I mean, maybe a hot take, maybe not … casual/social voice conversations at a distance were never a good idea in the first place.

Not absolutely at least. A disconnected voice that can summon your attention at any time wherever you are is a weird, uncomfortable, unpleasant and maybe unhealthy thing.

Textual communication at a distance odd much more natural, as it matches the disconnected communication with a more formal and abstract medium.

perfect!

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey’s post and thought about it as “Tech moving on from the web”. For those of us who like it, we’ll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It’s a weird feeling for me honestly.

It’s almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

Absolutely.

And this is why I’m seeing Google winning this. They’ve got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they’ve also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they’ll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI’s backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.

Hard to recommend one over the other, especially as I’m not following things closely. mbin is a fork and seems well maintained at the moment while the lead dev and founder of kbin seems to be struggling to keep working on kbin. Things could change though.

just in case anyone here is confused … mbin (and its ancestor kbin, which is still running) work just fine with lemmy as they federate with each other. Upshot being that choosing between mbin/kbin and lemmy as an alternative to reddit is not exclusive … choosing one is choosing both … is choosing the fediverse.

No worries. Many of Bret Victor’s talks are great!

Another nice quote from Alan Kay (immediately after the above):

Think about what literacy actually is. Literacy begins with ideas, and literature evolved as a way of communicating those ideas. Computer literacy, by extension, cannot possibly be about learning how to put a disk in a machine, and it cannot possibly be about learning a spreadsheet.

Computers are really for helping us understand systems that are too complicated to think about in classical ways, such as political systems or the AIDS epidemic. They are really for letting children build models of complicated ideas and understand these powerful ideas in a direct way at a much earlier age than they would have without the aid of the computer.

Which, in the video, is followed by a nice comparison between SmallTalk and a deceptively similar UI in the Macintosh.

good question … the devs definitely aim for efficiency in their choices. Their frontend framework for instance is niche but (at least at the time that they picked it) requires only a small size and performs well (though many devs complain about the use of a niche framework).

Ha!

Why more of this type?

It certainly seems to be a bit of a fediverse stereotype though.

I mean I guess I see that. But still, the use/abuse of country code TLDs has maybe gotten a bit much hasn’t it?

The hu.ma company from Nigeria?

‘kay

Ummm … I don’t think this is clickbait … at all. The title? Sure … it’s from the video. But this is a big tech reviewer (whom, FWIW, I’m not particularly partial to) talking about a new product that is not only making buzz but, IMO, is somewhat emblematic of where tech is up to at the moment, especially regarding AI. It’s, IMO, a fair review from a user’s perspective and highlights reasonably enough how rough the idea of taking AI to the consumer market is right now.

Also, looking at the broader picture just a bit as I think I’m trying to, and there’s an odd picture here which, again, I think touches on how the tech industry is going right now. Yes it’s a 1st gen product, but the company isn’t young and the pivot to AI seems glaring to me.

Maybe just scroll and move on if you’re not interested rather than posting irritating content policing?

Fair! The humane AI pin thingy announced sometime last year.

TLDW: AI cloud is too slow and shitty, the projector UI is too shitty, the battery too shit, and it doesn’t to anything better than just using your smartphone. Don’t buy.

Generally I find the broader picture interesting … like how are they getting funding and what were they doing before chatGPT?

ha!

Still … what’s wrong with “humane.com”? It’s a decent name for a tech company (if somewhat on the nose).

haha, yea … for sure too long … but that’s kinda youtube these days right?

I’d add (having watching most of the video … at 2x) … that the complete reliance on cloud AI is prohibitively slow and often worse than just a Google (or other specific smartphone app) … and that its committed to being a standalone device and so doesn’t interact with your smartphone or smart watch. Also the battery life seems problematically bad as does the whole projector screen thing.

The thing that gets me … and I’m a little surprised MKBHD didn’t mention it … is how fragile an attempt at disrupting the personal smart-device market it is. It’s basically a smart watch on your chest that talks with cloud AI (with someone’s probably irrational love of tiny projectors as a UI). The moment it takes off, the big companies can make an accessory, just like the smart watches, just like it but which integrates with their existing ecosystems.

Now that level of monopolistic control is a problem, obviously, but it doesn’t detract I think from what looks like a fairly poor attempt from a strangely well and persistently funded “start up” (I’m not sure being former Apple execs counts as “start up”, which is really the problem here I think).

Someone posted on mastodon about this group (“hu.ma.ne” … cuz meaningless dots are cool?) and how the belief from big-tech-employees that they can transition to independent startup business models is probably a complete fallacy that they wish was true. Instead they’re so used to the safety nets, resources and platform security/monopoly of big-tech that they haven’t any idea what it takes to lead a startup to success … but they have the connections to procure funding, hype and attention.

Yea, I do think there’s a bit of cult-hype around federation and decentralisation and has been for a while here in the Fedi. Which is really just tech hype … the idea that some technology magically solves problems.

