jrm4

I quite literally cannot remember anything I've ever read as simple and correct, on the topic of UX/UI as this.

I tend to deride UX/UI as almost a joke because it nearly never understands that fashion and science are different things.

This one gets it.

Big picture, it kind of blew my mind a few years ago when I realized this: If one concern is the surveillance panopticon thing, it's mitigated by the fact that online advertising itself is a business "fraught" with the fact that there is just as much of an incentive for the seller of ads to be loose with the truth and to use those sorts of tactics as it is for anyone else.

Yup. See also why many care more about dogs and horses than pigs and cows, etc.

Ha, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most uncanniest valley thing I think I've ever played with; I'm from Tallahassee and it's weird to fly around a very high-fidelity, realistic, inaccurate version of a city I've lived in my entire life.

Yeah, the more I let this roll in my head, it just reaffirms how we need to be vigilant about trying not using "human" terms around these things. Both "cheating" and "hallucination" fit this.

It's like trying to build, I don't know, a safe gasoline canister, and you test it, and it explodes and you call it "cheating."

Step one is understanding that you're not "communicating," which implies "reliable understanding."

"Communication" is not what they do, because they are not people.

You're sprinkling words about hacking into a thing that's programmed to output hacking actions, that will never be accountable for those things. It can't care.

Adjust yourselves accordingly.

I think this is a great argument against their "intelligence," and explaining why this happens is a really good way to push against the anthropormophization.

They don't "know" things, and it's even fair to say "they don't know how to follow instructions," not in a way that humans do.

Spicy auto-complete. If they're working in the realm of "how to break into stuff," they're going to see ALL THE WORDS about breaking into those things and use those words.

Not "truth" or "instructions." That's for deterministic things like real code.

Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students."

And it's kind of like that, but overwhelmingly what I'm really doing is "I find technology to be endlessly fascinating and exciting and important, and here is both how and why, let me see if I can transfer this excitement to you."

If that's there, the learning just happens, that's the easy part.

Blah blah blah.

Here's my theory.

There is no such thing as "general intelligence." Only "skills."

Correct. I appreciate the theoretical technology here, but I believe a great deal of harm is done by the fact that people are not likely to understand exactly what this means.

Which is to say, I believe that google is strongly implying the falsehood of "no one at Google can read your stuff."

Strongly believing it should only be two is symptomatic of the worst ideas in UX/UI. Pretty much one of those tiny steps toward "Idiocracy."

Do not hide what the machine is doing from the user in this way, this is how so many of the bad things happen.

I cannot stress enough how good of an instinct I think this is; many of my long term nerd decisions over the last 20 years or so have "paid off" in ways that I literally don't know how to put a money value on. Not priceless, but freeing me from so many headaches.

Offhand, these include "preferring text and my own machines for storing information that is useful to me" over "clouds" and e.g. Word docs. Also, having my own domain and email (which I pay for).

I'm thinking of, e.g. the guy that blogged for years and years and then Google just yoinked it and it was gone. Younger me was more probably more obnoxious about it, like, serves you right -- a thing I would NEVER say now -- but, still, people like me really were right all along about this sort of thing, and I daresay it would be good if everyone followed us.

Right, but to a complete casual like me, what you're saying and what the op is posting as a new thing, seem really similar.

I point my phone at a thing and click. One or more lenses take picture(s), software magic happens to the pictures and they look good.

I kind of mean if you're in "spaces where people appear to be fancy" or similar? Like physically go in. Though I think talk works too, actually.

This is absolutely it, and it's something I try to impart to college students. What programming language you learn, or what you put on your resume, or even how you dress and speak at e.g. job fairs all pale in comparison to. "Who do you know, who is in your 'network?'"

And note, this can be done without being sleazy. Try to be interested in other people, try to make random friends. That will "pay off" -- both in richness of life and in just money -- more than just about anything.

(One of my personal corollaries here is "go until they stop you." This works for nightclubs, conferences, etc. etc. And even if you are stopped, hit them with a HUGE mea culpa, and back away. Which will be rarer than you expect.)

