As a scientist who has ended up gradually becoming more of a programmer, I battled through the SICP after seeing the cult following it has. It’s a weird, but good book, and I couldn’t imagine a book like that using anything other than Lisp

“this is a big Butt”

Nice.

I don’t think it’s a lowering of expectations — it feels like more of a qualitative difference. Like, the thing I’m looking for now is for someone to have given a fuck about what they’re trying to say. “Earnestness” is probably a good word for it.

Another factor in this is probably the fact that I was one of those kids who was at the top of my class for my entire school life, then went away to a prestigious university that just made me ramp up the pressure on myself even more. For a long while, I had built so much of my identity up around being smart, which led to me becoming overly preoccupied with ensuring I appeared smart too.

To give a concrete example, I’m a scientist who isn’t particularly well read, and for a long while, I held myself back from really engaging with the humanities, because I felt like I needed to stay in my lane and not make a fool of myself by having ill-informed or incorrect opinions on things like art or literature. I was too up in my head to be able to read a poem and actually have my own emotional response; internally, I’d be orienting myself around what seemed like the “correct” response. Ironically, being overly preoccupied with appearing smart led me to act quite dumb (though fortunately I met many delightful humanities nerds while I was at university, who were excited to both help me learn bits of the technical theory, whilst also being enthusiastic about my own crude, unrefined opinions).

So yeah, I used to be overly fixated on ideas of correctness and good execution in basically everything, and that made me hold back from engaging with my passion for the world, for fear of being wrong. I guess the point I’m making here is that my recalibration with respect to AI has also come alongside a personal arc in which I am learning to open up and let myself care about things without having to be good at them.

For instance, I am a deeply mediocre musician, but I have a lot of fun jamming with friends. I wouldn’t have been able to do this 10 years ago. So when I see someone being courageous enough to actually try to say or make something meaningful, I respect the guts of it, even if the execution is not great. A human can learn how to communicate better, but an LLM will never be able to actually give a fuck about what it says

Well you see, silly, it’s because the billionaires deserve to be at the top of the hierarchy, whereas baristas deserve to be at the bottom. Taking from the rich to give to the poor is just disrupting the natural order of things, which will lead to all sorts of mess.

Society needs a permanent underclass to function, and if the wage slaves are no longer struggling to keep their head above the water, then they might start having funny ideas about radical systemic change, and that’s bad for everyone (especially the wage slaves — their silly ideas will blind them to the humble satisfaction of living a life in the place where they belong)

(This is all sarcasm, of course, but a disconcerting number of people do actually believe things to this effect. I felt like I understood the conservative mindset a lot better once I saw someone explain core ideological motifs of conservatives along these lines.)

I don’t know anyone like you describe (at least, not nearly this level of bad).

But I want to offer a more positive contra-example. Since AI has become ubiquitous, I have become a lot more forgiving of mediocrity in human made stuff, whether that’s a piece of art or other media, or simply someone trying to articulate themselves, but poorly. I’m way more likely to work harder to try to understand the point that someone is making, and to see the thing I’m engaging with as an earnest attempt to communicate with another person.

In a weird way, I think that AI has made me a better person because of this. It’s reminded me of what things truly have value

Yeah, I agree.

I’m someone who, when overwhelmed by life (often), opening and reading emails is disproportionately difficult for me. The idea of spending the time and energy to read an email that someone couldn’t even be bothered to write is offensive to me

I’m sorry :( I’m currently homeless, and thus my only access to WiFi is at public locations like coffee shops (and libraries, but my local library is well used and so quiet that I’d be even more of an asshole to do calls there).

Though I am admittedly part of the problem, I confess that this has, if anything, made me more judgemental of people who engage in calls like this in an assholeish manner. For instance, I try my best to be as discreet as possible, as well as choosing places that are busy enough that my voice is more likely to blend into the background noise (I’m fortunate that my headphones are quite good at picking up my voice).

Yeah, it scares me too. Though it does give me some comfort to exist in communities like this, where people are well informed of the kind of fuckery done by big tech and other asshole corporations, and thus are not surprised by this kind of news. Although it’s pretty grim that we all recognise how fucked things are, it’s within communities like this that I often find my will to live be bolstered.

Maybe it’s to do with the average political inclination of folks here, or maybe it’s just that Lemmy has a high concentration of creative, nerdy people who find joy in making or sharing cool stuff. Or maybe I’m just so burnt out that I’m desperate to construct and/or clutch onto anything remotely meaningful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Regardless I find it reassuring to see so many people trying their damnedest to forge something good — not in ignorance of the world being on fire, but precisely because we need good reasons to live now more than ever.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish I could put my head in the sand and find some bliss in the ignorance of it all. I don’t really want that though. Real hope is built on a comprehensive understanding of the problems we face, with a hearty dash of some potentially irrational defiance.

Good start

I’m on porkbun and am quite happy with them. Been with them a while, but when I first purchased my domain name, they were one of the cheapest and looked decent in other ways too

Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

I’d love to mind my own business, but I’m currently melting in a historic heatwave caused by assholes billionaires and petrochemical executives continually adding gasoline to the fire that is the climate crisis

I have only bought stardew valley once, because I only game on PC, but I definitely would buy it for multiple systems if I used them; it’s already such good value that I feel like I’m stealing. I do love a passion project.

I wonder if ConcernedApe has a proper desk yet

Yay, teamwork!

Good kitty

None of us are free until all of us are free. AI is nothing new, just more of the same forces trying to crush more of us into a permanent lower class.

I can’t imagine that it would ever have enough impact to reduce their population significantly

Mage, because one of the first games I really got into was RuneScape, and mages have a lot of utility spells (mainly teleports)

There have been some wins from GDPR, but it’s woefully under enforced. I became very familiar with the GDPR when I did an internship in the regulatory risk department of a big bank when everyone was frantically trying to rebuild shit to ensure compliance. I think it’s a damn good piece of legislation, and it’s a shame to see it doing so much less than it could be.

I really like the automatic cruise control on my fairly new Honda Jazz. I’ve found that it has a net positive effect on my attention to the road, because I become less fatigued from the small, brief slowdowns that I might encounter on a motorway. There was actually an instance where I narrowly avoided a crash while using this system because of how quickly I acted when a potentially dangerous situation developed into an active crash; I felt like I was more alert than I would’ve otherwise been after a day of driving

However, I do not like the lane-keeping system, especially combined with the automatic cruise control. I remember testing it when I was on a clear but fairly curved section of the motorway, with my hands completely off the wheel (but hovering over the wheel, ready to take control again if necessary). I was horrified by how effectively it took me round the bend — effectively enough to be dangerous. There is a warning beep if you spend too long without your hands on the wheel at all for a while, but this was just something I did while testing it. I’ve not used it since, because I was confident that, unlike the automatic cruise control used on its own, this would diminish my attention and leave me unable to properly respond to an exceptional circumstances.