In reality, better social media requires more than just a technology.

Re kbin, you might be interested in mbin … it’s a fork and has active development happening. They have at least one instance up that I’ve seen. Generally seems to be a positive move.

And yea plenty of rough edges. Your experiences definitely sounds worse than mine though (and I’m on web apps too).

The weird thing is that people on mastodon mostly go along happy with their feed. Those that have found the problems too much bounced or just learnt to tolerate it. One thing that may fade away is the idea of running your own personal instance. I get the feeling that some don’t find it to be entirely worth it. There are “relays” though, which are commonly used, and basically feed in content from major instances as though you’re following a bunch of people there. I don’t really know how that goes though.

With lemmy (and kbin too), yea, it certainly feels like it’s not far from being kinda “done”, at least as a version “1.0”. Scaling up to many more users is likely to surface more issues though. But we’ve got many apps and alternative front ends, a somewhat stabilising API and months now of mostly working as intended.

I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.

So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.

Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.

The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.

EDIT (more ranting):

The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.

Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.

In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.

Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).

But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.

Even the textual healing? That seems to require a dynamic process that analyses the text, no?

Or are fonts capable of that?

Would this work in vs code only?

Someone put it well, if insensitively, about Sam Bankman Fried (FTX etc):

Not actually smart but just LARP-ing the “Aspy genius” persona.

However accurate that take is or offensive, I think it captures something about how nerd culture has gone mainstream and how it’s perceived.

“if you eat meat you have no standing to care about animal rights”

Come on … you know what I said is more nuanced that! You’ve got standing … I’m talking to you about it!

And yea, I’m totally with one seeing “wrongness” in much of how humanity interacts with animals, whether they could personally do better or not.

Where we differ and maybe start talking past each other is that I think an article or incident like Neural link is a good opportunity to not just get sucked into some main stream media click baity outrage and instead think about the broader system and culture involved, where, as I’ve said, there’s a real enough chance Musk and his company isn’t especially evil but rather representative of a multiple industries.

The point about whether someone is regularly eating meat is that the meat industry is comparatively huge and something which forms a central and direct part of everyone’s lives … it’s where the majority of our relationship with animal welfare begins and ends and it’s the one that we can clearly think about, that we have personal stakes in and can easily investigate and do something about. Which means if you care about animal welfare, and don’t want to only engage in click baity online outrage, it’s the obvious place to start and have a conversation. Which, of course, isn’t to take away from what may have transpired in Neuralink.

Other than all of that … yea look, if you want to get upset about the monkeys but not even talk about the meat industry, then yea, you can have a point about the monkeys, but it’ll be, IMO, a relatively easy one and it will run the risk of actually ignoring the medical/scientific progress that might maybe depending on your ethics justify at least the idea of the experiment.

I’m not rejecting it though, or the validity of your stance on it … just trying to push for a better conversation.

I haven’t read beyond the Verge article and it would make sense that neurallink is YOLO-ing it as you say.

but all effort must be taken to minimize it

IME, I think people would be surprised at how much this isn’t entirely true. There are grey zones and industries with people with careers and deadlines. There are groups that know staying out of the limelight and not talking about the slightly dodgy thing they do is a good strategy. Yes there are ethics groups and oversight and a general awareness of the importance of not being evil. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if neurallink isn’t categorically different from a lot of animal industries.

Ummm … I’m criticising it, just pointing out that it’s a much bigger issue than musk doing something dodgy and missing that fact would do a disservice to animals. If you know about the state of animal experimentation and farming already, my posts don’t say anything new.

Otherwise taking down musk and neurallink and not doing anything about the broader industries out of ignorance would be negligent IMO.

Or worse, expressing outrage online while not doing something actually within your control like altering the way your actions affect animals … that’d be petty poor behaviour too IMO.

To be clear it sounds like it could have been horrific. But it’s also vague enough on the details that I don’t trust it be free of some inflammatory spin. Otherwise, it sounds like something went wrong with one animal and they had to euthanise.

How wrong it went and why could be negligence or it could be experimentation that was reasonably handled. Months sounds like a long time but we don’t really know how bad it was over that period. It could have gotten bad only just before they decided to act on it. Shaking in front of lab workers doesn’t necessarily mean much, though I’m no veterinarian.

Even if it were negligence or at least some degree of indifference to the welfare of the animals, no, I don’t believe that’s odd, because that’s the world we live in. And that’s my broader point, this sort of shit is all over the place. It probably sounds bad because it’s a brain implant and there’s brain damage, but there are all sorts of ways animals can and do suffer, with farming and animal experimentation occurring all over the world.

Not sure I understand you here. I wasn’t talking about purity tests. I was talking about the quality of the debate and public understanding of the general issue.

