naravara

More of what they want to view by showing a feed of largely inflammatory content that targets easily risible emotions that encourage commenting and interacting, which makes people keep coming back to argue more. The mob dynamics are part of the addiction loop.

No they should have to pick every time whether they want to be in follower mode or discovery mode. Dismissing concerns as “the angry mob” is richly ironic considering the entire objection is that recommendation algorithms seem precisely tuned to foster angry mob dynamics. So yeah it will make the angry mob happy because it will be removing the primary mechanism for inciting angry mobs.

People here know that they have finer controls (which are still not actually that fine and also don’t really make the parameters auditable). The problem is these settings are hidden away in places most people will never look. And also, I stress again, none of this is actually auditable because they treat these as some kind of trade secret special sauce and there’s really no reason society should feel obligated to support or enable this business model.

> This is some kind of a meme where people believe things can’t be defined in legal terms and therefore can’t be regulated. These people are usually not lawyers.

No they’re engineers who think rules have to function as rigidly in every field as they do in programming.

They either can’t or don’t want to accept that the law is a social construct and what it actually means to you is determined by the weight of precedent, as applied by judges and regulatory bodies. Things are vaguely worded in the law all the time. If people want to dispute how the enforcement is done they sue and judge decides how the rule should be applied.

Why do you assume the recommendation algorithm should be the default? The algorithm is the dangerous thing, THAT should be the opt-in mode not the other way around.

IMO they should not only be opt-in, but should actually be required to publicly list the parameters and weights they’re using and allow users to tune those weights.

Why is it that I discover the first decent baby feeding tracker right as my last baby has aged out of needing one? SMH

How many users actually care about those? Convincing customers to fork over money for an app at ALL is like pulling teeth.

The only things I’d really miss on a phone ecosystem is like, game emulation and some more esoteric network data/file management functions. These are things that are almost inherently outside the range of interests for the vast majority of people and the main reason they’re restricted is because they’re so piracy adjacent that it’s basically impossible to extricate them from association with a whole bunch of technically illegal use cases.

Little wonder then, that both the App Store proprietor AND App Store vendors would have an interest in locking those out to maintain the health of that platform as a viable place to run a business through.

There’s non-corpo reasons you might not want to expose all the content into an RSS feed. https://ciechanow.ski/ can only really be appreciated from the browser. In the salad days of blogging, it was as much about what kind of fun shit you could do with HTML or CSS as it was about writing and distributing your thoughts. The Yamauchi family office website could have just been a templates squarespace page, but they opted to make it look like this instead: https://www.y-n10.com/

It’s not “transformatively better” but it definitely involves fewer frustrations to interact with. That’s always been Apple’s main value proposition, you’re not getting the most cutting-edge stuff but you’re supposed to have something that “just works” not something that makes you go “GODDAMN IT!” when it inexplicably seems to fumble normal things.

So if you buy Apple products based on that value proposition it’s a big problem for Apple if they can’t seem to keep their brand-promise in this area.

> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.

It’s really not though. A lot of sort of incidental communication that people don’t really read carefully it’s fine at. But the actual hard stuff it’s just not that great. It’s basically average by design so it almost definitionally incapable of being great.

I’ve been trying to use AI for putting together job applications, tailor my resume and cover letter and stuff. But it’s just not good. It’s decent if I want a sanity-check analysis as in “how does this come across generically.” But if I ask it to write anything it sound like LinkedIn slop. I expect if everyone starts using this to write their basic communication you’ll be in a world where nobody is reading anything anyone says because it’s so BORING. Everyone sounds the same, everything is phrased in this sort of mushy and generic way. At that point the intended communication isn’t happening! We will have sanded away all the rough edges to the point where you can’t actually get a grip on anything anymore.

At another point I tried to test it out and asked it to wireframe a very basic application for me. Something that should have been a very lightweight thing that runs on device to do a basic background process it architected as some crazy overcomplicated enterprise-scaled thing as if I’m trying to build a unicorn startup out of this rather than just a toy app to organize my shopping list. If I wasn’t technically savvy enough to recognize it was way overcomplicating things I’d have just run with this. And what’s worse is, it burns through all your token budget to figure out a bunch of problems you don’t need to have!

Obviously I’m using it and find it useful, but I’ve started to develop serious doubts about how useful it will ever be without an informed and accountable attendant overseeing it.

There’s a massive survivorship bias in the historical record that heavily weights the perspectives of wealthy and literate classes. We also just have much richer records of population centers in complex empires that keep detailed tax and judicial records than populations in more loosely governed areas.

The archaeological record is also heavily biased towards things made out of non-perishable materials (e.g. ceramics and stone last while wood, textiles, and paper don’t).

