A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
How sure are you that the collapse is coming? Personally, I’m seeing people embrace this stuff without caring too much.
I’m starting to think if there’s a bubble, it’s deeper than big tech. And if there’s a collapse, it may not be of the industry but if things many of us hold dear. I’m starting to think sitting back and waiting for the collapse may be completely the wrong move many of us will regret.
Ya Rayah by Rachid Taha
Loved it on first listen and it made me a fan of Taha’s. It’s kinda Arabic pop rock but with traditional instrumentation.
If you like this, maybe checkout the album Diwan 2 afterwards.
I’m not equipped to teach you lua, the language, but you’ll find plenty of resources online, including those in the neovim documentation.
In the end the lua scripting thing is pretty simple … it’s a language that is general purpose though pretty light weight) and used elsewhere for good reasons. So if you want to learn about scripting your editor, with neovim, the language will be something potentially useful elsewhere. With vimscript, that’s not the case.
And maybe it helps for the dev team to not have to maintain a scripting language on top of everything else?
What’s people’s thoughts on the vim and neovim separation?
After being away from vim for a while, and never being a power user, I came back and opted for neovim because scripting with lua just makes sense to me. But the split feels uncomfortable.
And it’s what’s happening here too. AI is just corporate control and monopolisation with new tricks.
It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.
I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.
I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.
In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.
BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.
This is written by the president of Mozilla, which important context I think.
Honestly, to me, it’s a worthy talking point in general, though it reads to me like a fantasy.
Which isn’t to mention that the issues they cite with AI may be intrinsic to the technology itself (and you can’t just sculpt historical metaphors however you like), and that what utility some have found with it may also have intrinsic issues or be, in part at least, attempts to patch over the ways in which technology/world has gotten shit (which is maybe the problem that should be solved).
I’m anti-AI, essentially, but I think this touches on what may be an important arc in all this (very speculatively at least).
Namely, maybe humanity had ~20 years to make tech “good” (or not bad), from 1990 to 2010 say, and failed. Or maybe missed the mark.
What that would look like, I’m not sure exactly, but I wonder how much your general sentiments are distributed amongst tech people — how much the average person who’s substantially touched tech is just over all of the minutiae, yak shaving, boilerplate, poor documentation, inconsistencies, backwards incompatibilities … etc etc. Just how much we’ve all been burnt out on the idea of this as a skill and now just feel it’s more like herding cats.
All such that AI isn’t just making up for all the ways tech is bad, but a big wake up call on what we even want it to be.
And even if there is some productivity positive, there’s also the question of whether there’s a negative that’s hidden, not understood or not spoken about. Eg - thinking you’ve done your job but it’s actually sloppy and forcing someone else to clean up after you.
And best of all, none of the fears associated with wide spread solar have materialized into real world problems.
What were/are these fears?
aah … gotchya!
Cheers and thanks for the chat!
It’s shit like this that makes me glad to be completely outside of the AI hype circus. It sounds toxically unhinged. In the sense that being into this sort of dynamic and vibe, I suspect, at some point, involves some unhealthy attitudes, desires, sentiments and directions.
Like, I suspect some anti-AI sentiments come from just finding it creepy to be into having a digital slave … and, conversely, being pro-AI must involve being into that kind of energy and dynamic to some extent, all irrespective of the productive aspect.
Any gains to claw back more profits will necessarily be adversarial and technically anti-capitalist.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean by the anti capitalist part here
Otherwise, I think I’m still stuck on how we’re dwelling on profit maximisation as the crux of capitalism. It may be the incentivising factor for the agents operating in the system … but is it the justification for committing to the system?
Where, as far as my ignorant mind goes, maximising the efficiency of the whole economy and/or its total productivity from the assets available … are the obvious justifications.
In which case, embracing a profit maximising ethos is a means to an end. And disrupting a particular profit process for the sake of the economy’s productivity perfectly justifiable as good capitalism.
There’s only one goal, profit / capital maximization.
Capital maximisation for a small set of individuals (the wealthy) or the economy in total? Where the latter can also achieve the former to some extent.
In the end I think capitalism can be more than one thing, which is something the strident anti socialism reflex of the US has stagnated.
And it’s easy to confuse ends with means and the status quo with its justifications.
Interesting.
I’m not sure we disagree much, especially if a flexible schedule is common sense.
In a way my main point was that however much we think it common sense, I suspect for a lot of work culture it crosses a line that maybe isn’t made explicit that much. Which, I think, is that your job is to be there and follow orders as much or more than it is to deliver well defined outcomes.
And so my point was that if we want flexible scheduling and believe it can be as productive (or more) … then I suspect we’ve gotta address this “line” … and I’m not sure what can replace it other than some established concept of “owning” your job more. Which I’m not sure has to be working for outcomes, as you say.
Well, coming from the perspective or justification of trying to maximise efficiency through a market of incentivised actors, is mass multi-level-hierarchy wage labour “optimum/peak capitalism”?
That’s what I was aiming for in saying “anti-capitalist” … in that the opportunity to incentivise was being missed so that an existing power structure could persist.
And, I don’t know, my experience tells me lots of places struggle with the quality of their managerial leadership, some times a lot, while people on the ground keep the place together and have plenty of insight on how to do things better.
“I earn a living based on outcomes,” he says. “Nobody sends me a check for how many hours I work in a week.”
This is the key, whatever label or trend you want call it.
The bottom line is that employment is kinda anti-capitalist. The employee doesn’t own anything real and so isn’t incentivised by real rewards to deliver real outcomes.
Instead, showing up, making appearances and convincing their colleagues/managers that they’re valuable, however virtual, is the natural response to virtual incentives.
What if we owned an outcomes based contract instead? Of maybe even the company itself in someway (with meaningful decision making power and stakes). Otherwise, we’re mostly paid to sit in the chair at the office and do what we’re told … frankly not a great look at such a scale as we do it.
The mega employment market strikes me as obviously fraught for both sides of politics.
This where I’m at. And I’m now thinking that techno-feudalism is where we are headed (and are already TBH). I’ve just seen too many people exhibit gross acceptance of basically this destiny/outcome, to the point that the logical conclusion is the ground work for the transition was successfully laid decades ago.
I don’t want to be to too doomer, but I fear the complacency we or many may have. The lack of a willingness to dwell on what world we want for each other, the lack of values and conversations about them, the consumerism and doom-scrolling ©opium. Including, I’m sorry to say, presuming a collapse/reset is guaranteed. We may just end up serfs (again) because Facebook and Google were just too convenient in 2010!