@dahukanna I can only speak from my experience looking at open-source projects, but I often wished developers would write down more what they tried and didn‘t work (for whatever reason. And be it they didn’t know and the library was buggy.)
There‘s so much silent intentionality, that will never be shared because it‘s impossible to infer in hindsight.
“prompt engineers”: people that know what to type to get what they want out of generative intelligences or statistical inference engines - https://www.wheresyoured.at/empty-laughter/
AKA “Probabilistic spread betting” by trial and error.
Alt text: Chris tucker (actor) with a backwards baseball cap on his head - looks incredulous, despondently lowers his head into the palm of his hand, covering his face. Looks back up and shakes his head.
> ‘But it’s a fascinating experience watching people argue about whether I’ve "a large scholarly influence over [my] subject area", minutiae about the authority of news sources that have written me & whether NSF CAREER awards are prestigious. "Notability" is such a fascinating social construct. :)’
I guess 2024 Nobel prize winner Katalin Karikó doesn’t stand a not(oriety/ability) chance of getting a Wikipedia page as she was not widely published & even got “demoted”. 🤦🏾♀️
Journalists say, “AI system that is ‘imprinted’ on text generated by fallible, biased human beings, does not discriminate because of ‘data sourced from fallible, biased human beings.”
2 Economist uses excels “autofill” function to “generate” data for a published paper and saw no issue doing that!
Carl Sagan prescient words, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science & technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science & technology.”
@dahukanna@FINOkoye@PropCazhPM@hbuchel you might need to ask to whoever designed this.
I agree on the lack of contrast here, it's quite annoying.
I would blame the lack of knowledge of a lot of people around accessibility basics like color and contrast :(
@dahukanna@FINOkoye@PropCazhPM@hbuchel@stephaniewalter The sad, simple answer is that there are still many, many designers out there for whom “design” means “make it look cool.” “Make it usable” is a concept that they just have not been exposed to.
There’s also “whatever, it’s just a settings screen. Let whichever developer is least busy slap something together.”
Current “AI”/statistical inference (SI) tech represented by Machine “imprinting” (It’s not continuously learning/updating, with only 1 time update), Large Language Models (LLM) & conversation “chat” interfaces are decimating cultural, social & ethical assumptions (statements taken as facts, without proof) AKA “norms”.
As a society, we’re not prepared for impact of rethinking, reconsidering & updating our current human practices & conventions with a non-human machine as a participant.
I really like that point that these current production "AI" systems (Generative AI / Large Language Models) are "imprinting" not "learning" because they are trained on a single data set and then set out into the wild to use that data without correction.
Real systems are constantly learning from experience.
Yeah, I hate the way they stole the term AI. As an old AI researcher, it's really frustrating the way that they successfully took these two huge fields (AI and ML) and narrowed them down to a single model, which is a very poor model of general intelligence.
PS. I think it is a very good model of certain human behaviors - that of BS'ing. Humans also pattern-match to spin stories that sound good and are meaningless, but to claim that's a model of "intelligence" is insane. (As a teacher, it's explicitly what we are trying to get our students NOT to do.)
Stating learning objectives. challenge 1. The reason why I want to learn somethings varies & is usually intrinsically motivated.
Splitting topic content into chunks. Second main challenge - I prefer active working through exercises to being talked at (lectured), read a wall of text or watching a linear video. (Edit typos)
2/2
"Software alchemist" is not a job title, more descriptive/expressive of what I "seem" to be able to do , with creating digital experiences using software as my "material or medium (edit)" and a play on words -
Alchemist: a person who transforms or creates something through a "seemingly magical process".
When someone says, “make it easy to do …”, what they mean is, “make it match/align with my current mental model/perspective/expectation” I.e. their “map”, regardless of the existing, actual territory.
Bias is “misapplication” of individual & collective socio-cultural maps & refusing to update them.
The worst map, often used in key decision making is the “assumption” - A statement (map) taken as true (territory), without proof. Think about that, “map” accepted as “territory”, without proof!
@dahukanna My reasoning is that Safari is designed for battery life and is a reasonable enough browser. Just not a powerful ‘Swiss Army knife’ like Firefox. And that’s fine.
Separate accounts is a nuisance but a useful one for boxing off distractions!
I’m tempted to wrap all’a ActivityPub “whatever, waving hands” in abstraction with a tech-flavor I can use for a personal federating instance. Really don’t want to manage a database, DHCP, DNS & etc. I only want to use FTP-ish protocol to transfer content to 1 or more syndicating server(s) I choose.
@dahukanna I love the vision of a world where we could use full potential of protocols like ActivityPub or XMPP to record all this information and then use it in various contexts and with various purposes. But here we are in surveillance capitalism, ruled by Big Tech (always hungry for data)...
Opinion: When I hear people say “clean code” or “clean lines in a digital design” where “clean” is an adjective for clarifying a noun, it’s always made me viscerally “itchy”.
What I’ve observed as their intent is the noun they’re describing (digital code or design) is clear & unambiguous in its meaning. But you can only be 100% sure of that by getting feedback from & really listening to intended & unintended target audience. Otherwise, adding the adjective is an opinion or worse, an assumption.
However I really dislike applications that only refer to recent dates relatively like “yesterday day or “today” (like I don’t know I’m currently at today -😱). Without anyway to specify my presences for those arbitrary relatively recent ranges.
Give me the option to format how I like to see the date displayed. I prefer the Japanese date format for all my dates “YYYYMMDD”, thanks.