Adraghast

Hope this helps!

During research did you come across any mass-market applications of this sort of concierge service? It sounds very niche/upscale. I can’t think of any purchase I’ve made where I could have even found someone to hold my hand through it that wasn’t the person making the sale. The closest analogue I can think of is a travel agency.

I can help with that: not seriously at all. Calling someone a nerd has been a thing for the better part of a century. How long has TikTok been around?

I’m not qualified to know if your post is better or worse than Netflix’s documentary, Bill, but this is an egregious example of a pot calling a kettle black.

The implicit assumption here seems to be that Mozilla needs to exist and if Firefox can’t sustain that existence they need to pivot to something that will. Why? So Google can keep using them as a fig leaf for their browser monopoly? So Mitchell Baker can keep collecting $3 million per year? Because the blind squirrel might find a nut someday?

Maybe there’s a point where the remaining employees should just pack it up.

I can think of few worlds more dystopian than one where there’s a causal, quantifiable relationship between wealth and biological superiority.

This is why I think that taking steps to keep kids off social media is delaying the inevitable. Just as there’s no safe age to start smoking, there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists. So either we accept the negative aspects of these platforms’ existence, or we remediate them.

Could the internet exist in a way that makes the RIAA/MPAA/etc happy without DMCA? Maybe not. But there’s no reason to assume their happiness is a requirement, or even desirable.

If my child were to say that to Siri though, I’d be concerned because, as you said, it could be highlighting something about the way they interact with the world. But I would still want it to respond to the command and leave the problem of my child’s bad manners to me. Unless there’s a major shift in our understanding of sentience, I consider teaching the delineation between humans, who are never unfeeling tools, and technology, which is always an unfeeling tool, equally as important as teaching mindfulness of one’s impact in the world. In fact, I don’t think you can actually understand the latter without understanding the former.

Beyond that, I fundamentally don’t think people should be trained to be “nice” to technology. I don’t have to politely ask a hammer to pound in a nail and - the fact we’re talking about NLP notwithstanding — I shouldn’t have to politely ask Bing to provide me the results I’m looking for.

You’re the first person I’ve heard with anything positive to say about their podcast UI, so I’m really curious what those four are.

I've retained employment for nearly two decades, and have retained the "privilege" of working remotely for nearly half of that. I'm not concerned.