Flutterby™! : more effective than censorship

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more effective than censorship

2025-04-11 19:18:27.647211+02 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

I'm implementing a video chat feature this morning. I started out with a Medium post on WebRTC basic concepts and creating a simple video call app, but it turns out that that's mostly just a rephrasing and introducing of more NPM packages of Fireship WebRTC Video Chat on Firebase (to be fair, the former has a little more on building your own STUN server rather than using Google's), which itself is a distillation of the Fireship WebRTC Firebase demo code.

I apparently read very very quickly. Whenever I'm helping people with their computers, I have a long moment of "okay, we're looking for the button that says ... on it, so ..." and then a long detailed description of how they can find it as I watch their mouse cursor, when I absorbed the screen and located the action item sub-second. So I get why people are using LLM "summarization", but this comment spoke to me in the context of this morning while I'm digging through Medium/LinkedIn resume padding slop and thinking about how "AI" automates that on an industrial scale.

Ted McCormick ‪@tedmccormick.bsky.social‬

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

[ related topics: Movies Free Speech Artificial Intelligence Video ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: more effective than censorship made: 2025-04-11 13:32:00.638906+02 by: markd

> locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves

Happens even with the coders. Dude in my meetup was having a tough problem (a button with a menu wouldn't update the menu on iOS), and "chat" continually failed. I needed to do something similar, found the same problem, and googled. Found a snack overflow post describing a similar problem, and had the correct code that I could look up the docs to understand, and then implement.

When everything was regurgitated through "chat", finding those serendipitous solutions disappears.

#Comment Re: more effective than censorship made: 2025-04-12 01:40:58.531553+02 by: Dan Lyke

Yep. I was working with Firebase today, and Google offered me Gemini in the sidebar to help, and that was less worthwhile than docs. And lemme tell ya, Firebase docs aren't great to begin with...

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