Notices by Benjohn (benjohn@todon.nl)

@Jobob @cstross is there good terminology to distinguish smaller artisan / boutique ML models, like the example you give, from the “EAT ALL THE DATAS” kind?

@persagen WTF!?

Mood: We are pretty much at the local maxima for the usefulness of computational technology under the guidance of capitalism and App centricity. Further leaps of benefit exist but are improbable under present constraints.

@inthehands @ned don’t understand how that’s not a direct admission to use of counterfeit currency, and he’s not already charged. Strange country.

@inthehands I believe in you!

@inthehands @jeffowski I’ve seen this happen. A friend was taken in by a romance con and lost some money over it. Then she lost the rest by refusing to accept the con.

@inthehands Audio software UI seems to mostly still be in the Kai's power tools era.

@inthehands And why not?

@inthehands @datarama @jenniferplusplus fwiw, my personal hope for AI is not a short cut to learning, but the most wildly able and ultra patient explainer. But it doesn’t look it will do that at the moment.

@timnitGebru

AGI Boosters to AGI, "Oh great and glorious mind, tell us, tell us how can we fix climate change?"

AGI to its boosters: "Jesus – do you really need me to tell you you've got all the solutions you need, but you can't organise yourself to act against vested interests? Switch me the hell off 'till you can afford the power and raise a damn wealth tax, bozos."

@deprogrammaticaipsum @aral @khinsen 👍 It’s a good expression! Thanks for the links Aral. Hope to take a read…

@deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen

I think the essence is retro machines are steeped with agency.

You feel almost entirely in control of a small, mailable, magically powerful world, with nearly no external obligations. Even the physical “pull it apart and fix it” level.

Modern machines don’t, and in particular, **neither do modern business models**.

I’d like modern SSD, Ram, Network, CPU and GPU, Battery and display. And modern computer science and language theory. But I also want that agency back.

I think we can have both.

@deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen I think I feel similarly.

I think the major ideas I want to bring forward, and it’s almost a glimpse of better instead of a specific idea, are the ideas of profound “simplicity” and immediacy. Retro machines had these in bucket loads. Modern machines nearly never do.

I think the limit of retro machines is that many of their user abstractions, while very simple, graspable and immediate, were not very “good”. They didn’t compose well in to larger things.

But modern machines are also often not composable either! And they’re also wildly complex and unknowable.

My retro futurism is a hope for computing that feels tangible, entirely graspable, and very immediate, but which have abstractions that happily scale to modern sophistication, while remaining tractable.

@futurebird @snacktraces @stacey_campbell @inthehands a great dev I worked with made the analogy with accountancy’s “double book keeping”.

@aubilenon @inthehands Something I love about the touch bar is it's exactly the kind of thing I think I, and I suspect so many people, might have also got wrong.

Here's the idea! Tried out! Tried at enormous expense! You can actually buy the bloody thing (I mean – you have to, in fact for a few years) and use it and feel just how completely crap that genius idea you had turns out to be. It's okay – don't thank us.

The thing I imagine could work is track pad the size of the whole of the beneath the keyboard aluminium chunk, that's actually an oddly shaped iPad. It's a track pad mostly, with haptics, but it's also a piano keyboard, or a mixing desk, or room lighting interface, or a video splicing thing. Or maybe a drawing interface. Or so many f keys.

Go on Apple! Try my mad idea! Spend a billion on it!

@inthehands from tonight? And it’s really late / early here in UK, so I feel alright about that :-) All in, a very safe time to upgrade, I think.

@inthehands more angular again is the new cool again. I think?

@inthehands Case design unlikely to change in the short term. It changed late last year with a “the new new” sort of push.

For buying a new machine I’d worry more about whether M3 or a tech iteration will arrive.

@inthehands @mcc I would think a path back to that approach would be highly desirable? I suppose at least some people are working towards that?