Yep, it’s that reality distortion field that really makes it special and creepy, not least because their greater wealth allows them to support the distorted sense of reality, while also likely demanding more of it so that they can fit in with their wealthy social class.

I hear you.

(edited because my original reply was uselessly mean)

Wow … nice to see!

Reminds me of a shower thought I had a while ago: why aren’t more churches/temples basically groves in forests? Even in an urban environment, why not cultivate some grand trees as a little forested oasis?

You could still put covers against rain and lights, fires and heaters against the dark and cold. Statues, murals and structures too.

Dunno, maybe I just like trees a lot.

Yes, but there’s certainly a disconnect here between what school entrained us to believe and what “real life” cares about, which is maybe the point here.

Not a new idea, I know, but watching the world upend itself over some tech “progress” highlights this gulf, not to mention how much school scepticism was right, to some extent, all along.

One my most embarrassing personal moments with tech is that I wasn’t immediately revolted when I learned that captcha was being used to farm training data. I just didn’t think it through, and didn’t think I needed to think it through. A hang over from the era of Google in the naughties I suppose.

Still … fool me once …

Yea I’ve heard people who know nothing about computers talk about Claude (Anthropic) like it’s clearly the best brand (though I’m sure they don’t know what they’re talking about) … and copilot like it’s the worst thing to ever happen to them.

Funny to see such a quick branding move (it’s AI people, so what would you expect I guess) and Microsoft potentially miss another tech wave.

Probably not the last time we see this, right?

Realistically, the “Open” in OSS has changed its meaning and shape. Same with the Open in open web.

More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

Funny, I hadn’t really noticed.

Is lemmy dead?

Yea, call me a cynical shit, but I’m happily going around calling the Internet dead now. Arguably inevitable, and certainly not surprising.

A better analogy might be a forest full of large predators in which individuals are small prey trying to survive. Thus, hidden crevices and niches can become havens.

Basically, yea. As sometimes BS is right enough to find a vulnerability, but rarely good enough to patch it, kinda like finding a small leak compared to metal being welded to cover it.

Yea, I fear for the future of open source. There may be some asymmetries built into LLM tech and its uses that simply undercuts the FOSS system as we know it.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Nuclear energy and its problems, has seemed to me a firing analogy for a while.

Theoretically, as an energy technology, there’s plenty to gain.

But radiation and inherently catastrophic danger are fundamentally incompatible with biology and wellbeing, and so humanity mostly rejected the technology.

LLMs likely have some similar incompatibilities, despite whatever promise they may or may not have.

• EDIT -

So the responses to this are funny. For the record, I’m likely as much a pro-nuclear person as much as anyone here (Or used to be I guess). It should be a net-gain technology with solvable problems, and sticking with fossil fuels instead has likely been just dumb.

But I still think the point holds. There’s something about an invisible danger - radiation - that triggers wariness in people, and there’s something reasonable about that. Especially when you factor in the reliability of groups of people to do what’s in the collective interest even when there are high stakes.

And yea, CO2 is invisible too … but look where that has got us! Main difference is that its ill effects are not direct, individualistic, or relatively quick compared to radiation.

Then, compared renewables, you start to get a clearer picture, and analogy too. Maybe, sometimes, the worse technology that is more compatible with human nature is better overall.

For sure!

My only addition to the communal dimension you highlight, in line with my previous comment, is that a communitarian dimension can certainly develop around written text. You can get to know someone by their books and writings, and if you’re game to write your thoughts too, they may know you too. Not to mention letters and other more casual written formats.

Mass media, including the internet generally, even before social media, undercuts this dynamic, I think, through a saturation of both our social and content (a word I chose over “information”) bandwidths. A giant pipe of algorithmically curated content doesn’t leave much room for even noticing the author let alone forming a communal bond. Consumerism over conversation, one could say.

Additionally, moving the causal conversational exchanges online likely disincentivises real life communal engagements around written texts, such as book clubs, fan gatherings etc.

Which is all a hand wavy way of speculating that writing before the internet may have been something different than afterward with respect to how eroded the social dimensions of oral traditions have been. Of course there are trade offs again, especially with reach and connectedness. But once doomscrolling became the norm, I feel like a real categorical shift occurred.

Anyhoo, don’t let me chew your ear off! Very much appreciate the chat!

Yea.

The writing/reading vs oral one is interesting to me. Obviously we’re both on one side of that transition, and so biased by that experience. And I certainly would like to have been exposed to more of a traditional oral approach to knowledge. But like you I think it’s a reasonable choice on balance because it can naturally complement what came before. Writing can extend the reach of what one can gain access to and memorise and then share and engage with orally. While engaging with a text orally, by speaking it out loud or to an audience while you’re completing the writing process can likely aid the reader quality of the written text. If used correctly I suppose.

The point being that maybe there are technologies which necessarily involve more or more categorical de-skilling than others. And maybe that’s a property of technologies that can be assessed and tracked.