count me among the haters. i've been a hater since i first encountered this conflation of many different well-defined concepts into one ill-defined one

If someone were to make an app that gives you just your feed on Instagram and don't include ads or sponsored content, that seems like it was easy enough to make. The OG app as it was called. It got 10k downloads before it was removed from the app store (basically the only way to install things unless you know your stuff and can/want to tinker with your phone a bit). And that's why you can't use other ink on your printers and ink is more expensive than gold.

Same can be said about alternatives to youtube like Newpipe. You have to install your apk from outside the appstore and every so often youtube has made changes that make it incompatible. Or the months long race when youtube was fighting against all adblockers, or the more abusive things they are trying to do, like more ads, longer ads, unskippable ads, more midroll ads, surveys, stop your videos if you are using an adblocker, prompting you to uninstall rather than stop it on their page...

And with manifest v3, a chromium upgrade which is rolling out, ad-blockers will be a lot worse on all browsers (chrome, opera, vivaldi, brave, microsoft edge) except firefox and safari (and some other less known ones, librewolf, tor browser).

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.