Notices by Charlie Loyd (vruba@everything.happens.horse)

An analogy for what people are doing when they treat consumer imaging hardware like it’s perfect when it shows “orbs” or whatever: If you turn the volume way up on recordings made with even very high-quality audio hardware, you hear a hiss, which proves invisible hissing aliens are everywhere.

@jes5199 The empty comment is still a comment, buddy.

Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a trusted observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!

[Looking at a society where decision-making power is strongly inversely correlated with exposure to the consequences of one’s decisions:] Now hang on, why are there so many bad decisions?

Just had a startling experience on the internet that left me rattled – and, as I consider it, worried about some of my firmest assumptions. I’ll state it bluntly: a knowledge worker expressed the view that what the world needs is more of is their specific kind of knowledge work.

🧵 1/173

I think this phrase is, situationally, sometimes more true than false. But if you hear someone say it, odds are really good they want to measure instead of managing. https://indieweb.social/@dandean/111784409154249713

A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.

Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.

Dear software people,

Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.

It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.

Sincerely,
Charlie