danilo

danilo, 5 months ago to random

my thermonuclear take is that the issue here isn’t whether it matters that we call AI “AI”

but that Mastodon’s culture is poorly socialized and people here have a hard time doing constructive conversation

This is frequently lamented as “replyguyism,” but I think that’s imprecise. Something happened along the way to mislead people here that derailing the conversation makes friends

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/

danilo, 4 months ago to random

My absolutely thermonuclear, get-canceled take

is that Apple deserves a cut of third party App Store developer revenues

Reasonable people can disagree on how much, and Apple HAS harmed itself through greed

But distribution infrastructure has value. Creating and maintaining runtimes has value. Building developer tools has value. Calling it “payment processing” totally misses the mark on what they built

There has never been a universe where you got distribution for your product for free.

danilo, 6 months ago to random

When I got to San Francisco in 2010, I really wanted to do it all

Build a startup, create change through technology.

But the more I learned of the culture, the less I wanted to succeed according to its rubric. The turning point for me was Airbnb

Around 2011, Airbnb was REALLY taking off. All the benefits of a software business, none of the drawbacks of a real estate business. The best of all worlds.

Except…

danilo, 4 months ago to random

Part of why tech workers at huge orgs like this need a union:

Being compelled to relocate to a forced birthing state is violent as hell

So much more to collective power than just getting paid

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/14/24037904/apple-san-diego-siri-ai-team-relocating

danilo, 5 months ago to random

My most nuclear policy take is that the IRS knows your childhood socioeconomic status and they should discount your adult tax bracket accordingly.

If we’re not going to tax the rich, at least work on evolving the progressive income tax to meet the age of dynastic wealth.

danilo, 3 months ago to random

If we dedicated 100x more cognitive and computational bandwidth to discussing how great The Matrix was, how successful it was as a motion picture

I still don't think we do it justice.

Like, I love the primacy of the telecom network in the first movie's lore. There's something instinctively magical about the OG telephone system, its arcane complexity, its fundamental malleability through patterns of sound

The first film wove that thread in perfectly.

danilo, 6 months ago to ai

“I don’t like this form of automation because it does not address any of my existing deficits, therefore no one needs it”

okaaaaaaay?

Just a fundamentally unserious chapter in critiquing technology, and a waste of time and organizing energy that could go to building the counter power against the mega wealth #AI is about to concentrate in the hands of seriously bad dudes

danilo, 5 months ago to random

In recent months I’ve noted a certain “fuck you, change my diaper” mentality that crops up again and again with regard to “AI”

What typifies this is a whirlwind of goalpost juggling, a sort of desperate, insatiable righteousness gasping to justify an existing feeling:

fear

The more I see it, the more I suspect a whole subset of technical practitioners are afraid of losing what they built their identities on: being special computer boys

danilo, 2 months ago to random

The effective altruism cult is an inevitable, metastatic outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s infantile libertarian politics.

These guys never got past utilitarianism in their philosophical development, and effective altruism lets them invent a speculative majority their actions can benefit, at the expense of any minority they choose.

That effective altruism would become entangled with the most successful cryptocurrency criminal in the game isn’t an accident:

THEY ARE THE SAME GRIFT

danilo, 2 months ago to random

Nvidia claiming 25x reduction in energy costs compared to H100 for their new hardware, thus validating that energy consumption as a PRIMARY objection to AI is lazy recycling of objections to web3

Whereas crypto nonsense is designed to burn energy pointlessly, the goal of machine learning is “productive” applications, thus there are ongoing incentives for optimizing price performance over time

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/18/24105157/nvidia-blackwell-gpu-b200-ai

danilo, 7 months ago to random

One of the toxic patterns of the software business is “DevRel”

They get a bunch of people together who have valuable cross-functional skills—communication, engineering, education, design, research, diplomacy, in varying combinations—and put them into a silo.

Instead of making the organization more cross-functional, orgs enter into this failure mode, often quite early.

The business is fundamentally socio-technical, but all the sociotechnologists get cut off from planning and decisions.

danilo, 6 months ago to ai

Perhaps I can now, finally, know peace.

What they're calling #AI is inevitable because it's just computers, computing, and computers already exist and are everywhere.

We cannot stop it, unless you have a plan to stop all computing, forever. Meanwhile, AI products are becoming more useful to people all the time.

So, when it comes to critique of AI, we have to up our game if we want a future worth living in.

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

danilo, 3 months ago to random

A thing you’ll see on Mastodon is this kind of gut assumption that wide-open computing and platform strategies are inherently virtuous.

