wwweston

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301.
by wwweston 2y ago
Lately I've been realizing that as much as I value YouTube, much of the content is distorted by various incentives favoring length and frequency and a tech culture which overfocuses on elaborating steps as an equivalent to an explanati
302.
by wwweston 2y ago
The information coursing through the world around us already exceeds our ability to grasp it by high orders of magnitude. Three channels of television over 8 hours was already more than anyone had time to take in. AI might be able to crea
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by wwweston 2y ago
It's not crazy to have a personal in-office preference! I'm very much team WFH but I recognize some people have temperament or home environment that will make WFH difficult. And also that there are sometimes specific types of work
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by wwweston 2y ago
AI can offload the burden of producing more of something it’s seen a lot of. Including miasma. AI is much less likely to help you engineer your way out of miasma. When you automate something, you get more of it. Except attention, you get le
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by wwweston 2y ago
They were called Fireworks and Freehand. Sadly, they didn't survive Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.
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by wwweston 2y ago
Originally it was a worthwhile term to examine distinctions between virtue communications that might be more matters of social negotiation and virtue communications that might be reflections of personal value investment. Then in certain pol
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by wwweston 2y ago
I came in to this thread to ask if anyone had done this, given an intuition that it seems like a fairly natural path to bootstrapping lisp on metal. Didn't even have to ask!
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by wwweston 2y ago
When the jobs side of SO was active, it effectively did this. Strong answers and scoring were compensated with prospective employer attention. For a few years, this was actually where the majority of my new job leads came from. It was a pre
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by wwweston 2y ago
I get useful info from SO all the time, so often that these days it’s rare I have to ask a question. When I do, the issue seems to be it’s likely niche enough that an answer could take days or weeks, which is too bad, but fair enough. It’s
310.
by wwweston 2y ago
The 32 bit support nuking was in fact the source of my macOS concerns too, and why I was looking over the fence to see if Windows offered me some shelter from the tech treadmill. Current plan is to see if I can run 10.14 in a VM for 32 bit
311.
by wwweston 2y ago
The funny thing is that I'd been looking at switching to Windows from MacOS in the last 5 years -- main thing is Microsoft's tradition of backwards compatibility, which respects user investment in software, something that much of
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by wwweston 2y ago
Turns out it can also be useful during a personal apocalypse: having recently lost about 35lbs from emergency chest-cracking surgery, ended up pretty glad I wasn't at my leanest going into it (sadly, more of the weight lost was probabl
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by wwweston 2y ago
Definitely an important factor. Industrial scale can wipe out diversity and with it subtlety, which in cultural terms means impoverishing artistic vocabulary and range.
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by wwweston 2y ago
Upvoted for being one of the best comments in the discussion I've read so far -- I'm sure there's something relevant going on that's similar enough to a transition from some sort of ideal to pathos. But the part about no
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by wwweston 2y ago
Culd be my KJV upbringing talking, but personally I think there's an informative quality to calling it "vanity" over smoke. And there's more reasons not to simply compare the modern challenges of image and media with the
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by wwweston 2y ago
People have uses for conclusions that sometimes don't have anything to do with their validity. So while "if it's any good, people will use it" is true and quality contributions will be useful, the converse is not true:
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by wwweston 2y ago
The real question is why they'd have to be aware. It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant
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by wwweston 2y ago
A bit like breaking a door is "the same ballpark" as unlocking it with a key. Or paying with legit currency instead of counterfeit. Sometimes all you want is the effect, other times it's important that you're accurately
319.
by wwweston 2y ago
I appreciate his pointer to precedent, but the truth is that while precedent is a start, we're going to need to do work with principles beyond precedent. When tech introduces unprecedented capabilities, we will either figure out how to
320.
by wwweston 2y ago
Not sure I see a problem with that, really. Emergency response contributions are about as compelling a reason for social obligations as is possible, not everyone will benefit from them but anyone could need them. And since property exis
321.
by wwweston 2y ago
The adult educator figures in 1958's _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_ had a pretty similar conclusion regarding automation as a demonstration of domain knowledge. The interesting thing is that this view is pretty rare when it come
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by wwweston 2y ago
Our industry doesn't always make Raymond Carver title references, but when it does, what we talk about when we talk about Raymond Carver title references usually is an oblique way of bringing up the thin and ultimately porous line betw
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by wwweston 2y ago
> > Our industry argues about code style (: > Our industry does not argue about code style. QED
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by wwweston 2y ago
> if the writer has been using UNIX shells for that long, why are they using Windows at all? Desktop applications would probably be the usual reason. It's all well and good if your application needs are covered by open source, but t
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by wwweston 2y ago
> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse. For me it's slightly more complicated than that. I would probably still be using my 2016 iPhone SE with its headphone jack and size if (a) it
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by wwweston 2y ago
As far as I can tell, AI is one of several features that have actively made search worse. There are a handful of novel things it does well enough, but I'd rather engage those in their own LLM sandbox than have the facilities formerly
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by wwweston 2y ago
Are there good places to read more about this?
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by wwweston 2y ago
The “don’t make me think” mantra got noticed by too many product stakeholders who made it their life motto, and so didn’t notice when it metastatized into “don’t let me think.”
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by wwweston 2y ago
It's worth pointing out the main reason why people are invested in robots, AI, or corporations is that you can own them as capital either for direct production purposes or secondhand economic benefits, often replacing human labor, wh
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by wwweston 2y ago
Fortunately, since we already treat artificial entities like corporations and their interests as if they’re legally people even if it means that humans suffer, we should have no problems ushering in the cyberpocalypse in which we pretend th

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