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

@SuperDicq @collectifission if they believe in AI so much, it should have no problem doing the job of CEO.

We (or really, I, personally, but I think you also) should think of #SocialMedia primarily as a brain-rotting time suck that genuinely significantly ruins our lives, rather than a small inconvenience or leisure activity.

Corporate social media saps us of our time, attention, focus, sense of reality, self-confidence, and self-determination. It is a net negative for almost every single person I’ve talked to about it. It steals our life from us.

I know when I’m older, I will not care about how much Reddit karma I have, or how many upvotes I got on witty comments. I won’t care how much time I spent endlessly watching video loops, or what influencers I saw. It’s all meaningless time theft.

Treat it more like a hard drug in your mind, not a harmless little thing. Act and decide accordingly.

Elephant in the room: #Mastodon and the #Fediverse are certainly less addictive, less time sucking, less attention seeking, and more wholesome and social than corporate socials.

But they are not perfect. The drug is still the same, and we should be very careful to not just replace one form of time suck with another.

Especially as we design open social experiences, this should be a paramount consideration and a design goal. Non-addictive and life-affirming social media should be a design goal for the Fediverse and the future of social media in general.

They really don’t get it. They think the mass fear and worry is some kind of conspiracy operation.

They don’t understand that people genuinely dislike what’s happening on a mass scale.

Scary.

They are in the process of destroying the Federal government of the United States.

We need to face that as the truth of the situation, and do everything in our power to stop it.

This is so much better than dual-booting.

- Windows 11 running in KVM
- Dedicated 2nd graphics card (cheap 1030)
- ParsecVDA virtual display adapter, always on and passing video
- Looking Glass for live-speed video
- Creative Cloud and Lightroom working as though native
- MacOS Catalina in a VM on the side just for fun
- Upgraded to 64GB of RAM to make all this work.

I won't be gaming on it, but it runs Lightroom just fine, which was my last holdout application I couldn't live without.

After a quick check of my backups I can wipe my dual-boot Windows drive completely, finally!

#linux #windows #lookingglass #vfio

40 years ago, you could afford to not just survive, but live somewhere decent, enjoy life, travel, have kids, eat at restaurants, and even save a little. All of that was attainable and normal, with a normal job.

The reason it isn’t for us is NOT that we aren’t working hard enough or making good decisions about spending, it’s because the wealthy have systematically siphoned off every cent that they can—the wealth that is rightfully ours from the labor we generate and contribute to society—and taken it for themselves by sheer power and absence of resistance.

Never forget that. Never accept it.

#resist

@klausfiend @mekkaokereke It's what happens when you make 8 pies instead of the reasonable three (speaking from experience)

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.