This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer's specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.
i shouldn't let LLMs & GANs ruin my appreciation for generative art. statistical methods like these are not new (and most of their problems with LLMs are shared with, ex., markov) & all that's changed is that people are trying to Productize, which they tend to do.
proper generative art is like proper human-created art: weird, jarring, and impossible to make any money off of
the existence of thomas kinkade didn't make david lynch stop painting. the existence of chatgpt shouldn't make me stop producing dreamy looping pseudo-narratives based vaguely on 50-year-old media properties.
the number one skill in programming is masochism, and as long as you're willing to put up with frustration for extended periods of time you'll make a good programmer (regardless of other skills)
wild that so many people are putting, like, all their chips on Incompetence As A Service replacing trained employees, but it makes more sense when you realize that a lot of people making management decisions don't have the background to distinguish between a meaningful essay and clever bullshit, or between clean functional code and enterprise boilerplate bullshit
LLMs are being pushed in the workplace for exactly the same reason that trump was elected -- lots of people make important decisions based entirely on vibes, and bullshit operates on vibes
statistically-probable sequences of words that do not represent a coherent logical structure but pretend to (i.e., what LLMs produce) is, definitionally, bullshit
the only countermeasure to bullshit is for every individual to reject vibes in favor of structural analysis, except in situations when the problems that inevitably stem from operating on the basis of vibes can be completely ignored
if somebody tells you to "trust your gut" they are trying to rip you off.
Vibes are really useful for guiding your structural analysis, but if you only operate on vibes & never question them, you're gonna believe things based on whether or not the person saying them is charismatic instead of based on whether or not they're true.
Vibes eat less glucose than structural analysis & most people barely have enough energy to watch TV after work so I can't blame people for conserving cycles. It's not a personal issue so much as a structural one: bullshit has power because we've made a society where most people can't afford to think, and those who can are discouraged from doing so or are told to think only in particular domains.
marc andressen followed me on twitter for a few months and then immediately after unfollowing me started doing the bullshit he's currently doing, so i take full credit for the psychotic break he's clearly been in the middle of for the past year or so
i didn't do it on purpose (though i was trying to post shit that pissed him off so he'd unfollow me), and i'm on the fence about whether or not to regret it.
he seems to be crashing his carefully-built-up cache of PR goodwill, which will probably eventually also remove some of his power over decision-making, which might be a good thing in the long run. but there's a lot of bullshit happening in the meantime. some of that bullshit is entertaining. i'm not sure how much is harmful.
maybe i just wasn't plugged into exactly how bad he was at the time
from my perspective it was like "oh, rich techbro vc is following me -- better start commieposting extra hard" and then as soon as he unfollowed i started seeing articles in major newspapers about how he was embracing landian right-accelerationism
the first grand twitter -> masto migration was not last year; it was in 2017. this migration brought in a lot of gay & trans people who were boycotting twitter over moderation policies on organized harassment by gamergaters, TERFs, and the alt right, and it's a major reason why fedi is so trans so it feels really weird for people to act like it never happened just because they're noobs.
the first grand twitter -> fedi migration was in the identica days, back when twitter was competing with google+ and ello... so 2009ish maybe? this was related to excitement over distributed, noncommercial social media, and brought in a lot of anticapitalist & FOSS people. this was during a period when twitter still had the fail whale, to give you a sense for the time.
there has been at least one major migration-wave to the fediverse per year since 2017, more or less evenly split between people moving because they don't want to give a rich guy more money and people moving because centralized moderation sucks. the one that happened after musk bought twitter was unusually large but not different in kind from any of the others.
It's not all that strange unless you're the type of person who reads a lot of news articles about tech, where it was covered pretty routinely starting around 2018.
(Basically every article about the fediverse is exactly the same: "wow, some people made a clone of twitter that's non-commercial and distributed! it's full of gay furries! i personally find it confusing and plan to never use my account again!" I wouldn't recommend bothering with them.)
We got a lot of people from twitter in many waves, but most of those waves were groups of people with specific complaints they'd been making for years, who heard about it in the wake of some big event (usually some kind of spectacularly bad moderation decision) because somebody they followed was like "hey I just heard about mastodon, since twitter is so bad I'm gonna just move over there". It didn't necessarily escape those groups, which is why I can easily categorize the waves in terms of being mostly gay/trans people or mostly furries or mostly anticapitalists or anti-nazis, and also why there were many independent waves of signups for each of those groups.
The fediverse tends to attract communities that don't feel safe elsewhere. Some don't end up feeling safe here (there was a wave of signups of black users at a certain point & from what I understand a lot of them went back to twitter, for reasons that I don't completely understand) and some end up sticking around despite being actively pushed out by the wider fediverse (fascist & fascist-adjacent people, who have largely moved to their own mostly-disconnected network of explicitly fascist nodes).
Please don't provide an option in your app to switch between light and dark mode. No one wants that. Just use the system preference, there's a reason it's a system preference.
Counterpoint: I want it, because I don't have control over the system-wide dark mode / light mode toggles that different apps attempt to check (since I don't run one of the big two desktop environments) & every damn app defaults to light mode.
But also -- why not just give users control over the whole pallette? Dark modes tend to be too light and low-contrast, and I already customize the colors in every app that allows it.
When people say that they don't want Bluesky people over here - I hate to break it to you, but a lot of Bluesky people are also Mastodon people. Getting harder to tell the timelines apart, fr.
Over the years I've discovered that every social network contains the same small set of exceptionally popular/interesting posters, and they're all just people who join every new social network. People who are on only one network are, for the most part, people who aren't online much.
Over here I'm following an enormous number of low-volume posters (while there aren't enough people on bluesky yet to have enough low-volume posters to follow to even out the timeline) so my home timelines look a bit different, and because bluesky is even more similar to twitter than masto is in terms of UI design a whole bunch of people I know from twitter who pulled the "masto is so complex that only linux experts can figure out how to sign up" card are over there.
I just sort of assumed the "let's not federate with bluesky" thing was about the same issue as the "let's not federate with threads" thing -- i.e., that we shouldn't make it easy for facebook or twitter to scrape and data mine six years of posts.
Whenever a text input box has the prompt "what's on your mind?" what is on my mind is the hit single What's On Your Mind? (Pure Energy) by Information Society from Tommy Boy Records and how the entire landscape of legal rulings on copyright in the digital age begins here, with a kid from Cleveland who likes roller blades an autistic amount sampling star trek and charting, back before the time lords and the kopyright liberation front. These dudes got radio play, but thought of what they did as disco (in the 80s) and would put modem noises on their vinyls you could play into the cassette port of your c64 and see a little text file.
Excellent! I had heard that they had sort of gotten lucky, but this is even more wholesome than I thought. This connection may be why InSoc continued to specifically sample Nimoy as Spock in other tracks