Notices by 22 (22@octodon.social)

Child complaining: “the new Minecraft has sakura 🌸 and yeah it looks really pretty but it drops to 30 fps and the game breaks”

May I recommend Microsoft hire parents to work on Minecraft? Seems likely a bunch of childless devs are working on it.

@wingo can I ask, I think I understand that this is about the garbage collector proposal for WebAssembly https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Overview.md but I’m surprised to hear that JVM folks are stakeholders! Is their hope that with wasm/gc JVM (or at least Java and Kotlin) code can run in browsers/Deno/etc.?

Seeing people wringing their hands, “people might read something WRONG on the internet—and believe it! 😱 we’re dooooomed”

Let me tell you a story.

“Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard.” —Richard Feynman, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

Even the most disciplined of scientists, who have access to the means of directly probing reality itself, look harder when they find a “wrong” answer, and equally damningly, stop looking when they find a “right” answer.

I’m not worried about the existence of fake news or the risk that people’s echo chambers or ChatGPT or whatever the new bugaboo is will deliver them to disinformation, because the only solution to that is to teach people to be be militantly mindful of Millikan’s followers’ mistake. And we are laughably far from that.

No. The hand-wringing about disinformation is kind of like Ted Chiang’s explanation of how many fears about AI are actually fears about capitalism, and have nothing to do with tech (https://octodon.social/@22/109940499391380263).

Fear of the new thing spreading fake news is actually fear of fascism’s merciless attack on human rights in western liberal democracies.

Coworker admitted they were exhausted after redeye flight and long day of work but was going to churn out one more feature for me.

No.

I don’t want your 死んだ魚目 code (your dead fish eyes code).

This is painstaking, finicky work and needs clarity. Go eat, relax, sleep, and then write that code. I will receive it then.

I’m militant about this. Once an interviewee mentioned they didn’t sleep well (when I asked them how they’re doing). I stopped the interview and insisted on rescheduling it for tomorrow after confirming they were free then. No, I don’t want to evaluate you when you’re bleh. Yes, I will annoy our recruiter.

This industry should know best the difference between wetware and hardware but instead we’re abysmally prone to thinking we have silicon brains.

Y’all. We use the same neurotransmitters that sea urchins use to escape from predators. Take care of that wetware.

One of those quiet quality-of-life upgrades that you slap your forehead and think "Why didn't I get this sooner!"

Keypad door locks. Like they have on Airbnbs? We've had one for our place and. Kids able to get in and out. No keys, no knocking, no shouting "Mommy let me in". Glorious.

Bidets are a much bigger quality-of-life improvement but keypad locks are probably less dramatic.

I don’t understand why this industry does layoffs. Especially these “we’re gonna fire 15% of our staff but you don’t know who and can stew in panic for a few weeks!”. It feels incredibly inhumane, like something in twenty years we’ll be aghast we did.

Just cut compensation by 15% for everyone, say “sorry for not steering our ship better, we’re gonna do our best to weather this storm together, if you can find higher pay elsewhere we totally get it, sorry for fucking up”.

Being unemployed in this country is a cruelty I cannot comprehend inflicting this casually.

Got an e-bike and hit the mountain yeah?

What I was expecting to do: the "JINTENSHA RESSHA" ("bike train") power move the bros in YowaPeda do

What I actually did: sing my favorite songs at the top of my lungs "HIME HIME SUKI SUKI HIME" totally like Onoda #YowamushiPedal

I have discovered e-bikes.

@astraleureka @technomancy (dropping Christine to reduce noise, apologies if this is presumptuous!)

Aha, thanks, I see it:

“Much of this innovation is happening on top of the leaked model weights from Meta. While this will inevitably change as truly open models get better, the point is that they don’t have to wait. The legal cover afforded by “personal use” and the impracticality of prosecuting individuals means that individuals are getting access to these technologies while they are hot.”

The link is to Bloom: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom

Damn I love this:

“Being your own customer means you understand the use case. Browsing through the models that people are creating in the image generation space, there is a vast outpouring of creativity, from anime generators to HDR landscapes. These models are used and created by people who are deeply immersed in their particular subgenre, lending a depth of knowledge and empathy we cannot hope to match.”

