Honestly from my experience with corporate healthcare the real problem is that every mission critical message is wrapped in ten layers of feelgood bullshit.
I worked at a place where when they introduced a text paging system with priority flags, the actual meanings and expectations of those priority flags was buried in 30 slides of “remember to be nice to your coworkers, ok kiddos?” then there was one SINGLE slide with, “a green fyi flag needs no answer but there is a read receipt, an orange urgent flag requires an answer within 30 minutes, and a red critical flag requires the resident to be on the unit within five minutes.”
When someone asked me three months after taking that course if any of the flags meant anything I had to figure out which module it even was in because the title (as stated) had NOTHING to do with this single piece of important information the 30 slide presentation contained. Then I had to scroll through to almost the end (not the actual end though because that would have made even a little sense) and take a cropped screenshot of the slide to print out and COLOR IN MYSELF WITH HIGHLIGHTERS to make a peice of relevant wall signage to keep by the secretary desk.
Technology is evolving like DNA. 99% of these proteins do nothing except you can’t actually take any of them out because they might do one thing sometimes maybe that will result in the baby not growing a foot or not being able to make insulin. So instead of clarifying things and cutting back we’re just adding more alarms, more forms to fill out, more presentations to watch and more documentation to read and now that we can’t keep up we’re not reducing complexity at all in fact now we’re making robots to help us get confused faster which means things can and “should” get more complicated which means we need more robots and-
I had a coworker ten years ago literally just stroke out at work. I get it, tbh.
Tech bros are the kids that copy-pasted their essays off wikipedia
Starting to think a bunch of them are college dropouts just cause they were lazy
Either lazy, or they’re so cutthroat they’re willing to scheme, buy out or destroy anyone tries to stop them, then proceeds to create something that would cause ordinary people to shell out their money.
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
- Bill Gates
And we see the results.
Lazy can be good, but sometimes you need hard work.
My leading theory is there are many, many, people who are semi literate and don’t realize. They think reading is just kind of uncomfortable and slow, and don’t understand why anyone else would. Maybe they’re reading each word out loud in their head, sounding some of them out. You wouldn’t find a lot of people like that on a text based platform like this.
But for someone like that, an AI summary or video is probably a relief.
I took some dubious online reading speed tests the other day and it said like 350wpm, but the average is like half that.
Personally, I think the solution would be to invest in education, but there’s no quarterly money in public good.
The scary thing is that AI summaries are often inaccurate. I have an open book licensing exam that I am required to write every 5 years. I put one of the questions into a search engine hoping to find a study that would contain relevant information - the search results came up fine, but the answer listed in the AI summary was blatantly wrong.
I read at way above average speeds. I burn through series like The Dark Tower. I still don’t want to read most garbage sent my way.
It’s so easy to have AIs gather stuff for you these days that I read more, not less.
My leading theory is there are many, many, people who are semi literate and don’t realize
Theory
54% of Adults read below a 6th grade level. There is no theory.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
Where I am, the most frequent type of content I encounter more often while on the streets is fucking summaries of TV programs and movies… people who eat this up think is more entertaining than the actual media.
Save time !? Unironically, no thanks.
If there’s one problem with how we work nowadays, it’s that everything is too fast. Everyone would gain a lot if we could just take time and do things well.
We need to be given time to take time on things though. For the folks who are lucky to have one hour of unallocated time per day, any extra time spent on any task can easily cut that unallocated down to nothing and start cutting into things like sleep time.
At the same time though, I’ve never been so short on time that I’ve needed a misinformation bot to sumarize things for me. The above was more just a general statement about people doing things too fast. People often do things fast because they don’t have a choice.
Yes thank you.
I’d accept “as fast as industry can progress” if the industry in question was something addressing climate change, or poverty, or reducing war. Otherwise what’s the rush?
Work slow and fix things.
This is exactly how I work as a software developer. Unfortunately this may make me unemployable in industry… Fortunately, I don’t care, I’m headed for research !
Everyone needs to read Cory Doctorow NOW. ANY BOOK. Should be required reading for all humans.
Whatever he tries to warn is lost on those who chose to ignore and try to put food on the table.
in terms of solving the literacy crisis through book recommendations; surely we can do better than this boring dude.
Why boring? His books are pretty concise.
I just think his books are better as ideas. I don’t think his writing style is engaging. I shouldn’t have commented on your post. I recently DNF’d down and out in the magic kingdom and posted out of reflex.
The irony of needing a summary for a critique about shortening attention spans is kind of perfect 😅
Me and my partner love to send paragraph long messages. When this happens, meta ai is so kind as to give me the option to summarize it for me. As a brain dead AI worshiper, this has saved me a lot of time and enabled me to do what I really love: increase share holder value.
(reference: https://www.messenger.com/help/1252371032471628/?cms_platform=android-app&helpref=platform_switcher)
My partner and I
My partner and I (.)
You forgot the period! Revolting.
Looks like a boob. Here are two of them as they should be:
( . )( . )
Yes? Go on…
Grok why is this lady mad at me?
