Tag: Mastodon

Selvfølgelig er det vilkårligt spild. Hvordan skulle økonomien ellers kunne hænge sammen?

*Tinfoil hat on*

I doubt it’s a coincidence that the last 10, 15 years things like cryptocurrencies, “metaverse”, “AI” are becoming popular, just as “lines” in the computing industry flatten: as the computer has been perfected, an _economy of waste_ is created to sustain appetite for growth.

Computers (phones, tablets &c are computers) have become longer term investments; even if you have abundant money, the latest devices aren’t necessarily upgrades that bring anything new to the table. We’ve _done_ computing, we finished it back in 2010s mostly.

That’s a plateau in demand for new devices, or it would be, w/o the saviour of computing wastage industry. Cryptocurrency wastes storage and processors, “AI” wastes memory and processors, “metaverse”, ads, cloud etc waste networking bandwidth. So we use much more computing resources than we need.

Computing wastage also inflates the income of fossil fuel industry. Its useless activities and the infrastructure to support all that is powered–where it’s not pure speculation and is actually built out–frequently by dirty electricity.

I think that explains a lot about govt & corpo interest esp in “AI” right now. It’s a growth driver. It’s a line mover upper. It’s a conduit of money to an otherwise stagnating tech and dirty energy sector.

*Tinfoil hat off*

Göktuğ Kayaalp på Mastodon – link til indlæg

Håndklæde i ringen – men altså, beslutsomt

Framing legislative social media bans for kids as a triumph against tech giants is a mistake I think. I see it as an admission of failure to impose any meaningful regulation on any of the corporations & as essentially admitting defeat & ceding the territory to them after erecting a makeshift fence.

RealHackHistory på Mastodon – link til indlæg

Personlighed som metafor – eller som illusion

I’ve never had an issue with the anthropomorphization of digital processes. When someone says “if you enter this kind of command, the tool knows that it needs to look up this thing over here”, it’s an adequate metaphor of what’s happening, and the language flows well. People get a decent visualization of boxes and arrows in their heads that captures what the processes are doing.

It’s different when you’re anthropomorphizing an LLM. Please don’t, be very technical and precise about what it does. There’s a kind of uncanny valley of behavior that makes the metaphor collapse.

Clacke på Mastodon – link til indlæg

Indgroet ubehag

People learn to use terrible UI all the time. It’s not good to dismiss complaints about UI, because that’s insular. And the insular quality isn’t very welcoming.

But email remains a dominant force in communication. If email were invented today everyone would have to use gmail or not be able to email someone not on the same service. A few crazy people would talk about “open email” and try to get people to try it.

– Mymepropagandist på Mastodon (link)