Notices by Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)

If your professional network can't identify a random background character from a somewhat obscure film used as a reaction image, what is it even good for?

@lanodan @mathieui yeah. LLMs enable more mass communication pretending to be people, or letting unaffiliated people talk like programmers.

I hate LLMs they should not be products as they exist now.

https://github.com/aredridel/node-bin-gen/pull/241#issuecomment-1963442116

@voltagex @az oh they are SO WRONG. (I'm a telephony nerd.)

I think we should talk about loyalty, especially in the workplace, but just in general in our culture.

It is at once overvalued and undervalued in a bunch of ways, and I think we often misplace it.

There's loyalty to authority; loyalty to our group; loyalty to a partner; loyalty to a fandom.

But the thing about loyalty is it's kinda empty until it's tested, and we find out what that's really about. And testing loyalty either destroys groups or strengthens them.

It's fascinating how things break when there's conflict:

Loyalty to authority is often how a lot of bullshit happens to people lower ranked in the workplace. It's the core of the pyramid-structured workplace and its dysfunctions. This is how middle management sells out workers: when their loyalty is tested, they either side with authority, against workers, or they get the boot.

Individual workers are often rewarded for loyalty to those in positions of authority, given chances at promotion and growth. Often to the detriment of their peers: this is the backstabbing politics of some corporate culture.

@jalcine Yeah. This is a face saving downplay of the problem, not a correction.

If your website is still http only, no https...

... are you okay? Do you need help doing archival work? this isn't shade, we just saw the long tail of the web forced offline with the move to https everywhere.

Are you holding on to an http only site for someone who's passed? DM me and I'll help you save a copy some place more durable than a personal or academic server sitting on someone's desk or in a closet. Let's save the remnants of the old web before they go offline entirely.

@zkat I'm also worried about the _informal_ power structures and how best to mitigate those.

@zkat Yup. But how to handle part-time, and how to actually make it go are the parts I'm mulling. Finding people, the networking required to make it go. Really starting to wonder more deeply the _how_.

I'm once again toying with what a good way to start a software consultancy looks like when it’s based in equality and mutual respect structurally, while accommodating part-time work.

I love my current job, because it's a team that does mostly set its own agenda and processes, and the external authority mostly makes sense — things like good clinical practice and other good ____ practice are documented norms across the industry. They are forces of nature or climate, rather than power structures within the company. Other parts of the company I'm sure have authoritarian power structures but my team is mostly isolated from them. There is a guy in charge, but he's also the source of domain expertise that we are happy to delegate to, and we're left with immense autonomy for the software aspects.

But when this job comes to an end, I want to do work in a structure that isn't a big hierarchy of power.

If you think libraries are only about books you’ve missed a key thing about them. They are about connecting people to information.

That means access, structure, retrieval, and collection.

Only sometimes is that about books.

I think a lot of technology of the last ten years has been Anti-Librarian Technology. Not necessarily on purpose, but I think there's an economic feedback loop that happens.

When we build systems around files and folders, an external agent can help build organizational structure. The core competency of a librarian is that: how to organize and retrieve information.

Ever since the search engine, tech companies have been gunning for the librarian job. But they can only do it with totalizing influence over the problem. They have to own the data. They have to provide the informational structure. And they do this at great cost to longevity of information, and the ability to comprehensively organize.

This is done in service of users who don't have staff librarians, or who don't want to do their own maintenance of their information structure. That's most people, really, but it's a shame, because what we've been left with now is that the dominant technological tools we have for information are controlling, and unorganizable. How many organizations are there where there's a bunch of google docs, most of them made with organization accounts, but sometimes shared from people's personal accounts. Which we find by searching our email for links, not consulting organized directories?

How many do we search for? how many do we end up with conflicting copies of half-baked versions? How many times do we confuse last year's edition for this, because they're both named “Board presentation”? How often do both get edited, and both end up with a date of “last week”?

And the feedback loop that drives this is the UX and user retention loop, since most users don't have organizational drivers, companies who build any system at all, even if it's bad, win out over those who don't. But what's lost in the totalizing effect of that is the ability to organize systemically for those who can, or wish to learn.

The Jewish nation MUST be allowed to exist in, but not be limited to the middle east.
The Palestinian nation MUST be allowed to exist in, but not limited to the middle east.

These are not in conflict.

The Jewish nation MUST be allowed to exist.
The Palestinian nation MUST be allowed to exist.

These are not in conflict.

States are created when their neighbors agree their militaries are too scary.

Nations are created when a group of people hit a critical mass of believing "this is us!"

These are not the same.

Has anyone done any research into peer-to-peer communication offloading to servers that users control?

Where a or the primary interaction is on mobile devices, but the network connectivity overhead is mostly on stable, desktop or server systems?

@Daojoan Fran kly? I disagree.

I've gotten way _more_ nuanced discussion of the subject out of Tiktok than I have out of the major papers.

We've got ten minute videos talking about the intricate history. We've got thirty second drops of "here's some resources you need to understand this". We've got two minute current events drops with citations.

People are doing the work.

At the same time NYT and others are making gaffes in their "live coverage" because they're in a rush

@Daojoan Yeah, you don't use Tiktok via search. It's not the major mode.

I actually think we're in a weird space where search itself has had its credibility and utility increasingly atrophied, from personalization of results, removal of binary search options, the desire to never ever ever show "no results found", never mind the actual manipulations of SEO, and now LLM-generated text.

Not to say TikTok is groundbreakingly accurate or anything — but it is a mode shift, and I think asking questions with that possibility in mind is critical.