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whytaka

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While financialized society is still standing, I'd much rather have money than material wealth.

Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.

But people are expected to understand the part of the system they are responsible for at the level of abstraction they are being paid to operate.

This new arrangement would be perfectly fine if they aren't responsible when/if it breaks.

I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.

Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.

My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.

Surely that's more Western philosophy than Christianity. If anything, Christianity impeded social progress. Even now, the most vocal Christians would contend that moral truths owe to scripture than reason.

Two problems from what I've seen so far:

1. Browser navigation overlapping website viewport in iOS Safari. What is the real height of the viewport?

2. Floating side panel on macOS: necessitates needless extension the app body. Also, the App close button is in the side panel, which is floating IN the app body. This seems like a betrayal of their so called structure philosophy.

"The best design is design that gets out of the way" as a maxim will probably hold.

Users may state a preference for "delight" and claim to be delighted by maximally rich graphics but I doubt it'll move the needle as a business priority.

As more AI slop pollute our digital consumption streams, my bet is that these attempts at simulacrum will quickly turn garish.

Even if one were to deny humans the will to "act", to think - as a verb, as some action being committed by a willing being or an automaton - by my definition, requires some weighing or surveying of possible answers.

If I were to ask you a question and you were to blurt out an answer by reflex or by unguided stream of consciousness, I can accuse you of not thinking. The kind of thinking I'm referring to you here is one where you take pause to let go of prejudices and consider alternatives before answering.

I'd say that LLMs are at best simulating reflexive streams of consciousness. Even with chain-of-thought, it never pauses to actually "think".

But maybe even our own pauses are just internal chains of thought. Look at me be a reflexive stream of consciousness.

It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.

CODE teaches you about how computation can be structured out of circuits and switches and ultimately transistors. I now understand the fundamental nature of electronic computation.

UNIX taught me about the how an OS deals with hardware resources and the software that run on them. I now understand the environment in which my processes live as well as the structure of a process.

DDIA taught me about the structure of data, how databases operate on data through transactions, the difficulties of synchronization across databases, and the way data streaming works.