On the contrary, there's absolutely a reasoned, principled position here. Pike isn't a hypocrite for creating a Markov chain bot trained on the contents of an ancient public domain work and the contents of a single usenet group, and still complaining about modern LLMs; there's a huge difference in legality and scale. Modern LLMs use orders of magnitude more resources and are trained on protected material.

Now, I don't think he was writing a persuasive piece about this here, I think he was just venting. But I also feel like he has a reason to vent. I get upset about this stuff too, I just don't get emails implying that I helped bring about the whole situation.

How is this substantively different from the endless spam we all receive from clueless illiterate spammers?

Me too! I'm using Alfred's Adult Piano course book.

Have you started yet? How is it going? Self learning?

Nope, haven't started yet, since I'm out of town and my keyboard is at home. But yeah, I'll be self-learning! I did it with guitar a few years ago and it worked for me (to a point; I never got amazing at guitar).

It seems to be browser.viewport.desktopWidth; I found 500 to be a decent starting point on my phone.

Thanks, it works! (I had to access about:config via chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml)

While you're there flip general.aboutConfig.enabled to true so you won't have to use the silly config.xhtml URL again.

Alternatively, you can download Firefox Nightly instead of regular.

"about:config" just works in Nightly. No fuss.

You can sideload extensions in Nightly, too, after you activate the developer options. I don't think they've added that to regular, as yet? At least not with as much flexibility.

Anyway, I'm gonna try this mobile desktop mode thing and see how it goes. Thank you to everyone!

Installing extensions from file is available on the release build as well, after enabling dev options.

I think the only difference is nightly allows installing unsigned extensions, which I don't personally have a need for (as getting a personal/non-published extension signed is very easy).

That setting unfortunately resets after restarting the browser. But the width setting stays.

What a great thread!

Thank you and previous poster for sharing how to get that working.

I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.

I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.

I find it entertaining and view it more as a writing device

The author obviously adds some exaggeration to get the point across

I don’t think they actually think everyone does this

Yeah, this is seriously WTF. OP please read a book or go stare at clouds. "We" are not anything.