I tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity
I'm going to stick to that chopped fruit you get in the little plastic boxes marked "Fruit". Regular fruit needs to take some UX lessons from those guys
@tomw
I also feel sorry for people in the future who find that they need to have proof of their ongoing residency in the UK. When we needed that we put together a bunch of bills and printed payslips, and handed all that in. Nowadays, you don't even get printed payslips, so you would need access to a computer and printer and the foresight to know that you should save them/print them out and guard them carefully against the day you might need them (nobody warns you of their occult significance!)
Having a legal right to come to the UK, they neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK, nor following changes in immigration laws in the early 1970s.
Mastodon is an incredibly rare opportunity for open-source, non-profit, advertising-free, decentralised software to be a real contender in a category – and, if it continues to grow, even to pull many other social networks into being part of (or interoperable with) the fediverse.
It's strange to me that this isn't mentioned more in the endless opinions about features, onboarding, UX, "vibes" etc.
@tomw There's plenty of UX experience amongst #Mastodon user (probably the most genious #UX person I've had the pleasure of working with myself, @scottjenson , being one). The biggest problem is this pervasive view that focusing on UX/onboarding is what "dot con" does. Or VCs. Or that great UX brings in the unwashed masses.
I want my wife and kids to use Mastodon. They won't if there's a smoother experience someplace else.
Focusing on UX and #onboarding is something you do for the very same reason as Mastodon really nudges you to write image descriptions.
@troed@scottjenson Yeah OK, I'm not dismissing the importance of those things. My point is that comparisons between platforms often begin and end there without taking into account all the other factors I listed.
@simon_greenwood Yes, everyone is chasing AI – even stuff like Duckduckgo is saying "people don't want links, they want answers". No, actually, I want links!
@tomw Until it's thoroughly gamed, which it will be, I've found that OpenAI can at least point at a solution, as long as you don't blindly trust it. It improves on digging through the usual content farms and Stack Overflow answers, but I agree, you've got to have that choice. That said, I'm going to set up YaCY and give that a go.
People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".
Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and add them all to the library.
In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.
@tomw in engineering it's called "Signal to noise ratio" or SNR. To extract signal, it has to be discernable within the noise. To suppress signal, increase the noise. The voice of truth can be suppressed by the babble of lies. The conspiracy theories aren't dangerous in themselves but pile them deep enough and people lose touch with reality.
So chatGPT makes up answers out of thin air, those answers become part of public record, search engines index them, then you're done: no longer able to search for factual answers to questions.
@tomw It is puzzling, but at least here there seems to be less (still non-zero, but less) emphasis on follower count determining who is allowed to reply. "How dare this person with 100 followers dare interact with me!"
Congratulations to everyone involved in crowding out useful information with dangerous information, and making it harder for everyone to tell which is which.
Every so often I see a post about how LLMs fail logic puzzles.
And... yes? Of course they do. The only way it could solve it is if it has seen the puzzle before or a substantially similar one. (But that might cause it to give the answer to the similar one, not the correct answer.)
Why is this even tested so often or considered surprising? It is, in essence, an autocomplete. It does not understand logic. It has no concept of a correct answer. It gives the most likely completion.
Seeing all these predictions of the AI future, I'm reminded of when every object in the world was going to be tracked on a blockchain. How's that working out?
@tomw I did see a guy here who had ChatGPT write an iPhone app to find him tickets or something. It set up the API and wrote the code to scrape ticket sites, or whatever it was. Granted it took him a few tries to get it right, but this technology is very new. In a few more years people will be able to conjure up apps and algorithms as they need them, with the required user skill level dropping constantly. (Currently you have to know what an API is, to use one.)
@tomw On the other hand, Bill Gates insisted for years that commercial use of the Internet would not go that far. Personally, I think AI will make us humans a bit more redundant again. What has advantages and disadvantages.
Pop quiz: can you spot the problem in this PHP snippet? I just got tripped up by it and it was very Not Fun. (This is rewritten to be a minimal example.)
if ( $coolness > 10 ) {
define('COOL_MODE', true);
}
@tomw@datarama@abucci yes. Php was successful because it was a horrible mess that worked if idiots used it. They are now trying to make it a proper language, but all the code that the idiots wrote is still running on live servers everywhere.
It's our own fault: we should have pushed back when they forcibly removed register_globals. Once they got away with that absolute catastrophuck, we were doomed.
@Geoff@datarama@abucci I think it's more that they want to focus on an audience that's building "apps" instead of pages.
When you're just adding some widget to a page, you want it to just error out and the rest of the page to still continue. You don't want execution to 'correctly' stop on error.