I know this is a weird thing to say when there's so much hype about AI, etc, etc, but sometimes I wonder if all the "big" technological ideas are, like, already taken.
Like, from the 1980s until the 2000s, we had massive disruption: the consumer Internet, the PC revolution and digitization of everything, smartphone ubiquity that vastly changed how non-tech workers communicate and are organized (enabling, like it or not, tracking of microefficiencies for labor work--think Fedex drivers--and gig work like Uber); we had massive social networks and online advertising that wiped out local news reporting and shook politics and tribal identity.
And in the 2020s, we had, um...cryptocurrency? Smartwatches that let you check those same social networks without taking your phone from your pocket? Direct-to-consumer eyeglass and mattress sales?
"AI", though I remain somewhat skeptical, is perhaps the big exception here; by some estimates it has the potential to change labor economics in a way not seen since the first industrial revolution.
But with that one massive caveat, it's hard to look at the last five or ten years of tech innovation and think it measures up to what we saw earlier in the "ICT revolution."
That's just my subjective perception, of course, but then there's this...
There’s an additional risk in attributing the complex social forces stoking polarization and conflict around the world to disinformation, according to Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. He argues that ascribing political outcomes to foreign information operations without unassailable evidence enhances the goals of disruptive actors. “We should remember the incentive of the people involved,” Nielsen pointed out. “If you are a former K.G.B. officer sitting in some office building in the outskirts of St. Petersburg trolling people for a living, it would be wonderful if your boss thought that what you did was hugely influential and really accomplishing every goal of the Russian state.”
I'm stealing the joke from "Hard Fork", but I have to say, I love the idea of putting on a pair of ski goggles and wandering around the city waving my arms in the air like I'm interacting with some virtual reality world.
I was recently at an interdisciplinary meeting (heavily skewed toward, but not exclusively, social science academics) in which easily 85% of the people there said they were working on AI or something related.
The current AI/LLM/AGI/whatever mania seems to have metastasized even more broadly than blockchain did. There are interesting and important problems there, but it seems to have become an intellectual black hole across the academy.
@cstross@mattblaze I’m not sure I buy that. What bugs me about some LLM papers, such as the “Sparks of AGI” preprint, is that they’re not really computer science at all but, instead, CS academics naively applying various psychometric tools off-the-shelf.
I’m not a social scientist, but I have to imagine that if we do think that LLMs demand being measured via psychometric tools developed originally for human subjects, there’s some relevant social science (broadly: maybe psychology, etc, etc) expertise here that doesn’t come with a standard CS degree.
I'm not old enough to have heard JFK say "We will pay any price, bear any burden to support the cause of liberty as long as the victim of aggression is spending 4% of GDP on defense and is current on their Marshall Plan repayments"
As long as I'm spending Sunday shitposting about tech companies:
Does anyone else remember that Box is a company that exists? And, weirdly, is not the same as Dropbox?
I honestly am shocked either of these companies has a real business model given the commoditization of online storage, but the fact that there are two of them, and they have such similar names, is frankly just weird.
Honestly, the only thing more embarrassing for Facebook than renaming themselves "META" only to find "the Metaverse"--after spending $10bn on development--to be a complete flop...
...would be all that, but replace "complete flop" with "huge success for Apple."
Someone at Google changed the Takeout download format, so you can't download it via a curl command. Seems like instead there are single-use XSRF tokens in the request or something?
Annoying. Now I have to download to my desktop and rsync to my NAS.
I assume this was meant to protect users against some threat (XSS?), but, sigh, here we are.
@parkern Yeah, I also hit the "download limit" thing. Dunno.
I generally try not to use Takeout, and instead have a bunch of automated scripts to export my data incrementally. Takeout is a great idea, but the implementation unfortunately reflects the obvious esoteric aspect of the usage.
My biggest thing right now is that I sort of want to get off of Photos, for a variety of reasons. What are the good alternatives?
One of the amazing things about Trump's rise is just how cowed most politicians are by a fear of losing election.
Everyone knows that many establishment Republicans loath Trump, but their fear--not of violence or legal persecution or anything of consequence, but, merely, of losing an election--is so overpowering that they fawn over themselves to stay on his good side.
I've come to believe it's this attribute that allows Trump to dominate his party. In 20th century fascist movements, it was the fear of mob violence. In the 21st, it's fear of mild irrelevance.
@alex_02 I was struck by a line from this interview, though
DAVIES: You write that Romney called the Senate a club for old men, meaning what?
COPPINS: (Laughter) Well, this was a really interesting insight. He basically said, on some superficial level, you know, it's a lot of old people. We have on-site barbers and doctors, and everybody wears orthopedic shoes. But, you know, on a more serious level, he told me he had not realized just how much psychic currency his Senate colleagues attached to their jobs. It almost was as if, you know, losing reelection was akin to death for them, right? There were - a lot of his colleagues were in their 60s, 70s, even some in their 80s. And to them, the relevance and power and importance associated with their position was essential to their lives. It was central to their identities. And what it meant was that every decision they made came back to, will this help me get reelected?
Russia could attack a Nato country within 3 to 5 years, Denmark warns
Lots of things to criticize about American imperialism and behavior during the Cold War, but now we get to see what replaces Pax Americana, and it isn’t a “rules-based international order.”
If I were more naive, I’d imagine Trump mocking the husband of a rival for serving in the military would be some sort of political scandal.
But the thing you realize if you watch Trump long enough is that his supporters don’t admire the values they claim to support—military service, say. They just admire anyone who’s on their side, and oppose anyone who isn’t.
I saw a TikTok recommending putting olive oil in cappuccino. I love olive oil and I love cappuccino, so I was super excited to try it. Can't get over how well it did not work. Somehow combining two things I like turned into undrinkable coffee.
One PoV is that it’s one of a class of fairly small-fry businesses that exist providing niche services that differ slightly from those built into major platforms (like Word, in this case), and that this is a fundamentally sustainable but growth-limited business model.
Another is that if this feature set were truly compelling Microsoft would’ve built it into Word.
I guess a third is that big behemoths like Microsoft Office can’t really pivot or change their product positioning the way startups can, and eventually Grammarly (and those like them) will displace established players.
@standev@mattblaze yep, I read “The Dead Hand” after “Command and Control” sent me on a “reading about WMDs” jag (also to Richard Rhodes, of course). ;)