Notices by Tristan Harward (trisweb@m.trisweb.com)

This “is it racism and sexism” vs “is it the economy and selfishness” debate is going to tear liberals apart.

It’s not one or the other, folks. It can be both, even in one person, and they feed into each other. Gotta embrace the whole pile of shit that is America, it’s not a competition.

@a1ba also works for audiophiles!

Nearly all business software, at its peril, is dreadfully afraid of having an opinion about how its users should do their jobs.

The principal reason is that it does not confidently understand its users jobs better than they do (a pursuit that should be required of a company designing software to help with a job, in my opinion) and is therefore ill equipped to recommend better.

Imagine the world if understanding the fields we purport to help was so elevated as to actually have a chance of improving them.

#productmanagement #design #ux #productdesign #engineering

Corollary: the mission of product development (note: not a specific job title) is to understand your customer’s job better than they do, so that you might create a tool to guide them to do it better.

If you’re making a tool based on a poor understanding of their job, aren’t you simply targeting poor execution of that job? Who would want that? Who would want to take part in building that?

@trochee oddly enough this thought came from a discussion about Figma’s new AI features.

I don’t think they’re playing 3D chess with the point of these features, they’re just following the hype train and trying to be reasonable about how it might help people, with a lot of uncertainty in how that happens.

My conclusion here is, if they understood the jobs their customers actually do (in Figma’s case the discussion was around getting out of high fidelity and actually modeling solutions and conceptual directions) then they could design tools, AI or otherwise, that are genuinely valuable. Like, I don’t know, something that helps designers work through a fantastic approach to their process in a humanistic and user-centric way, rather than just helps plagiarize high-fidelity UIs for useless conceptual ideas that have no connection to reality.

I don’t believe that their customers are demanding “replace humans with AI” or expect that to be realistic (yet).

You can’t make up just how badly this shit works.

@mike @andypiper @tchambers @shitpostalotl yep this is mostly correct via my experience on a single-user server. Following matters the most, but others’ boosts do cause those specific users and messages to be pulled in, so a nice side effect when looking at a user with no follow relationship is I can see the posts that my server got by whatever means, which means there was some activity I can go on.

Overall, fine-grained controls on federation, and especially controlling moderate proactive fetching of posts and content, is IMO one of the best opportunities to improve Mastodon.

I'm scared how misunderstood LLMs and GenAI truly are; they are so far from a genuine intelligence it's not even funny. They are statistical models for language, trained on a lot of words and sentences, representing the statistical likelihood of words following other words, sentences following other sentences, just with a lot of data and samples to pull from. That's it. There's no intelligence, there's no path to intelligence; it's simply statistics chaining words and symbols together.

@futurebird we need a knowledge bank, kind of like a seed bank but for knowledge untainted by AI.

@clacke @engarneering yeah that makes sense, I figured I have no recourse it’s just upsetting to lose control over something you’ve written in general.

Follow up: it is not within my rights to remove my content, apparently. Upon submitting it conveniently becomes Creative Commons licensed. Huh.

@j12i that’s their recommended approach, and I’ve done it already. Or you can delete your account which makes everything just reference an anonymous contributor. I believe that’s how they say they adhere to GDPR and California privacy act.

Byeeeee stackoverflow

lol, going to need to try a different method

This is what you get when you try to delete your content from #StackOverflow: they treat you like a criminal defacing their site, rather than as a human being with privacy rights.

Will be saving this conversation and sharing publicly. Your move, Stack Overflow…

@carnage4life Apple simply wasn’t the one to undertake it.

Competing with Tesla will be easy for auto makers with actual experience manufacturing automobiles. Tesla isn’t even good at that.

@thomasfuchs just a heads up, mostly the issue with not reading replies is because all replies aren’t pulled into my local server, not that they’re displayed wrong.

@marcprecipice @drewda I still miss it. I think I almost interned for you once? A missed opportunity for sure.

@virtulis @aral that would be fine. Edit: it may not be fine, as it still makes it inaccessible to folks hosted by a provider.

@loke @aral @shoq Par for the course for him. He's a pseudointellectual blowhard who's entirely divorced from the real world.