BorisBoreUs

If people communicating in a public space are of differing opinions regarding a topic, and all can claim truthfully to have reflected thoughtfully, and understood the complexities of the topic, then disagreements about the topic can still be communicated gracefully to one another. If left unpersuaded, they can agree to disagree and part peacefully. The act of the discourse is valuable even in disagreement, either to re-enforce ones own convictions or to soften a stance when presented with new information.

I'm fairly confident that the OP isn't referring to discourse and debate but rather comments or posts that unnerved them. I suspect the comments were some shade of anti-social, ignorant, or violent from their perception. I'm speculating on the specifics, as I'm working from the same post you saw.

If you want to talk about objective and subjective thresholds of truth vs. fact and determination of what is considered valid, I'm not sure this is the right place. The OP seemed to be concerned at the prevalence of concerning rhetoric online, at least, that's what I took from it. A broader philosophical discussion might be better served in it's own post/comments.

I'm curious about the tone of your reply. My perception is it seemed combative and contrarian, though I can't be sure that you intended it that way. Your comments seemed to be directed at me specifically rather than at the ideas only. Am I misinterpreting your meaning?

In order to be civil, thoughtful, and graceful, a person needs to reflect and understand complexity. The platforms of the internet incentivise the opposite. Extremity is louder than resonability so it floats to the top of the discourse.

Additionally, seeing 100, 1,000 or 10,000 people on a platform, from around the world, express shocking or anti-social viewpoints represents an infinitely small sub section of the population. A group that includes provacateurs, bots, nation-state actors, and wing-nuts.

The real trouble comes from others who aren't taking time to reflect, who see this content every day and begin to believe that it must be valid because they keep seeing it. Slowly they twist and adopt pieces of rhetoric because there isn't enough of a counter balance of opposing views sharing the same weight in their feeds.

The original idea was that the "trick" was the default (some type of mischief or vandalism) but the costumed (annonymous) tricksters would give the person a chance to be spared by offering a "treat" instead.

We've gone so soft.....

Nope

Yo... That ain't PG material there...

I certainly hope so! Human ingenuity has gotton us here. I'm interacting with you across who knows how much distance, using a handheld device that folds up. .....but, just because we've gotten ahead of trouble and found solutions thus far, doesn't mean that an unintended bit of code, or hardware fault, or lack of imagination can't cause consequences further down the road. I appreciate your optimism and pragmatic understanding. You seem to be a solution driven person that believes in our ability to reason and fix things. We'll definitely need that type of attitude and approach when and if something goes sideways.

As with your original comment, i like your argument. :) Additionally, I dig the wall of text. WoT, written well, leaves little ambiguity and helps focus the conversation. I don't disagree on any particular point. I agree that its a net positive for programming to be approachable to more people, and that it can't be approachable to many while requiring apollo era genius and deep understanding of technology. It would be a very different world if only PhDs could program computers. To that, I believe the article author is overstating a subtle concern that I think is theoretically relevant and important to explore.
If, over the fullness of decades, programming becomes so approachable (ie, you tell an AI in plain language what you want and it makes it flawlessly), people will have less incentive to learn the foundational concepts required to make the same program "from scratch". Extending that train of thought, we could reach a point where a fundamental, "middle-technology" fails and there simply isn't anyone who understands how to fix the problem. I suspect there will always be hobbiests and engineers that maintain esoteric knowledge for a variety of reasons. But, with all the levels of abstraction and fail points inadvertently built in to code over so much time passing, it's possible to imagine a situation where essentially no-one understands the library of the language that a core dependency was written in decades before. Not only would it be a challange to fix, it could be hard to find in the first place. If the break happens in your favorite cocktail recipe app, its Inconvenient. If the break happens in a necessary system relied on by fintec to move peoples money from purchase to vendor to bank to vendor to person, the scale and importance of the break is devastating to the world. Even if you can seek out and find the few that have knowledge enough to solve the problem, the time spent with such a necessary function of modern life unavailable would be catastrophic. If a corporation, in an effort to save money, opts to hire a cheap 'vibe-coder' in the '20s and something they 'vibe' winds up in important stacks, it could build fault lines into future code that may be used for who-knows-what decades from now. There are a lot of ifs in my examples. It may never happen and we'll get the advantage of all the ideas that are able to be made reality through accessibility. However, it's better to think about it now rather than contend with the eventually all at once when a catastrophe occurs. You're right that doom and gloom isn't helpful, but I don't think the broader idea is without merit.

Yes, but also the bit about when someone creates an application without understanding the underlying way that it actually functions. Like I can make a web app, but i don't need to understand memory allocation to do it. The maker of the app is a level or two of abstraction from what the base metal of the computer is being told to do.

I like a lot of your responses. I agree about nostalgia being a main driver of his article. However, i think the bits about how a doctor needs to know how a medical tool functions etc, is a little misplaced. I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user. I ALSO think the author would prefer more broad technical literacy, but his core arguement seemed to be that those making things dont understand the tech they're built upon and that unintended consequences can occur when that happens. Worse, if the current technology has been abstracted enough times, eventually no one will know enough to fix it.

I'm not saying this is a question to train AI on a specific piece of information, but i don't know that it would have been worded differently if it was.

....how is that a conspiracy theory?

If you dont require open-source in your decision, Vivaldi is great. Its what i use most. It has a ton of granular features that i appreciate, but can be a bit too much for folks that want a more minimal experience.