by realityfactchex | 2026-03-05 04:20:06+00:00
I'll give it a shot for ya. Parent, GP, GGP, GGGP, OP, or anyone else can feel feel to correct mistakes, please.

Original Post (OP): A post linking to https://www.fubardaily.com/ which is "Curated slop to enjoy with your morning coffee. Updated daily." Apparently a sort of "Drudge Report" or "Dashboard of news/posts".

--> OP MEANING DECODED: There's a big amount of "crappy stories" that a) purport to show "how crappy/dismal things are", probably b) with a healthy amount of "fake stories, or performative artifice, etc."

Great Great Grandparent (GGGP) post said, "front page has racial slurs, a link to goatse, and something crass about trans women. fantastic work /s"

--> GGGP MEANING DECODED: Even the "slop" the OP indexes daily has old-school shennanigans that perennially (every year for decades or forever) are sort of "shock value" or "jarring" things, and in a sense this is refreshing, since those kinds of concerns/topics are worth caring about and relatable or important. (But the GP admits they were being sarcastic. So, really they are saying, the OP's link is a pointless page and a waste to look at.)

Great Grandparent (GGP) post said, "This is almost hopeful in that it softens my lamentation that we're losing a whole generation of engineering labor to AI. It makes me realize that much of it was going to be wasted regardless."

--> GGP MEANING DECODED: The GGP points out that sometimes they are saddened that AI "takes the engineering out of engineering". For example, instead of designing and specifying out and making a thing, an engineer can, now, legitimately, sit down and type "Make a high level design for _____. Ok, now spec it out. Ok, now make it.". The GP sees LLMs and agents as "taking the engineering out of engineering" since much its rote aspects can be externalized. The GP sees this as a concern, because they imagine that an ENTIRE GENERATION of engineers may learn to "ask a machine to do things for them" that once required knowledge of those things. (Note 1: you can trace this back to "learn C", then back to "learn assembly", then to "learn vacuum tubes", etc.; the lamentation of losing "necessary awareness of how systems work on a fundamental level" is not new. Note 2: it is not unique to software engineering, since as a ____ engineer you may now "draw a thing" but "someone in X country/company will actually make it for you" (outsourcing, again, externalizing "actual" engineering/production). In any case, even if "some people" still know how things work, and design and make those systems, the LABOR MARKET in which people "are paid to do things" could nearly evaporate, and this raises very real concerns or worries of the existential type (very much of the paying for food and shelter in the near future type, or the having a prosperous family ever type). Finally, the GP comes around to heir point that THE THINGS WE PAY PEOPLE TO ENGINEER ARE STUPID THINGS BY AND LARGE ANYWAY, SO IT IS OK TO WIPE OUT THIS LABOR, IT'S A WASTE, WHO CARES IF IT EVAPORATES. While this may sound like nihilism, there is an unwritten portion, which could say, AND MAYBE AT LEAST THIS PASSING OF EVENTS/EVOLUTION IN TECHNOLOGY WILL CONTINUE TO FORCE US TO THINK ABOUT WHAT IT IS THAT IS VALUABLE, AND WHAT TO BUILD AND HOW TO MAKE ACTUAL, FUNCTIONAL, SYSTEMS, AND PUSH US FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET WHERE WE WANT TO BE.

Grandparent (GP) says, "This is 100% true. It's fucking brutal and depressing. But genie is out of the bottle now. Ill was born 1985. It's over."

--> GRANDPARENT MEANING DECODED: Oh yeah, GGP is correct and nails it. And this realization is tough to process and handle. There's no going back, I know it because I have seen some things evolve in my half-life. The way the world once was (what felt like plentiful work of at least some modicum of utility and meaningfulness with truly pleasant human interactions and products and services rendered) is going the way of the dodo (ain't want it used to be and ain't coming back).

Parent says,

--> PARENT MEANING DECODED: I also concur with GGP. Furthermore, many people are too young to know how good it once was, what we had, saw, and experienced, what embodied and encompassed that all. And furthermore, young people process media in a different way than us for the most part and do so with less context, and mostly may never gain have access to knowing what's going on right now and has been or is still in a process of being being lost. And there is an entirely different set of people, who are of our generation, but are totally disconnected from either the white-collar working world, or from the semi-technical fields, and they too have nothing like a grasp on what is occurring and seems destined to continue down an inevitable path of removing meaning from labor, as well as removing the opportunity for much meaningful labor of the types we have known in the past or currently. It is possible to intellectualize and describe painstakingly some or all aspects of these concerns, but most such expressions will be unprocessed by any meaningful proportion of people, for they lack the attention span, or interest, or context for understanding either these facts or their importance to some people.

Note: Cogntive biases appearing heavily above include "declinism", "in those good old days", "rosy retrospect", "conservatism", etc.

NOTE: These are NOT my views, I am just trying to "translate" the chain for the post immediately above.