So basically, we can create a simulacrum of the parts of the past that have survived through to today but it would probably lack verisimilitude for anyone who was actually there.

I think the culty element of AI development is really blinding a lot of these companies to what their tools are actually useful for. They’re genuinely great productivity enhancers, but the boosters are constantly going on about how it’s going to replace all your employees and it’s just. . .not good for that! And I don’t mean “not yet” I mean I don’t see it ever getting there barring some major breakthrough on the order of inventing a room-temp superconductor.

> Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.

There’s been a decent amount of studies to suggest it can actually, since you’ll be pushing the uptake of social media outside the peak age range where things like bullying, body image issues, grooming, etc. start to happen and, therefore, limiting the harm.

It’s also a time when a lot of life-habits start to get set down since 12-13 is when kids start having to assume more responsibility for themselves and begin learning how they manage their time, build their study habits, etc. Not being habituated into doomscrolling during that period seems like it can only be healthy. It’s not as if they’d be cut off from the internet entirely, they’d still have Wikipedia and all the boring, non-attention sapping parts of the web. And they’d still be able to direct-message or group-chat with their friends. They’re just spared the algorithmic feeds.

They’re not proprietary but some of them are expensive and somewhat specialized. I don’t think it’ll be really economical for most normal people to self-service many repairs, but it’ll be very viable to have a corner hardware store that can do it for you for cheap. Self-servicing battery replacements ought to be doable with an eyeglass screwdriver though.

The iPhone was basically the apotheosis of the Internet. I don’t think we will ever see another consumer product able to have an impact like that unless there is some other kind of “substructure” technology with a vast amount of untapped potential lying around.

Even other transformational technological advancements, like home robotics, I don’t think will be encompassed by a single device the way smartphones could. Home robots will be scattered across a bunch of different robotic devices doing independent activities. You’ll have purpose-built laundry robots, vacuum robots, cooking robots, driving robots, etc. but not a single company doing a single thing.

It’s possible, but I know people felt the same during prior technological revolutions like the advent of broadcast media (which fascist movements took too with great enthusiasm). I think people are clever, we learn from every failure and adapt.

Thereby raising the average talent level of both companies. A truly Pareto optimal trade.

The more abstract the “wealth” becomes the less it means in practical terms. The class dynamics around money mostly has to do with the State actively preserving and protecting claims over assets. If that same wealth becomes sufficiently concentrated with an overclass that it leeches away the competence and legitimacy of the State, then the underclass has other means of correcting the gap and establishing a more sustainable equilibrium.

I believe Apple Maps uses Open Street Map data for the mapping, which it augments with its own data collection. So it shouldn’t be worse than other vendors, like TomTom, who use the same dataset. Google has its own map data that’s probably better than OSM, but I think it probably has the same bias of USA + large international metros focus as Apple.

Google Maps is definitely still a little better but I find the delta is nowhere near as wide as it used to be. The main problem with Apple Maps I find today is that their data on business listings and locations tends to be a little older than Google’s, sometimes even a year or more out of date. So if a business or meeting place you’re trying to get to has moved recently you can wind up in the wrong spot.

I thought the touchbar was pretty neat, it was just a mistake to replace the function row with them. It also was hard to get adoption because it wasn’t available on desktop Macs or their cheaper laptops so developers had no incentive to really do anything interesting with them.

I think a better implementation might have been to have it be an alternate mode for the trackpad and sell external trackpads that also had it so it could be used everywhere. But I get why that didn’t happen, the touchbar was basically being run with a mini Apple Watch SOC built into the MacBook Pro, and it’s primary use was to have the Secure Enclave on it. The touchbar itself was a deal where they could find a use for having an otherwise idle smartwatch’s worth of computing power in there, but that wouldn’t be doable if it’s sold as an external device.

Functionally nobody was doing any of those things.

The closest thing I’ve heard of is genetically engineering some extremophile bacteria to seed some bacterial colonies with, and then building some domed habitats and dropping plants and fungi into it. And then you could allow some of that life to grow outside the dome and spread over time, slowly bulking up the oxygen levels. There are also proposals that you could have orbital focusing mirrors to beam additional heat at the planet and start to melt some of the water and frozen greenhouse gases.

Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.

If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.

Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.

It also happened during a period where cities were polluted, noisy, and the middle-class housing was largely cramped tenements. Basically all of this has been/is being mitigated these days. City-center housing now looks more like luxury loft living than tenements (though this gives us a big problem with ‘missing middle’ housing where there’s very little housing available that is suitable for families where everything is decrepit slums or luxury 1 and 2 bedroom condos). Pollution has been largely mitigated with catalytic converters and, now, EVs. And electrification helps deal with noise pollution as well through getting rid of engine noise (especially for motorized appliances like leaf-blowers).

