It reminds me of how we laugh at scam emails for being poorly written and obviously a scam, but the theory is that this filters out all but the most gullible people so the conversion rate on anyone that replies is high.
If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
I'm not sure of this. I remember back in the day finding people's blogs, reading old forum threads, participating in said forums - there was a ton of info out there and easily found. Now those kinds of sites are rare, and those that still exist aren't surfaced by search engines like they used to be.
AI has the benefit of having trained on all that material, it's a snapshot in a sense. But as people increasingly stop creating content like that and we turn to AI instead of asking for help on forums we stop growing the knowledgebase that AI draws from.
I don't know whether it's nostalgia for the past or whether it really was easier to find things. If you say so, then it could be. It's true that in certain fields it really was easy to find things, and it also differed from country to country. Where I was, there was mainly gatekeeping—a kind of control. In that sense, was the past really better? I don't know. In the past, there were quite a few cases where learning a particular skill required an absurd amount of money (though this may be because I'm from an East Asian country). I think what made people enthusiastic about Udemy was probably that, in my memory, it offered those expensive courses cheaply or gathered the information together.
I don't think forums are bad, but I've questioned whether experiences in such forums were always pleasant. There was a lot of wrong information, and there were also many people who picked fights for no reason simply because they didn't like something. But AI really does just tell you knowledge easily.
Of course, forum activity gave me the opportunity to come across knowledge whose keywords I didn't even know, and that got me studying, but I question whether such forum activity was open to everyone.
I also somewhat agree that the problem of the knowledge base shrinking is real. But is that problem really unsolvable? As far as I know, the results on the degradation problem of synthetic data say that if there is synthetic data, there isn't that much degradation. People, too, tend to idealize the past as they get older. Like treating the inconveniences of that time as nostalgia.
I don't know. Rather, once the current SLOP era passes, certain knowledgeable people may become rare and be treated well then. The future can't be known.
Anyway, this is purely a matter of values
"Some people may regret the destruction of knowledge communities, but I benefited from that destruction, so I can say it's good. People always judge by their own experience, don't they? I respect your past experience. In the cases you went through, I think AI produced more bad effects than good.
I've also seen many things disappear because of AI, but it let me try things I wanted to try, and I think that part is good. So, honestly, I don't know. I have both affection and hatred for AI. But the affection seems a little bigger.
Yeah it probably did vary by field and by country. Also when you bring up Udemy I think that might illustrate a difference in perspective that's relevant - I'm thinking of finding very specific info. Like searching for an exact implementation detail of something, giving exact keywords and wanting results that match what I typed. That functionality just doesn't exist anymore, at least not with mainstream search engines. Udemy however is more about teaching a general topic, and I think this is something where AI helps a lot - Udemy is essentially trusting a teacher to summarize a large topic into its key components, and AI can do that quite well for a lot of subjects.
And certainly dealing with people online can result in unpleasant interactions. I found that specialized forums were usually well managed and wouldn't tolerate abusive members, though new members were expected to learn the forum's rules and put some effort into finding existing info before they start asking questions. The downside of AI is that it can only tell you things that are already visible online, and it will take the stance of the majority. On a forum you would get people who can chime in based on their experiences where there's absolutely no prior info online, or people who could contest the majority and explain why.
Synthetic data certainly could solve this. Especially if we get AI controlled robots or AI managed physically accurate simulations of the world, such that AI can actually engage with the world and test new things. It will take a long time before we get to that point where AI is able to reach the level of being able to tell you something like "oh yeah if you take apart that DSLR lens, the screws holding the floating group in place are glued in with loctite. And for good reason, if you don't have an optical bench you're never going to be able to get those elements recalibrated if you adjust them. But it looks like your copy has a shim behind that group - try removing that and see if that lets you focus past infinity." Like AI can understand a lot of that in the abstract, and might be able to guess at some of it, but until it's actually pulled apart this lens and messed around with it it's going to be vulnerable to just making things up or simply not knowing key details. But that's why it does so well with code, since all code is accessible to it.
I do agree that AI is useful though, and I have no qualms about using it to learn things faster, build tools that help me, or do my job. And though AI has contributed to the loss of the internet I value, it's not the only contributor, and likely not even the main contributor. Search engines were already consolidating power into a smaller subset of large commercial sites rather than surfacing forums and blogs, sites naturally went offline over time and archiving efforts just weren't sufficient to make up for this, and users just prefer lower effort forms of engagement like scrolling Reddit with everything in one place and lots of entertainment rather than being a member of multiple more focused communities. So while I may malign AI for the impact it has had, you're probably right that on this topic the net impact is positive.
Thank you for the in-depth comment. We have some points where we disagree, but also points where we're similar, and I think this has been a genuinely enjoyable discussion. I largely agree with your current comment.
