Hacker News with Generative AI: Criticism

Wikipedia's Co-Founder Is Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic (vice.com)
In Słubice, Poland, there’s a monument to Wikipedia, the inscription on which reads: “Wikipedia [is] the greatest project co-created by people regardless of political, religious, or cultural borders.”
Statement or eyesore? Japan's divisive brutalist buildings – in pictures (theguardian.com)
Laid-off Meta employees blast Zuckerberg: the 'cruelest tech company out there' (fortune.com)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued layoffs in the name of low-performance that workers deemed callous.
I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up (reason.com)
When I helped create the United States Digital Service (USDS), it was not on my bingo board that it would become the U.S. DOGE Service a mere decade later.
Google Maps blocks Gulf of America reviews after rename criticism (bbc.com)
Google Maps has blocked reviews for the Gulf of Mexico, after criticism of its decision to label it "Gulf of America" for users in the US.
Could Amadeus be the most misunderstood Oscar winner? (bbc.com)
Released 40 years ago this month, Miloš Forman's best picture-winning Amadeus is often accused of historical inaccuracies – but the film's critics could be missing the point.
Gartner's Grift Is About to Unravel (dx.tips)
Gartner's Grift Is About To Unravel
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (arstechnica.com)
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms.
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (arstechnica.com)
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms.
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (arstechnica.com)
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms.
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (arstechnica.com)
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms.
Why Children's Books? (lrb.co.uk)
In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:
AI is failing the Indoor Plumbing Test (freddiedeboer.substack.com)
The AI conversation remains absurd, hype-ridden, and utterly out of touch with actual material reality.
The real motivation behind systemd (2018) (unixdigest.com)
Personally I didn't have a problem with systemd in the beginning, when it was just a new init system. However, my problem with systemd today is that it has turned into a kind of Trojan horse. It is an attempt by Red Hat (IBM) to change the world of Linux in order to better serve their corporate interests.
Rust's Downfall: From Rising Star to Rejected by Major Projects (medium.com)
Rust, once celebrated as a game-changer in systems programming, has found itself facing a wave of criticism following a string of high-profile setbacks.
The Trouble with Elon (samharris.substack.com)
I didn’t set out to become an enemy of the world’s richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same.
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates (astralcodexten.com)
Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).
WordPress Is in Trouble (anderegg.ca)
Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet.
Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014) (akkartik.name)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by focusing on a passive representation; and the means were insufficiently polished, by over-emphasizing typesetting at the cost of prose quality.
The Cravenness of Mark Zuckerberg (ft.com)
The cravenness of Mark Zuckerberg
Apple squandered the Holy Grail (xeiaso.net)
Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect
Why the U.S. Patent System is SCAM [video] (youtube.com)
Mufasa's 'Bye Bye' shows how Disney villain songs went wrong (polygon.com)
Every day, Disney strays further from the wishing star’s light. And there’s one big reason for that: a staggering lack of animated villains. The studio has only produced a handful of movies with actual villains over the last 15 years, and as Disney fans frequently note, that means we’ve lost a glorious entertainment staple in the Disney villain song.
The Nintendo Switch EShop Is a Bigger Slop Factory Than (kotaku.com)
If you’ve recently loaded up the Nintendo Switch’s eShop to buy something or search for a specific game, you’ve likely noticed that the digital store is filled with a lot of garbage that was likely made quickly and is only there to cash in on a trend or holiday.
Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s (chuckwnelson.com)
You know when you go on a picnic, sometimes there's a fly that decides to join you.
LLMs are everything that it wrong in computing (crys.site)
For decades corporations have been doing anything in their power to make computers worse.
Something is wrong on the Internet (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
I just read two long diatribes on the Internet about what’s wrong with . . . well pretty much everything.
Spotify's Plot Against Musicians (harpers.org)
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The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed (honest-broker.com)
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.
Web3 Is Going Just Great (web3isgoinggreat.com)