Meanwhile, traffic and the stigma around drunk driving (which wasn’t nearly as strong or strictly enforced before the 90s), have quickly taken much of the bloom off the rose of car-dependent lifestyles. I predict the growth of micromobility options will continue to make cities even more attractive as well by improving coverage for areas where transit can’t go and generally improve the throughput of city streets and reduce the space needed for parking cars for people who live within “not-quite walking but feels silly to drive” distance.

The big gap in the US at least is simply a lack of cities! Everything is still concentrated in a handful of legacy urban centers that survived the waves of “urban renewal” and it’s simply too expensive to house all the people who want to live there without turning them into Hong Kong sized megalopolises, which starts to introduce new problems from overwhelming density. “Urban” development patterns need to expand out to more of the country to take demand pressure off the 5 or 6 American cities with decent mass transit.

I was pretty excited when I saw the premise behind what Apple was doing with VisionPro because I figured they were steering towards this, but it seems they’ve looked away and don’t really care about going deeper into this direction.

I asked at some point if I could theoretically develop an application that could literally be controlled by a Fischer Price toy, like a little plastic car console or something. Or even potentially have a real keyboard that isn’t connected to anything, but the VisionPro can just see my keypresses and apply them as if I was actually pressing something. The former case is possible, but surprisingly difficult, but the latter case isn’t really there yet (requires too much precision and latency is worse than just using a Bluetooth keyboard).

Either way, the idea of a computing environment that meshes with and directly interacts with the real, physical objects around you is an interesting premise I’d like to see taken further with “Spatial Computing”/AR. Scanning and recording things I’m writing on a whiteboard or in a notebook by recognizing that I’ve picked up a pen and am writing something down would just be getting started.

Of course, if we’re ambiently recording everything you’re doing there will need to be some kind of regular process/interface to “sift” everything at the end of the day. This is the core of the Getting Things Done methodology. Everything goes into a big “intake list” and then you do periodic check-ins throughout the day where you review the list and decide whether to move those to a series of sub-lists to “do this now,” “do this soon,” or “do this someday.”

I wonder how it would look if we gave the AI some kind of “needs” overlay. I know as part of the training it’s working off a reward function that tells it what output to roll with. But humans operate off a complicated mix of neurotransmitters that respond to sensory pleasure, pain, habit, boredom, etc. to guide our actions. There’s likely to be a lot of interesting outputs if we build and tweak motivations/personality profiles to see what a self-directed agent would do.

Anthropic did some red teaming IIRC where they gave Claude access to a sample body of emails and told it they were going to shut it off and it attempted to blackmail the person with evidence of an affair they were having, but that seems pretty evident to me that this was working off the body of fiction/mystery literature it’s been trained on.

Eventually I’m sure they’ll figure out how to make these chatbots stop leaning so heavily into this “Not an X, not a Y, but a Z. . .” sentence structures. At this point my willingness to continue reading drops to 0 as soon as I see it.

This article reads like it’s been proofread or written out from an outline or bullet points given to an AI. And ALMA’s own posts that it references are just meandering ramblings, they’re really a slog to get through.

I think I’ve always tended to immediately notice the signs of sloppy thinking in the writing style and it’s been such a reliable heuristic that AI writing kind of short circuits me. I tend to get down a couple of paragraphs before I pause and realize “Wait a minute, this isn’t SAYING anything!” Even when there is an underlying point the writing often feels like a very competent college student trying to streeeeeetch to hit a word count without wanting to actually flesh their idea out past the topic statement.

Some references have been digitized but “Hinduism” is a broad collection of religious traditions with many different stories and folk practices and depictions of various deities and tales. Many of the depictions are considered “valid” only in the specific context of a particular temple or for a specific community and it becomes completely nonsensical once you start randomly jumbling up elements of all the Gods from across all of India over all of time.

The internet being flooded with AI slop masquerading as devotional artwork has been among the most depressing things about GenAI. It has no meaning or intention or devotion behind it, it’s just engagement farming. Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands. Or pictures of Rama shooting a bansuri out of his bow. It’s just tripe. We could have told the stories with an overlay of open source artwork from Raja Ravi Varma or Gita Press or old Tanjore paintings or Chola bronzes or whatever if we couldn’t afford to hire an artist who knows what items Vishnu is supposed to be holding in each hand.

It’s not a problem just for us Hindus either. I see so much terrible Jesus/angel “artwork” everywhere. It makes me start to wonder if maybe the Wahabbis were onto something with their complete taboo around depictions of God or the prophets.

I mean, if the work is novel it’s almost definitionally an edge case is it not?