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Tools are often objects that "exceed the average human's capabilities" in some respect or another but assigning the quality of intelligence to tool itself is like calling a hammer strong or a chisel brave. It maybe true in a metaphorical sense but it doesn't have any objective meaning.
Would injustice exist in an alien society if that society didn't recognise it as such?
Here's a Strange Loop talk where one of the authors covers some of the content of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxINoKFm-S4
This project wraps `inotifywait`[0] which I didn't know about until just now. Really useful utility, thanks for sharing!
[0] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/inotifywait.1.html
Ah, the boiling frog strategy. Effective but definitely evil.
Is "don't be evil" still part of the Google's official ethos?
langcc is general enough that the tool is self-hosting: that is, one can express the "language of languages" in the "language of languages" itself
There's something deeply satisfying about recursive tools who's inputs can include the definition of the tool itself. Brilliant.
I think we're still in the experimental phase of lots of novel types of social information exchange.
Building in public is very much an experimental form of communication. It's a new way to think and operate and it's not something with a strong set of conventions and norms. That means that you have to think much more about how you're communicating, not just what you want to say.
Building in community means sharing information with a specific set of people who have a shared perspective. Conventions and norms do exist and you have a good sense of how people will interpret and understand your words. This is the kind of context where it is easier to be more authentic and less performative.
I think that a good chunk of people who build in public whould say that they are actually building in community. They get the sense of a shared perspective and the community has established some its own conventions and norms. I don't think there's always a clear seperation between these two concepts.
As an interesting example of how these two concepts overlap is in the Zig community[0]. The community is decentralized - does that mean they are building in community AND in public?
So it turns out that when you outsource auth, you also outsource some of the governance on who can access your platform.
Isn't access control a set of patterns rather than a service? When did it stop being a core competency of web applications?
Is ROI in this case a measure of comprehension? What about the enjoyment and playfulness of metaphor and expressive language - do these have a negative ROI if they aren't sufficiently terse?
How far do you take efficiency as a measure of communication quality?
Did Kevin have it right when he asks "why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?"[0]
No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities.
Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce.
I've been searching for other examples of end-user programmmable tools beyond spreadsheets for inspiration. Anyone have suggestions of some other places these kinds of "folk interfaces" show up?
To comply with DNT, we pledge to delete user personal information such as IP addresses in server logs after no more than 10 days. We do this regardless of whether you set the DNT flag in your browser or not.
EthicalAds does not comply with the intent of a user who sends a DNT request. It's not obliged to, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the request has been honoured in some way.
We need to stop admiring those smart enough to understand how the software works, and start making the software easier to understand in the first place.
Yes, I agree. But I think it does take a lot of design skill to achieve the latter. Making the complicated simple is not an easy task. Hoare described a similar problem like this[0]:
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.
[0] The Emperor's Old Clothes (1980) - https://web.archive.org/web/20220428130737/https://www.cs.fs...
It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
The transition towards "a nonstop amusement drip" has been gradual and effective but it doesn't mean that the current situation was what people always wanted from the start. This has been the evolutionary journey of companies in search of maximum profitability. It has never been exclusively about what people want, it's also about what maintains profitable engagement and eyeballs for advertisers.
There's a general sentiment that people don't like the addictive nature of social media (see other comments in this thread). Social media users have become boiled frogs as the heat has been turned up on monetizing attention. I think it's fair to say that we've not landed on the optimal solutions for social networking just yet.
IMHO the current social networking market has reached an evolutionary dead-end. The platforms are all converging on a "content stream" model or group chat. I think that there are plenty more opportunities for digital social networking that get closer to what people really want but these opportunities are hard to see. Functional fixedness[0] is the biggest barrier to imagining what comes next but more possibilities exist than these.
The reality is that software is extremely expensive, especially polished software with a good user experience that's usable by non-experts.
I get your point here and I think this has been the case for so long that it seems like an immutable law by now. But, is it inevitable that software should be so expensive to produce?
How we write software today is largely based on ways of working and technical limitations that are not much different to what Fred Brooks wrote about in the Mythical Man Month. Brooks had some hope that programming languages would raise the level of abstraction we work at and that software design would shed much of its "accidental complexity".
Better programming languages could enable authors to work on problem solving rather than generating artefacts for machine computation.
The promise of better languages has been with us for a while but I'm not convinced that this avenue is as well explored as some believe it to be. The scope for these kinds of new abstractions isn't just drop in replacements for the programs you might write in C - it extends to other flavours of programming.
An example of progress here is how component libraries are used in web UI development. Mature component libraries require very little work to use and massively speed up development of "polished software".
Declarative end-user programming isn't a lucrative problem domain, but innovation in this space is still possible and could change the face of free software (both definitions) for everyone.
Progress like this could enable user communities to build, maintain and run their own platforms without the level of expense that currently prevents these kind digital commons from forming.
This is exactly why I think FOSS has become irrelevant for end-users. An open source client for a proprietary API only gives superficial freedoms and doesn't guarantee those freedoms will not be taken away.
The software landscape has changed so much since the conception of GPL and all it stood for. Back then, freedom was about expert users having autonomy over their own systems. These days, I think the real fight for freedom is about user communities and general end-users.
I think there is potential in the emerging field of community authored software. Community's coming together to build their own platforms is an ethos that I think has gained some traction and, if it builds more momentum, could become the next free software movement.
You don't often see such clear examples of where industrial design impacts the evolution of human practices.
It seems like the feedback loop works both ways - the available paddles inform paddling style and intended paddling style informs the design and manufacture of verities of paddles.
It would be interesting to explore where else these kinds of observable mutual feedback loops might occur.
It's a sign that you intend the company to survive.