More from the recent New Yorker piece:

“Sure, shopping online is fast and easy, and streaming movies at home is cool, but I think a lot of people would willingly trade those conveniences for the ability to own their own homes, send their kids to college without running up lifelong debt, and go to the hospital without falling into bankruptcy. It’s not technology’s fault that the median income hasn’t kept pace with per-capita G.D.P.; it’s mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. But some responsibility also falls on the management policies of C.E.O.s like Jack Welch, who ran General Electric between 1981 and 2001, as well as on consulting firms like McKinsey. I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible. …

The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately. We haven’t had those policies for the past forty years, and, unless we get them, there is no reason to think that forthcoming advances in A.I. will raise the median income, even if we’re able to devise ways for it to augment individual workers. A.I. will certainly reduce labor costs and increase profits for corporations, but that is entirely different from improving our standard of living.” https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

Oops, managed to delete this brilliant bit from #TedChiang

“Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work? What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn’t going anywhere except into shareholders’ bank accounts? We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital. We need to be able to criticize harmful uses of technology—and those include uses that benefit shareholders over workers—without being described as opponents of technology.” https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

This is gonna take as much headspace as his interview from March 2021, where he was so on point:

I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.

Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

… in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. … I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html

@cwebber “While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us”

Damn, this is so juicy. Thanks for sharing!!

It's always interesting what anecdote I share that the kids get very fascinated by.

During a hike, someone mentioned they were itchy, and when I asked if it was possibly a psychosomatic thing, they said no "because you can see a rash". After dealing with the situation I offhand mentioned that just because you can see physical evidence of something doesn't mean it's not psychosomatic, and described (1) phantom pregnancies, (2) stigmata, (3) the Sarno mindbody theory of chronic pain, and (4) the study they did where they asked people to just visualize doing exercises and then saw their muscles actually got stronger.

Friends, all three of these engendered a lot of curious follow-up questions. Yes, phantom pregnancies can result in even menses stopping. Yes, the Church does try to help people who get stigmata though that's quite rare these days.

And oh so many questions about the exercise-visualization study. I dug it up later to make sure I was getting the details right: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998709/ is the study from Cleveland Clinic Foundation researchers but yes, visualizing finger exercises or bicep exercises can increase muscle strength (N=8 study for each exercise, 35% stronger fingers, 13.5% stronger biceps; the control study that visualized nothing had 0 increase in strength, the other control study that did real exercise had 53% stronger fingers).

Occasionally I say something that the kids get really interested in and that upon further research turns out to be either wrong or misremembered. Thankfully that's not the case here. It's hard to know if there's any lasting impact from learning about the power of the mind over the body, but I'm curious to find out.

I've wanted to write something deep and meaningful about this but I haven't found the words so here it is extempo—

Saw the headline, #StackOverflow is going to charge AI/LLM companies to use their database https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/

I'm not ok with this because I gave my answers on StackOverflow under a Creative Commons license to help as many folks as possible—I wasn't compensated for that labor except through Stack Overflow building and maintaining a nice effective repository for knowledge.

Today, "helping as many coders as possible" means giving my Q&A contributions to folks training LLMs. Stack Overflow charging for that feels like rent seeking.

If there was a way for me to mark my answers as "OK for LLM training", I'd do that—for example, re-release my contribution under Public Domain (i.e., "CC0" instead of the Creative Commons with Attribution and Sharealike license that Stack Overflow contributions default to).

I don't expect this to be controversial. I can see folks upset that LLMs are trained on your open-source code (I personally have released all my open source software into the public domain, but I'm incredibly privileged to not need funding from open source). But Q&A content seems different—the intention was to provide uncompensated help to the person asking the question and future visitors.

So much of my confusion about why Facebook and Twitter for the last few years just felt like broken products evaporated when developer friends at both Meta and Twitter both told me that engineers are tasked with proposing changes that drive revenue, engagement, or other OKRs.

This blew my mind. All these years I thought product people were thinking up these awful changes and meh non-features—no, the engineers were tasked with this, the thinking being they look at code daily, so they must know what’s an effective use of time and resources.

Like my friends said, “Suddenly everything makes sense why social media is terrible”.

The classic Jobs–Ford story (“if we’d asked people what they wanted they’d have said a bigger keyboard/faster horse”) teaches that you need design sense, not just metrics and experiments and user research. So it’s shocking that these big companies don’t practice this?

(I know I’ve seen people with product titles at both firms, so I’m not clear whether they work in a tiny part of the space, or if my friends’ experiences were unrepresentative.)

New globe! Instead of the puzzle-piece ? colors of a political boundaries, which destroys our conception of physical and cultural reality, this globe uses a Natural Earth-like basemap of colors on the ground.

Tactile, so mountains are raised (not sure how accurate).

It also has a light-up mode that shows you the political boundaries.

“I’m so happy I could cry.”

#GIS #globe #geography DM for link (keeping Octodon advertising-free)

The #FieldMuseum’s special exhibit on #China in #Chicago has this 3D physical “#map” of South and Southeast and East Asia, and it is pure love.

@mattly I forgot how cool it was to use Paredit for Clojure in Vim! Today I struggle with selecting a line of text to wrap in parens and VS Code unhelpfully parens the semicolon ? I was devastated when Eve died http://witheve.com/ and have been waiting for Darklang to either get rich or die trying… and gritting my teeth at those semicolons