reject all, you get two classes of settings, the default "types", and "trusted partners", and for trusted partners, about a third of them have what's called "legitimate interest" turned on, which means "we legitimately think we can share your data with this people after leading you to believe we haven't, and that's ok", and there are a hundred or more partners you have to scroll through and disable this for

> Astronomers have pretty good terminology for stars,

...do they though?

The "proper" terminology says all main sequence stars are dwarves, but nobody calls them all that in practice. Some astronomers insist on saying "yellow dwarf", but some don't really bother. In general having the only two kinds of star be "giant" or "dwarf" is contentious, but it's also contentious that there isn't a name for whatever is in the "middle". "Main-sequence star" is a broader category and doesn't apply. They're all "stars", obviously, so that isn't specific enough.

The only decent terminology is for the spectral classes, but those only work as long as you look at spectra. The moment you try to figure out what the theory says those stars would look like as proper 3D objects, things get very messy. You also immediately get the issue that star size and brightness goes O>B>A>F>G>K>M. So... it's alphabetic except it isn't. And C is something completely different and doesn't fit the brightness classification at all.