Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.
That for some reason uses em dashes and writes in a voice that at times I find hard to distinguish from AI.
Man, I'm tired. Are people just lying? Am I just seeing things? Some mystery third option? Is it meta commentary?
Everything is poisoned.
I suppose it feels incorrect regardless of actual AI use, because it's still the LinkedIn thought leader template with relevant current issue.
Which is interesting, because it is so meta.
It has it all. It has the SpongeBob meme for relatability, it has the vague call to action (mindfulness, lmao) at the end. Ugh. Man.
You'd be surprised that there are folks on this planet who love em dashes. I'm one of them and I used to write a lot with em dashes, but stopped using it altogether in the past few years because of AI.
So exactly what you said. You've stopped because you know how it will be perceived.
There is something not checking out with that blogpost is what I'm saying. Things do not feel organic. Which can be AI, but also can be lots of other things, but regardless of that, it smells.
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Googling the author tells me that they perhaps might just be trying a bit too hard to be taken seriously. Oh well. But anyway
Smell is there. Intent is unclear
I enjoy using em and en dashes for punctuation. They provide a nice break that’s not quite a comma, of which I already have way too many, because I tend to overthink grammar.
I’m sorry my writing style is not appealing to you, but don’t accuse me of publishing AI slop, that’s a shitty thing to do.
No need to make it emotional like that.
Besides, I have simply told you that these aspects set flags for me. Others might not. They might instead just discard it with zero actionable feedback.
I saw on your bsky account that AI is some sort of holy war for you. It is not for me. I just don't want to read stuff that feels inauthentic :D
The thing with such disclaimers like "written by a human" is that a) people can just lie and b) labels are redundant. Either the content speaks for itself, or it speaks in a way where a label doesn't change anything about it.
Especially on platforms full of hustling business frauds like HN, you do not want to base your judgement of something on their self-declarations. You completely ignore any provided guidance or other metadata on how you're supposed to understand stuff and instead parse it as it is. (Of course, context still matters. Always does.)
Anyway. I'm not trying to be an antagonist here.
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One of the harsh lessons of the internet (or rather the world) is that rarely anyone cares about your intent. What people do care about is what they've perceived.
This can be very frustrating, however, it becomes somewhat less frustrating (but still frustrating) when you plan with that and act accordingly.
Then again, I'm just one person so you shouldn't just drop everything and suddenly do everything completely different just because I said so. I am mostly irrelevant.
The idea that "good taste" exists and matters is a form of social conservatism that communicates nothing of value and is inevitably self-serving. It is always possible to restate "X is more tasteful than Y" as "I and people I like/respect prefer X to Y" without losing information; the only thing that changes is the subtle implication that the speaker's subjective experience is in some way superior to that of others.
I encourage the author to go and eat a wild banana, to experience the raw, wondrous near-inedibility of nature untainted by humans' shameful lust for making things nicer.
While quietly implying his personal superiority and deep understanding of things, this German sets up a premise that everything deteriorates because of CAPITALISM and now also AI, listing numerous completely distinct areas of human life. For such bold claim he gives only one wrecked example: strawberry flavor substitutes real berries. How did he come to this conclusion? Did he look up any data? To me, personally, this is not a common knowledge. I know a bunch of people who really like and enjoy real strawberries. At the same time, I am personally not interested in neither.
OK, he has some sort of a premise, but what is the conclusion? Did he just write his own opinion to highlight how smart he is? Apparently so. I guess we could assume that what comes out of all this, is that "we're having less and less experiences".
It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.
Why lead with this? There is a very long line of dopamine-fracking-like behaviors that hatched before now.
How difficult is it to say that we can't use science to create strawberry flavors but we can use science to basically create what strawberry means in the first place? Oh, you think that the strawberries we have now in all their varieties just arrived with us on the planet in their current form?
Who is to say what the point is where too much tampering is enough? HINT: it's not the ones consuming, they like the new stuff regardless of whether it's real or not.
It's tempting to point the finger at The Capitalist or Capitalism, but this misses the mark no matter how close it is. You are the Consumer. You empower enshit.
Don't believe me? Go build something and see. People don't take the time to look at what you have built and who you are to determine if your product is a worthy investment. You have to sell them. You have to court a demographic and place your product. You will spend a lot of time doing this unless you are already somehow connected into a network that turns everything you touch into gold.
After this process, see if you are not sympathetic to strawberry flavoring. And this is all your fault, right? It has nothing to do with The Consumer, we can't blame those people. We can't blame "You" because you aren't rich and powerful. Even though it's "You" and many people like you that are the whole engine of this thing.
TLDR; "dopamine fracking" is a great term. It lets us explain what those "others" are doing to "us" while we sit by passively and accept our fate.
Shame on them. When they hear this term they will be ashamed and fix their ways or we will make them through our friend The Government.
But where's the clever and magical term that makes "us" behave differently?
The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.
It is indeed interesting to observe how attitudes in tech seem to be changing, especially with the specter of AI. I think some of it is just the lament of the keypunch operator or some kind of parochial and domestic grumbling concealed behind the appearance of something greater, but some of it does seem like its rooted in at least an intuition about where everything is headed...and has been heading.
What the author is describing is consumerism. Consumerism devours everything and soon enough becomes a way of life. But as a society, we are enslaved to consumerism. We cannot let it go. We don't even know that we should. Status in consumerist societies is tied to consuming power! You don't want to be left behind, do you? So, unfortunately, the only corrective for an obstinate people is reality itself, which will come for its pound of flesh sooner or later. And we're seeing it. The drowning man must let go of his satchel full of fool's gold, but he is unable to and the satchel takes him to the dark depths until perhaps he is can no longer hold his breath. Reality has to pry his fingers from that satchel.