(and one more. The other thing I do in every class: Each and every one of you knows something about something WAY MORE AND BETTER than literally everyone else in this room. No promises, but that might be your good avenue.)

It's so easy to make fun of the cringe on LinkedIn, that, well, itself is kind of cringe.

Here's what I've realized is interesting about LinkedIn, though. Yes, you're going to get heavily filtered and perhaps self aggrandizing takes.

But, but, but. Please note how easy it would be to get yourself fired from something you posted there.

For what it's worth, what you find on LinkedIn is something that someone is so confident in saying out loud, they're literally willing to possibly lose their livelihood over it. That's a very useful filter.

Hey folks, a bit of a hijack; but I've taken to using the Kobold gui, which I'm liking much more than Ollama -- but are there any major benefits to going straight up llama.cpp? Yes, this is somewhat of a question about laziness.

As an Android guy and not an iPhone, or phone pic guy...

What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.

Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?

Wait.

Are you all seriously arguing/considering that the barrier is something like "innovation" or "UX" or "hard work at improving the OS?"

Like seriously?

Come on. By now we should know what actually happens. The entrenched carriers will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. That's the real threat. It will look like the above, but like e.g. Google lying about why it got rid of Google Reader, the real story will be "monopolies gonna monopolize."

I strongly predict this article is mostly pointless very soon.

Much as people may not want to like it, "software" as a product to buy and sell, even as a subscription, is probably going away, and will make about as much sense as "math" as a product.

We were already headed in this direction, but AI's going to rapidly accelerate this.

Relatedly, there needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between types of LLM usage. Nothing more boring -- and often not even favorable or useful to a semi-hobbyist -- than just one-shotting something with Claude;

Vs. what I do. I've always done tons of little quirky automation type things with bash -- that do actually strongly become a part of my life.

Today? Yes, that -- but more and faster. I'm actually typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.

Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.

The irrational exuberance of these guys. It's interesting to see what happened, somebody somewhere got the very very bad idea (if the goal is to make money) of "we will build, like the BEST terminal."

Which, given open-source, is just going to be a dead-end, even before AI. Because software likes to be modifiable, and this sort of thing is literally at the center of people who like to modify software.

But, hey, if something good comes of it, fantastic. I mostly the think of Docker, an unqualified success in software and probably a huge failure in business.

And the latter actually makes this a double-good; a "successful" docker would have somehow monopolized some very important part of the process, and docker is too good to be gatekept like that.

Oh, I have all the thoughts about this.

I've been experimenting with this for well before Obsidian existed by using what is probably the best proto-Obsidian -- https://zim-wiki.org

And my gut is, while they can be very useful and it can be rewarding to get a good workflow for yourself, we will not see some sort of revolutionary improvement across humanity strongly attributable to these things, and I think I have a solid why we won't even if it seems like we should.

Roughly, they're attractive looking to our brains because they work just like them, nets and nodes and connections and such -- but ultimately, our brains are actually much better at that exact type of work. These tools can help, but they pale in comparison to human brains.

Yup. My point exactly. That's an unfortunately useful distinction that is fact these days.

I don't think NAS v. Server or whatever this whole thread is about is -- or more importantly, should be.

(In other words, the concrete position should be e.g. -- soldering RAM is just BAD actually. It's dumb and terrible and they just shouldn't do it ever.)

Belief in the Singularity and belief in God strike me as extremely similar.

Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.

For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.

So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."

I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?

Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."

That would be because "piracy rates" are not, in fact, much lower.

I can easily accept that arguments like "an Iphone is just a computer" are often overly reductionist.

But people justifying much of this segmentation?

Come ON, any NAS is just a server. What are people DOING here?

They're not at all "completely different issues."

Both are well within the category of

"If you buy a device to do a thing, then the device does something else that is not readily apparent to the user that user would find objectionable if they had clearer knowledge."

This is immoral and harmful regardless of precise vector/action.

Sure. And you'll quite literally never be able to get any meaningful reduction in this practice unless you attack it at the level of big, publically known companies; the warnings about these local dinky things I suppose are not harmful and help individuals a bit -- but I'm concerned they give the entirely false impression that the extremely similar stuff coming from the big boys is definitely a-ok.