Correct. Technology is inherently political, and it has been for all of human history.

I think you don't want to engage with the political implications of technology and computing. That's fine, but it's not on the permacomputing folks, and it doesn't make the topics irrelevant to sustainable computing.

Agreed, some humans are good writers, and no LLMs are good writers.

People like the above poster who are "just running an experiment" or "trying something for fun" who then wonder why online communities are full of AI now.

gonna start calling this effect The Slop Vanguard

Have you considered that (further) lowering the signal-to-noise ratio will make it much more difficult to find and distinguish a signal?

If every TV channel is static, watching TV is not productive, and the correct thing to do is stop watching TV.

Yes, but I'm hopeful for a survival of the fittest instead of an extinction.

Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.

What do you think happens to the least prolific organisms that lose the survival of the fittest?

To be clear I'm talking metaphorical survival of the fittest that takes the form of prestige/popularity/status/etc. of people and organizations.

In the same way that monasteries preserved ancient greek philosophy during the middle ages, hopefully some groups will maintain our modern culture through these dark ages.

Probably something like "but imagine how much money a few people are making from it!"

So, as long as something only grievously harms a small percentage of people, it's fine. Good to know.

FOIA does not apply outside government entities. Maybe you can get the data from the entity itself, but good luck.

Which is one of many reasons why privatizing government services probably isn't a good idea.

You could also make different laws but that's probably not going to happen. Think about just about any of the important laws that we rely on for a stable and just society in the USA, and consider that most or all of them would be politically unviable if they didn't already exist. Including FOIA itself. Not a good situation.

Do typesetters or compilers write the code for you? Or are you perhaps using a disingenuous analogy?

A compiler writes the ASM code for you, and the typesetter does the layout for you, yes absolutely.

The high level language code is a prompt for the compiler. Consider that there is parsable C code whose behavior is not even defined. There are still bugs in compilers today, where the code produced is not what you intended. And further, modern compilers do lots of work to optimize performance. You usually don’t even look at the resulting code, you just gratefully accept the rewrite for the extra oomph.