What I think is very funny about the scam of ppl putting a random OpenAI textbox into every program with a cheap 50 word conditioning prompt prepended and telling you its "personalized AI" is how its really them getting scammed. Because in like less than a year they are going to start hiking the API cost like a hockey stick and all those things will have to price themselves out of existence and face the wrath of the Customer while OpenAI scoops up any of those things worth a damn and undercuts the rest of the market.
The US Constitution and common law are rooted in pre-18th century English legal jurisprudence and traditions.
And the "presidential immunity" bullshit is an attempt to rewind the clock to before 1649, when Parliament got fed up with the King's bullshit, put him on trial, and beheaded him.
Y'all: Trump wants to revive the divine right of kings.
You know who pulled the German equivalent of that stunt? Hitler.
(I will summarily block anyone who raises Godwin's law.)
I'm writing a longer (as it seems) article on the lock-in effect of solutions like #Obsidian that are using open formats like #Markdown for storage. The file format is not the only thing that might lock you in.
I did already start with a list of arguments but also want to collect your ideas so that I don't forget a good argument.
Please, no emotions, just facts and objective arguments.
Reply here in this thread and I'll collect ideas from it. 🙇
@publicvoit interested to hear your thoughts. I think I agree: although open data, schema and interchange would definitely hugely help, there does still seem to be a risk of lock in.
@publicvoit also think we can expect an ecosystem to provide an intratool data sea of some kind. So every tool is as able as any other to work with data, but specialises in the interface it provides on to data and the types of specialised domain data it works with
. We could also expect tools to openly support each others’ interfaces in an integrated way.
"...on the team side, the reality of team practices that claim to be autonomous at large organizations is that supposed independence of action is frequently sustained by senior members or managers “protecting” their teams from external dependencies and taking on the work of advocacy as individual responsibility (Moe et al., 2019; Hicks, et al 2023)."
I think this is a big point with large psychological implications although software journals, alas, did not
@grimalkina they’re usually effective and loved by their teams. And the work the team produces is valued. But I don’t think it’s recognised that they’ve achieved that by protecting their team and its autonomy within the company.
I suspect it’s more seen that all of that is a cost of them that prevents their team being more valuable, rather than what allows their team be valuable.
@MLE_online that’s a cool name 😆! It seems like the kind of thing that ought to happen near where I live (it’s that sort of place, I think), but I’ve not heard of it.
My brother left some drops of water on the leaves of one of his house plants that he left outside overnight and now these marks are permanently part of the leaves.
I asked him if the sun caused it, but he assured me that the plant was only outside overnight. The marks have been on the leaves for a year now
Something I love about exploring what it'd take to build a browser from scratch hardware on up, is merely the question: What's the simplest possible hardware & operating system? Whilst still being inclusive?
It took me about a year, but I think I've almost finished an answer...
The most banal software in our lives is the most complex! For good reason!
Yet those who don't know better are more impressed by neural networks & blockchains than text renderers.
@alcinnz text layout, rendering (and interaction!) are even more complex and confounding than time. My guess is they might have more genuine and totally real complexity than anything else in software? It’d be interesting to hear anything that has more.
@mcc age 48, it finally made sense to me to discover that the usual % behaviour is division remainder, and it kind of makes sense for negatives then. But clearly, what everyone actually wants is a proper modulus operator instead!
I am a software professional of 25 years. I believe I'm considered pretty good at this – people say nice things about the work I do.
I quite regularly come close to tears in frustration with how broken, demeaning and awful computers are to use. Either trying to help others make them work, or just for me.
I'm not sure if this is helpful to know for anyone, but I think it's probably worth being honest about.
This makes so much sense! Looking at this I feel like this is what I've been Actually wanting from the moment they announced the NTS-1 I just didn't know it
@mcc@polotek I didn’t know about the kiosk thing. That all makes a lot of sense! Thank you for explaining. … I like the ideas of performance tools rather than production / composition tools. I’d noticed that it’s pretty different thing and it appeals to me more, I think.
@mcc@polotek it seems interesting that phones / pads haven’t fulfilled such a need. It could be interesting to understand why?