And that competing approaches with more proprietary or corporate-controlled mechanics are inherently evil and poisonous.

Another thing you’ll see on Mastodon is waves and waves of spam, as a wide-open community commons finds its social and infrastructure fabric torn apart by bad actors.

danilo, 26 days ago to random

An ongoing pattern in the AI march:

• the hardware efficiency improves
• the software efficiency improves

So I continue to argue that energy consumption as a PRIMARY criticism of AI is going to be unpersuasive, as incentives drive down the energy costs with time, and all critique of the energy costs is just as applicable to conventional cloud computing, which we have already accepted into our social bargain

(and which underpins every single tech salary)

so instead:

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

danilo, 4 months ago to random

We need to change our social norms. The extent to which extravagant, self-indulgent despair has become normalized is simply bad behavior, and it should be treated as such

Dumping a bucket of hopelessness at strangers’ feet in this way should receive the same social rejection as walking up to someone enjoying lunch and farting in their face.

Who raised you like that?

danilo, 3 months ago to VisionPro

The biggest thing I see folks getting wrong about #VisionPro is to imagine that it's just a great volume for placing two dimensional surfaces.

And that's like imagining television as a way for seeing the people who read your radio plays.

I mean, sure, you can do it, but you're barely using the power of the new medium.

The real opportunity is that Vision Pro is a holographic simulator that allows developer code to reason about the user’s 3D reality.

Integrating that opportunity is the work.

danilo, 4 months ago to VisionPro

So what is it Apple is trying to accomplish with #VisionPro?

What's the underlying experience that only this technology can deliver?

It’s nothing short of science fiction. But the reality will be more challenging to pull off. v1 products are tough.

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/no-hate-no-hype-apples-vision-for-spatial-computing

danilo, 4 months ago to VisionPro

Absolutely wild to see the threads of social antipathy coalescing in the anti-#VisionPro column:

• The seething hatred of Apple, which dates to computing antiquity.

• The malaise and disdain reserved for all things emanating from Silicon Valley, generally.

• An inability to imagine a future, or to imagine that change will be positive in any way.

• An attachment to the status quo of computing at the point where it gave the opinion-holder their greatest sense of power

danilo, 4 months ago to random

My first exposure to the mechanics of neoliberalism came in high school, when I sold consoles, phones, PDAs, cameras, and appliances for a certain blue and yellow retailer.

Managers would patrol the store with a little clipboard with hourly figures on how each department was succeeding, or not, at attaching high margin supplements to customer orders:

Cables, extended warranties, credit cards.

The store was brand new, with no baselines established. So a conspiracy emerged.

danilo, 3 months ago to random

Yeah, this about covers it for me

What I find most alienating about Mastodon/fediverse zealots is that the only strategy is ever braying and gnashing teeth.

“Let’s make an open, interoperable protocol for exchanging information”

And then, someone they don’t like interoperates with the open data and it’s surprised pikachu

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/111925164076409597

danilo, 7 months ago to ai

A thing that bugs me wrt to #AI, #LLM, whatever pattern synthesis tech you want:

BINARY THINKING

I understand the hype is exhausting.

But this thing where someone plugs their ears and repeats reductive catechisms about AI is just as silly. The common trope lately is comparing it to Eliza.

The truth is somewhere in between, unevenly distributed across use cases.

Still, when this stuff works well it works well in life-changing ways.

danilo, 4 months ago to VisionPro

People ragging on Apple for charging $200 for the #VisionPro case really missing the point here

There’s no universe where the case is even necessary because that shit is never leaving my house

danilo, 2 months ago to random

This is from a C-suite person at a company you’ve heard of. They’re responsible for product.

And THIS is why I have spent the last year developing proficiency in using LLMs as part of my development workflow:

It’s great to be able to detect a crock of shit.

There’s no universe where AI makes features “functionally free.”

The complexity of a software product cannot be handwaved away through magic tensor beans. Features are more than just code. Features are a social contract with the user.

danilo, 4 months ago to VisionPro

I think @caseynewton has economically summarized where the whole industry is right now: most people have no idea what #VisionPro is for.

But I can tell you what it’s for:

Changing the scale of software, from something that fits in a window, to something that fits in a room.

Software big enough to walk through. As consequential, some day soon, as the GUI.

https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/111842220034770887

danilo, 2 months ago to random

the real problem for the fediverse purists is that I’m getting great content from following just ONE person from threads

like my feed is instantly better than it was before just from the boosts alone

so