You can recognise this as wrong all you like but it won’t alter whether the broader dynamic between the media, the public and the various industries involved is mostly an uninformed and ineffectual circus that ends up not caring that much about animal welfare.

Also, if these experiments are so self evidently wrong but the meat/dairy industry is ok by you, that’s beyond a mere lack of purity, and I’d have to ask you whether the habits and pleasures of meat really are worth the suffering caused and whether you’re even aware of the sort of suffering behind the meat industry.

I think you didn’t understand my post.

What would you say to medical research and using any medical advancements we have now that we’re discovered on the back of animal experimentation?

What about the meat and dairy industries and people who eat meat?

What if the experiments on the animals were rather harmless and they were kept under caring, clean and safe conditions?

I think part of my general point was that seeking “moral high grounds”, at least as a judgmental behaviour, is a trap and can be dumb and can be part of the problem.

In a world rife with deferred ethics, I’d argue moral high ground urges and behaviours are an opiate to help us cope with the realities and difficulties of issues.

I also haven’t eaten meat or animal products or driven or owned a car for a while, but personally, I’m wary of wanting to take moral high grounds or being too judgmental of those who eat meat or believe in animal testing to progress medical science. I don’t think it helps the issue, argument or any animals frankly.

IMO, to get people to be better at empathy, you have to start with empathy. And then, if someone turns out to be a cunt, then well, call 'em what they are.

Otherwise, beyond all that, I personally am really not sure focusing on animal testing makes any sense if you care about the general state of animal welfare and the way humans treat animals. I personally suspect scientists in lab coats make an easy scarecrow with some subtle prejudices creeping in, and kinda probably judge people would prefer to target testing rather than the animal farming industry and the industries that destroy habitats. Outside of scientific research though, yea animal testing is probably complete trash.

As for my view on animals in scientific research, I think the whole thing could do with a pretty significant clean up where the model of scientific practice is probably in need of reform to be more efficient. Awkwardly, I suspect the scientific industry would find this difficult and for entirely shitty reasons.

Generally, I’m personally not sure where I stand on whether any animal experimentation is justified, but I’d bet much of what does happen is not entirely justifiable at all.

So I think people here need to be mindful of how much they don’t know about animal testing, how easy it is for the topic of animal testing to become inflammatory and how much musk-hate makes that even more likely.

Animal testing and experimentation is happening all over the place. And in such work accidents to happen, as with any surgery. And a common measure to prevent suffering is to euthanise. In fact I think euthanasia is prescribed so often that it’s controversial, but you should keep in mind that any animal experimentation setup is likely to have an intentionally antagonistic relationship between experimenters and animal carers and ethicists.

There are groups deeply and actively opposed to animal experimentation of any sort and will infiltrate and target labs and try to expose them any way they can. There’s a real chance that something like that is behind these revelations. Point is that it’s often not objective and misleads you into thinking the targeted lab is particularly bad when it’s actually just a selected target for political reasons.

All of which is NOT to condone animal experimentation (I’m a vegan for example). But you really should be mindful of how dumb media hype around this issue can be.

If you’re outraged for instance, when was the last time you ate meat and how well do you think that animal was treated both before it’s killing and even during? Better than the monkey in this story? Hell, when was the last time you ran over an animal in your car and did you really need to be driving at all? Did that animal die peacefully? Did you even realise?

How many benefits come to both humanity and animals too from progress from animal experimentation and is that worth some of the mistakes and suffering caused?

These are some of the better thoughts IMO, where musk hate is really not relevant here. From what I could tell from the article, it did not seem odd at all. If you care about animals, take the issue seriously and don’t make it about one very famous person who’s cool to hate right now. Animals, and humanity, frankly deserve better.

Loving the hexbear custom emoji game!

I’m neither close to this (I’ve seen a few LTT vids here and there) nor that interested in dogpiling or anything … but this is exactly what LTT/LMG and Linus himself always felt like to me and it always kinda creeped me out. Like I’d watch something and get that feeling of, am I the only one seeing that or is it me?

Key insight, even beyond tech but, I think, “successful” people across the board:

nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else … So you have a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated … most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism

Yep … I forgot to mention that. Overall, when I watched a DVD for the first time in ages, it was somewhat eye opening … like we’ve truly gone backwards on what the home viewing experience can be apart from the somewhat minor convenience of being not needing to store the DVDs at home.

The place has plenty of Blu-Rays too … I’m grouping them in with DVD for convenience … also you shouldn’t presume the quality of my internet and streaming subscriptions or even my TV.

I’ve found a DVD rental place close to me with quite a collection. Honestly thinking about just unsubscribing from all streaming and going all in on DVD rental. I watched one recently for the first time … you forget how consistently good the qualilty is compared to streaming (YMMV). But, in true hipster fashion, being more deliberate about what I watch, more openly exploratory, making more of an event of it, all seems attractive. If streaming were actually convenient, fine, but with the way things are now … they can go to hell.