I can imagine a whole bunch of reasons why a specific device would be far superior, like good tooling for home coding, distinct physical controls, the right io ports for other music gear, physical robustness, other os shit getting in the way, systematic attention to latency requirements… wonder if any of those are it?
If I tell you the radii of the spheres 𝑎 and 𝑏 in this picture, can you figure out the radii 𝑟₁,...,𝑟₆ of the six spheres that touch them and snugly fit inside the big sphere? Can you at least do it if you know 𝑟₁?
Irisawa Shintarō Hiroatsu did it in 1822! He was a merchant who sold tea, textiles and ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine - and he had a hobby of solving math puzzles.
In 1932 his technique was rediscovered by a Nobel-prize-winning chemist, so it's often called Soddy’s Hexlet Theorem. But Hiroatsu did it earlier as part of a Japanese mathematical tradition called 𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑎𝑛 - and as part of this tradition, he donated a plaque containing this result to a shrine!
He wasn't the only one who did this sort of thing. This kind of plaque is called a 𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑘𝑢. These plaques were used to commemorate newly discovered solutions to hard math problems during the Edo Period from 1603 to 1868. There's a lot of interesting math in these 𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑘𝑢, and you can see some of them here:
You can also learn more about the solution to the puzzle I gave! The most surprising thing is that the reciprocals of the opposite pairs of spheres in the "hexlet" of 6 spheres add up to the same number:
What creative movements are like the demoscene, but aren't the demoscene?
Things I can think of: livecoding has communities from various walks of life. And the game jam communities have some similarities in terms of bringing graphics, music and code together, to a deadline.
But what else? Who else has quite so many parties, for one thing?
@aldroid Maybe amateur dramatics – it's a community creative endeavour to a deadline? Amateur bands? Graffiti / skating / flash mobs if that still happens?
A couple of grim articles in BCC about UK homes that have been fitted with insulation under a grant scheme and are now inflicted with chronic mould.
I wonder what on Earth is going on here?
There's definitely a sense that the occupiers are getting the run around with no one taking responsibility or providing a central "we'll fix this" point.
What the science or best practice is here also seems very unclear. Does the product just not work? Does it work great, but not in some homes? Does it work great but the homes should have ventilation fitted, or some other remediation? Assuming this approach is deployable at scale then these questions must have very clear answers.
Or is this a cooked up scandal to try to prevent insulation schemes getting off the ground?
Gatwick are now charging £6 to drop passengers off. As in, park for 60 seconds while they get out of the car and take their bags and you say “Bye, hope the doors won’t fall off your plane and it isn’t delayed 7 hours and you’re given tokens it turns out you can’t spend anywhere.” before you head off to McDonalds and eat breakfast at 4am while waiting to see if they need a lift home because everything’s fucked up in some new and exciting way.
@MLE_online last summer I saved this snake from certain doom on a quite quiet nice warm asphalt strip, and was then wracked with guilt if actually that was a great spot they spent a good while getting to every day, only to get moved back to the chilly grass by some bloody tourist. Not sure.
Last year, for the first time, 30% of electricity produced worldwide was from renewable sources. Wind and solar are growing. But notice that the biggest is hydroelectric, and it's going down! One reason is droughts in India, China, North America and Mexico. Climate change is causing droughts.
We're in a race against time. But at least we're running.
@johncarlosbaez I'd like to see an exponential fit through the wind and solar, and when it whizzes through 100% :-) The deployment rate atm seems to be accelerating spectacularly. Surely there are other pieces to the solution (storage, dynamic use, grid support), but just deployment is amazing and inspiring.
I'd would like to see it publicly talked about a lot more. The hope and the direction.
What is interesting is I think there will be a fairly profound reordering of the "form of abundance". It will begin to have consequent changes in how we live with that abundance.
I'm pretty historically ignorant, but even to me its apparent this has happened before. Coal and steam. Oil. Farming and agriculture. And on the vastly awful side – colonies, slavery, war and plunder… We reorganise our society around means to achieve abundance, technological or otherwise.
If people can see this trend, it might both give hope, inspiration of a joint venture, and help them prepare for how life might differ.
