LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.
-emacs user
Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that.
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.