I think the thing to remember here is that inputs should only be `type=number` where the semantic value is best represented with a numeric scale, not just where it is a number only field.
A simple way of determining whether to use type=number is to consider whether it would make sense for the input control to have a spinbox interface (e.g. with "up" and "down" arrows). Getting a credit card number wrong by 1 in the last digit isn't a minor mistake, it's as wrong as getting every digit incorrect. So it would not make sense for the user to select a credit card number using "up" and "down" buttons.
I don't think browsers can infer the semantic intent enough for this to be a fixable problem without some distinction in syntax.
Is this not just describing a community of people who have vivid imaginations? How is this an "uninvestigated emerging phenomenon"?
Text is definitely a more versatile, low-effort, high-value and ubiquitous medium that will never be beaten for human information exchange. It's perhaps not the best medium for all context but it is the best generic medium for interoperable information exchange (unix was right all along!).
Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations are probably the folk who experience books that way but, for everyone else, rich media provides more entertainment value than text alone.
The Metaverse is entertainment. It might be great for parties, games and other virtual interactions/experiences but it's definitely more a medium for novelty and sensory excitement than for pure information exchange alone (obviously).
“She didn’t know how basic stacks worked,” wrote one Facebook engineer, referring to a term used by the engineering team to describe how data is structured in computer programming. He said all of her testimony should be disqualified.
I don't know what's funnier, the poor attempt to discredit her or the terrible reporting of it.
The headwinds are indeed blowing against Facebook. Working there seems to be more of a career liability than something to be proud of.
The web browser product is a loss leader and the team's relationship to developers and users is not altruistic; it’s complicated!
This sums up exactly what has happened to the Web over the past decade or so. It got worse because of the design priorities of advertisers competing with the best interests of end-users.
If we're all collectively aware that things have gotten so... ambiguous, doesn't that mean that web browsers are ripe for disruption?
The IP/TCP stack is the real miracle of the internet, everything else is DX/UX layers on top. Creative destruction in this space is totally possible and the worsening experiences of both users and developers make it an increasingly likely possibility too. Vive la révolution!
Trust is about people and community, not automatic scans, arbitrary metrics, process, or bureaucracy. You can't replace a human judgment with an algorithm. Tools can only help make such a judgment.
Given the extent of the the Open Source trust problem, it's fantastic to see an human trust centred model like this.
Currently we know for a fact that there is a category difference between deep learning methods and human cognition. We know this because they are fundamentally different things. Humans have the capacity to reflect on meaning, machines do not. Humans are alive, machines are dead. Humans think, machines calculate. Do you need more evidence of the existence of two distinct categories here?
Whether GPT-3 can pass the Turing test or not doesn't prove that it possesses the same kind of intelligence as humans just that it can mimic the intelligence of humans. If you assume that they share a category because of this then you were probably already convinced. Everyone else is going to need a little more evidence.
The realities of dread and pain are part of reality - no doubt about that. So are joy and love. A pure materialist view would have to accept these realities without judgement.
We _want_ to be able to say that suffering and pain imply meaningless, but I don't think that is consistent with a purely materialistic understanding of reality. It is what it is - that's all that can be said.
The materialistic view takes an epistemological stance that precluded the possibility of the metaphysical. That's not the same thing as the actual non-existence of the metaphysical. Fiat money, power and the nation state are all concepts that don't have material existence yet these are realities non-the less. The material world doesn't set the limits to reality, just the context.
Even if you see humans/society as just really complex versions of a cellular automata (or composed of nested automata) you can't deny that the emergent properties are more meaningful/significant than the material realities that compose them. The material world isn't a panacea of meaning either.
Individualism is a closed system. Any attempt to find meaning in isolation as a lone consciousness is subject to the same kind of force as the entropy of closed physical systems. It becomes almost impossible to pattern match on significance because the dataset is too small and the variance in factors that might influence our thinking is too great. All Nihilists are focused only on their own existence because they fail to see reality as having meaning beyond the meaning they can individually make sense of.
I think we can only ever really understand ourselves as humans in relation to other humans. Our individual ideas about who we are can only form in context of our ideas about who other people are and in relationship with them. This is an open system where meaning is an emergent property. Life create meaning, order and structure in the context of complex systems. This is a force as powerful and pervasive as entropy but much less understood.
Meaning exists outside of ourselves.
PostgreSQL and even things like SQLite are fantastic tools for programmers with time to invest in learning them an their quirks. What a modern database could do that they can't is be comprehensible to a power-user. Modelling and querying data could be far simpler than SQL makes it.
A modern database language/interface would be far more useful to most than general purpose programming languages are. We can do better for end-users than forcing them to grapple with archaic `SELECT` statements. The crowd that have invested in learning the language already will disagree, of course, but far too many newbies self-select out of that group because it seems too complicated to them. It doesn't have to be so.
I get your concern but is it possible that your idea of confidence is shaped by a male perspective on how that trait manifests?
Encouraging a junior team member to have more self-assurance in their presentation style is one thing but routinely asking women to behave more like men is another. This same scenario could be seen either way depending on your perspective.
To address sexism in the industry we need to be able to have a reasonable conversation about these kinds of subtle and subjective differences. There are grey areas and we won't all agree but resenting the challenge to think this through is probably not a response that's going to affect change.
The possibility of a post-climate crisis feudal system is officially on the table. How terrifying.
Are they allowed to do that? It suggests a strong stance that the market rates of engineers is location specific not skill/capability specific. If you're part of a company that is built on a meritocratic culture, you should absolutely challenge this. You might even consider seeking legal advice.
Paying people living in one place more than people living in another place for the same work is a slippery slope that harms the interests of workers when it becomes acceptable practice across the industry. Maybe resisting the absurdity here could be your act of solidarity with those who are in the same position but without the freedom to speak out about it.