Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.

And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.

I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.