😡
Horses and humans. For a long time, the oligarchs and wealthy classes in every country bred, fed and maintained their equine populations. They earned a living by providing a service to the wealthy, which was transportation. Horses became specialized in certain things like fighting in a war, pulling carriages, etc… and some more than others were more highly valued and traded as workers to other companies (wealthy families and businesses)… They needed horses to do all this work so they expanded the horse population. By the 1900s, it was massive. The horses themselves were worth so much money because of the labor they provided the wealthy classes. Then the automobile was created and suddenly the wealthy didn’t need the services anymore. It didn’t take long for the world equine population to drop substantially never to recover.
This is what the wealthy want AI to do to you
Well put.
While i dont really like AI, the horses and humans are little different.
Horses were tools. More adept parable would be cars were to horses what petrol engines were to steam engines.
People are not just going to stop procreating because ai takes their job.
Isn’t “I don’t have enough money to raise children” a common saying? I seem to hear it IRL and on lemmy or elsewhere
Horses were tools that were fed and tended to in service of the economy, and would procreate as much as their circumstances of food and care allowed them.
Many humans are seen as tools to be fed and tended to with respect to their service to the economy, and will procreate as much as their circumstances of food and care will allow them.
Horses are living animals, just like people. Do you think horses chose to mostly stop procreating because cars took their job?
And now we mix Horse Meat into our Fast Food Burgers!
Humans need not apply.
Lots of real world examples of course, but sci-fi has covered how lack of access to writing, reading or knowledge is an essential ingredient in dystopian control societies. Bit of brave new world, 1984, and some animal farm thrown in.
The 2010 play Futura by Jordan Harrison is highly recommended though don’t think it’s been produced anywhere in a while.
Fahrenheit 451 is often left out but arguably the most important piece.
But of brave new world, 1984, and some animal farm thrown in.
Funny how you didn’t mention Fahrenheit 451, since that’s literally how the dystopia in the book came to be.
You can just suggest it as an addendum instead of implying that it’s a deliberate omission by starting with “Funny how…”
Wasn’t meant as insinuating a deliberate omission. Put you’re right. The tone was a bit agressive, sorry.
🥇
Learn from this Lemming friends great attitude!!!
I thought the omission was funny too
I have worked at the grocery store, and remember many of the produce codes by heart. I practice them, its a silly fun thing for me to do in my mundane life. I stopped using the self check at my shop because they upgraded to AI involvement. However, they had one lane open the other day and I was in a rush, so I used self check.
The fucking Ai scans fhe produce it sees and gives yoy options to pick from. All pictures. I cannot put the item code in myself anymore, I have to select the photo based on what it thinks is on the register. Im not fucking dumb. this is shit is so dumb. I fucking hate it.
“banana”
puts avocados in the bag
4011 still bananas?
With a 9 prefix for organic!
"Im not fucking dumb. this is shit is so dumb.’
Well…
Typos are not an indicator of a lack of intelligence.
A lack of humor is though.
Agreed.
Had to look that word up. Thought it was a typo. Purposively. I’m going to try and use that in a sentence today irl.
Do not be surprised when someone corrects you to ‘purposefully’.
To be fair, they are very close in meaning.
in most cases language should minimize unneeded complexity imo
having 4 differently spelled words that mean the same shit but with slightly different hyper-specific use cases seems stupid
i bet it is French root
Haha you would love the Japanese language.
One character can have multiple meanings, and different pronunciation. 一 (ichi) vs 一つ (hitotsu) for instance.
And then there are the puns. So many puns.
I love reading about Japanese wordplay in manga when the scanlator is solid but only because I don’t have to converse in it. Still at least it is not tonal.
We’re talking about English here.
It breaks pretty much all of its own rules, and arguably is the most unnecessarily complex widely spoken language.
and something like 80% of those words are fucking French root (complete anger driven ass-pull number)
I believe the actual number is around 25-30%. Blame the Norman invasion.
But French is like 80% Latin roots so you can blame the Romans before that.
Also yeah the crazy number of synonyms is a peculiarity of English because it also has strong influence from Old Germanic, Latin (more directly), Greek, even a bit of Sanskrit.
To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages
English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.
Also arabic and other semitic languages
Latin is at least pronounced just like its written.
The french took those words, threw away everything but the root, added 50% more vowels than necessary and drew a few symbols over certain letters to change the pronunciation.
in most cases language should minimize unneeded complexity imo
Welcome back, Webster.
I still enjoy the use of “ain’t”. It’s a beautiful word.
Sure is!
Y’all ain’t from around 'ere, aren’t ya?
I’m about to blow your fucking mind, then: “purpositive” is a word too as a nonstandard variant of “purposive”, most commonly that I’ve seen used to replace it in “purposive sampling”. “Purpositively” is a word that has some small but real usage and that you could use if you ever stop giving a shit.
“Purpositively” is a word that…you could use if…
Ahahahahaha
Must shoehorn
Yeah I’ve always thought it’s ‘purposely’
It can be, it can also be ‘purposefully’. All three have slightly distinct but overlapping uses. ‘Purposely’ means on purpose, ‘purposefully’ means with purpose, and ‘purposively’ means with a purpose.
Porpoisivly
I’ve had an AI “summary” of a 6 word sentence that was like 20+words. It’s absolutely goddamn insane.