I also agree that specialized forums have well-managed aspects. But conversely, getting into a specialized forum usually required a ticket of admission—something like having to attend a certain conference socially.
So the problem is this point. Very high-level forums required an admission ticket, or basically a certain level of qualification, and were hard to get into; you had to get in through an existing member, and if you were physically far from that member, it was hard.
Usually, the forums someone like me could get into were often ones at a somewhat lower level. These days things move to Discord, but it's hard to go into Discord's closed ecosystem and study there.
Actually, as you said, forum activity and human interaction are important. Because in the end, humans have to learn about the world through humans.
The world isn't simply a place to obtain information—things like the patience to endure unpleasant situations and people, the understanding to listen to others' opinions without distorting them, and the courage to admit to others what you don't know are not things that can be cultivated through AI, I think.
The various values that have limits when learned through AI can be learned by mixing with people. In that sense, people have to learn about the world among people.
Because AI basically gives you wrong information to please you and reinforces information only within the scope of what you already know. I think friction with people is necessary to find keywords you genuinely don't know.
My words got sidetracked in the middle. I agree with your comment that AI isn't the only thing that changed the internet this way, and I also agree with your point that forum activity and the like are necessary. It's just that where we put the emphasis and weight is what makes our thinking differ. Thank you for the long comment, and have a good day
Yeah this is the difference between personal projects or being a team lead with serious influence, versus being a typical developer employee.
The typical employee is not given the leeway to spend time building up the infrastructure needed to enforce good output from LLMs. Previously understanding the codebase was just part of doing the work you were assigned, but now it requires that side effort of creating infrastructure. And unfortunately a lot of teams won't approve letting developers spend their time on that infrastructure, they just want the deliverables they're asking for.
Close family member of mine was wrongly diagnosed(not cancer), did not listen to the hint we had, prescribed the wrong medicament. She was in bad condition. Went to another doctor (while the first one was on vacation) - got the right test, the right medicament and recovered quickly. Her actual doctor after learning this did not apologize, but threw a tantrum and also dropped her. Probably enough legal grounds to sue, but who has time for that.
I'm using Opus 5.5 at work extensively, have also used Kimi 3 and Deepseek 4.1 for stuff outside of work, and I can't deny that the tools aren't capable. They solve problems, surface issues I wouldn't have considered, and largely do write better code than I do.
The one exception is for stuff that I care very deeply about. For a very small subset of projects where I'm willing to spend hundreds of hours ensuring that what I build is the best possible thing, AI still hasn't been able to match my work unless I micromanage it, but at that point just writing the code myself is actually faster.
For almost all jobs though AI is probably the future, most software developers never cared that much about their company's code anyway.
I'm not a big LVT fan - pushing for maximally productive use of land is going to result in displacing people, displacing small businesses, displacing artistic/cultural/environmental spaces, etc.
I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.
How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)
> How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains?
The goal of the deferment is to stop a negative outcome (the resident being forced to sell their property because of higher LVT taxes) from occurring until the resident actually wants to do so.
Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.
Who ever wants to manipulate the user using their PII and associated metadata - Retail, Marketers, Political and Security Apparatus... the world is your dystopian oyster in that regard.
It just has oil. While it is nice having low taxes because of all the oil money, it can also be draining being surrounded by people who want to be annexed by Trump, or hold socially regressive views. But economically yes it's a great province.
As opposed to the very productive and diversified Canadian economy? Over 50% of Canada's exports are natural resources and the rest of the economy is basically just downstream from that.
Where are the tech giants or manufacturing giants? We have 1 tech giant who constantly criticizes Canada, 1 large manufacturer that gets bailed out twice a decade and otherwise we're just a country of housing schemes, financial services and fast food/retail.
It's funny the housing angle that parent poster is playing, too. While Edmonton at least has made sensible decisions around its housing stock, the real reason why Alberta has "affordable housing" is that the absolutely brutally cyclical and volatile nature of the oil industry there means that every few years a wave of unemployment and poor economics knocks real estate prices down. Every time there's low oil prices there's hand wringing all over Alberta. It's just a volatile place to invest.
Alberta real estate is affordable relative to the rest of Canada because it's actually not a good investment. Not that I think real estate should be treated as an investment, and this isn't a knock per se, but it's also nothing to brag about that every few years scores of people in Alberta are losing their shirts on real estate.
I'll probably buy a house next year in Edmonton for my daughter to use (and rent out) while she's at the UofA, but I fully expect to either lose money or not gain on it.
Can't comment without knowing more specifically what you're comparing. Massive variation across both provinces, of course.
The standard unit in rural Alberta is the quarter section - 160 acres (half mile by half mile). Greater Edmonton is surrounded by mostly flat quarters in every direction as far as the eye can see.
If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
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