I think they crave shared experience, the social activity of watching together, of picking something that everyone wants to watch.
I miss it too, except I never wanted to watch what they wanted to watch. I couldn’t do it either.
Now I just miss them.
Wikipedia has citations. Check out the links at the bottom as well as inline citations.
Cognitive Surrender. I can feel it happening every time I use this employer-mandated Cursor crap. I’m fighting it as hard as I can. Every AI slop pull request I have to review makes me die a little more inside.
(Edit: I’m glad this was so well received, but people are hating on my “assembler isn’t as difficult as people think” post below. Oh well.)
First, I love this analogy. At the end of the day someone is still analyzing and decomposing problems, and whether you use AI primarily to search and summarize, to recommend, or to write some goofy starter unit tests, it should still be the human writing the code.
… and now I can’t unsee this rule of three crap. Ever since I heard about an author getting busted for using AI, and all the talk about how AI generates in “rule of three”, I keep looking at my own writing and saying “wait, I do this too. People are going to think my posts are by an AI.” Every part of this post was written by a human software developer on a cell phone while I should be getting ready for work instead.
Also I feel like pointing out: assembler is the human-accessible version, where you break code into files and procedures, give things useful names, you have a symbol table that gives you the addresses where your names ended up. You can insert things and edit things and all the addresses shift around to accommodate your changes automatically. You add comments, even block comments. You “inline” methods with assembler macros.
I would say assembler is more accessible than people think, and complex programs don’t require as much of the “hold everything in your brain at once” horsepower as people think.
99%? We can get these numbers lower :-)
Like the American Squid Game reality show? It uses squibs and has contestants pretending to die in a lamp-shaded way (gets caught, remote controlled squib goes off, looks down disappointed, after a short reaction time and thinking delay they lay down in a safe way - or jump-fall like a stunt person). Maybe they have a bigger special effects budget and don’t interview the “dead” people after?
Posts like this try to twist compassion into hate.
Less hate - people who were convinced to believe in something wrong deserve outreach and compassion, not hate. They’re wrong but they didn’t decide to be monsters.