maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 18 Posts
  • 612 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 19th, 2023

help-circle












  • It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.

    I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.

    I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.

    In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.

    BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.


  • Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

    The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

    But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

    There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

    Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.






  • Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).

    I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.

    For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.

    I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.


  • Yep. And it’s a point well made.

    To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

    Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.