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Oh yea I hear you.
Yea, the "cheaper than droids" line in Andor feels strangely prescient ATM.
Not a stock market person or anything at all ... but NVIDIA's stock has been oscillating since July and has been falling for about a 2 weeks (see Yahoo finance).
What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype? There were open reports from some major banks/investors about a month or so ago raising questions about the business models (right?). I've seen a business/analysis report on AI, despite trying to trumpet it, actually contain data on growing uncertainties about its capability from those actually trying to implement, deploy and us it.
I'd wager that the situation right now is full a lot of tension with plenty of conflicting opinions from different groups of people, almost none of which actually knowing much about generative-AI/LLMs and all having different and competing stakes and interests.
AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.
What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.
Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.
- Fix picking an instance. It’s an irredeemably bad UX, even for tech people who could run an instance if they wanted to. Gotta remove that as an initial UX barrier first, which would require a new layer of system with integration with all of the clients.
- Accept that this isn’t like mainstream social media and likely never will be, even if instance picking becomes easier for newcomers. So instead focus on what can be done well here. IMO it’s customisable community building.
Currently all the big fediverse platforms kinda suck at this, in part because it likely requires a bunch of features, but also because they’re all made in imitation of big social platforms that were always less “homely” and more engagement farms.
To bring normies, something new and unique needs to be offered. IMO there could be a rich ecosystem of content and structures and communities that draws people in.
My fear is that the protocol and federation are the limiting factors on this, and so I suspect some restructuring or redesign is necessary.
Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!
Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.
It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?
Similarly, heroes are emphasised in the film more and villains under emphasised. Sauron, Saruman and Denethor all having less screen time than mentions.
That Sam is relatively underplayed is interesting also. Pretty sure Tolkien is on record saying Sam is the actual hero of the story. Which is there in the film, but clearly with a preference for focusing on Frodo more.
Yea, this highlights a fundamental tension I think: sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, the point of doing something is the doing itself, not the result.
Tech is hyper focused on removing the "doing" and reproducing the result. Now that it's trying to put itself into the "thinking" part of human work, this tension is making itself unavoidable.
I think we can all take it as a given that we don't want to hand total control to machines, simply because of accountability issues. Which means we want a human "in the loop" to ensure things stay sensible. But the ability of that human to keep things sensible requires skills, experience and insight. And all of the focus our education system now has on grades and certificates has lead us astray into thinking that the practice and experience doesn't mean that much. In a way the labour market and employers are relevant here in their insistence on experience (to the point of absurdity sometimes).
Bottom line is that we humans are doing machines, and we learn through practice and experience, in ways I suspect much closer to building intuitions. Being stuck on a problem, being confused and getting things wrong are all part of this experience. Making it easier to get the right answer is not making education better. LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn't be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn't too far away.
All that being said, I also think LLMs raise questions about what it is we're doing with our education and tests and whether the simple response to their existence is to conclude that anything an LLM can easily do well isn't worth assessing. Of course, as I've said above, that's likely manifestly rubbish ... building up an intelligent and capable human likely requires getting them to do things an LLM could easily do. But the question still stands I think about whether we need to also find a way to focus more on the less mechanical parts of human intelligence and education.
What difference does it make?
An eggplant parmigiana: the eggplant was mostly raw and barely heated, there was some greens based sauce that was just kale and oil blended or something, tasted awful, and a pretty simple tomato sauce that could have come out of a bottle.
To this day I don’t understand how I didn’t blow up in vegan rage at being disrespected on such a fundamental “I want edible food” level. It wasn’t cheap either.
Didn’t finish all of the stories, but it seems pretty much as you’d expect: get trapped with someone that was either always controlling and selfish or develops that mentality by having control over someone and being the sole money maker.
Really makes the case for me that parenting should be made easier and being a workaholic type de-normalised. All of it seems to be a synptomatic of deeper dynamics around filling your life with things that aren’t satisfying or humane: jobs and “trad helicopter parenting”
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Lets try this experiment
Start watching Big Trouble in Little China at 7pm, Central Time, USA (as precisely as you can) ... and come here for live posts as you watch!
This is ~24 hours from the time of this post
Here's a timeanddate.com link to the timezone(s) involved.
@AVincentInSpace@pawb.social jas volunteered to run a live watch on cytube the day afterward (approx 7pm Monday). Posts and links should be coming (and see comments below on the idea).
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So ... how likely is a "de-woke-ification" of trek, presuming it survives?