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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#241

Post by Mithriil »

zkmon wrote: post #40

You are mistaken. The future is defined by the common man on the steet. Those are the same people who use Whatsapp, Facebook and instagram accounts heavily and regularly. They will soon become the biggest drivers of AI adaption. The techies are drop in the ocean. You may build a new tech or device, but the adaption is driven by the crowd who just drift away without a pinch of resistance.

But then the pinch of resistance makes an island of likewise thinkers. And there doesn't need to be more than .05% of techies to make great products that otherwise anti-correlate with what people claim as inevitable.

We should stop with over-generalization like "The future is defined by the common man on the street." It's always much more complex than that. To every trend, there is a counter-trend (even sometimes alt-trends that are not actually opposites).

Re: This is not the future

#242

Post by the_other »

dpedu wrote: post #91
titzer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely di…

The MacOs settings redesign really bothered me too. Maybe it's the 20+ years of muscle memory, or maybe the new one really is that bad, but I find myself clicking around excessively and eventually giving up and using search. I'm with you here.

It's got a bunch of problems.

- some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one

- loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck

- following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges

- it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags

- they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird.

- don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel

Re: This is not the future

#243

Post by codyb »

The less I use tech these days the happier I seem to be.

I'm basically down to Anki cards, Chrono Trigger, and the Money Matters newsletter on my phone (plus calls and messaging).

Recently I've dropped Youtube in favor of reading the New Yorker's that're piling up more frequently.

Is it just me or is software actively getting worse too? I feel like I'm noticing more rough edges, the new Mac OS update doesn't feel as smooth as I use to expect from Apple products.

Life is just calmer, get an antenna and PBS, use your library, look at the fucking birds lol. The deluge of misinformation isn't worth it for the good nuggets at this point

Re: This is not the future

#244

Post by wasteofelectron »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously.

This is an extremely crude characterisation of what many people feel. Plenty of artists oppose copyright-ignoring generative AI and "get" it perfectly, even use it in art, but in ways that avoid the lazy gold-rush mentality we're seeing now.

Re: This is not the future

#245

Post by tolerance »

polshaw wrote: post #231
jjice wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like the "everything is political" sentiment. Sure, lots of things are or can be, but whenever I see this idea, it usually comes from people who have a very specific mindset that's leaning further in one direction on a political spectrum and is pushing their ideology. To clarify, I don't think pushing an ideology you believe in by posting a blog post is a bad thing. That's your right! I just think I ha…

Your introductory paragraph comes across very much like "people who want to change the status quo are political and people who want to maintain it are not"; which is clearly nonsense. "how things are is how they should be" is as much of an ideology, just a less conspicuous one given the existing norms. >Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political? I am much closer to agreeing with your t…

> Your introductory paragraph comes across very much like "people who want to change the status quo are political and people who want to maintain it are not"; which is clearly nonsense. "how things are is how they should be" is as much of an ideology, just a less conspicuous one given the existing norms.

With respect, I’m curious how you read all of that out of what they said...and whether it actually proves their remarks correct.

Re: This is not the future

#246

Post by lioeters »

ben_w wrote: post #93
Juliate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping. I do wonder who the AI er…

"Arguably we would have been better off knee-deep in horse manure." -- MarxGPT

Re: This is not the future

#247

Post by mghackerlady »

imperio59 wrote: post #232
rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

So are photos that are edited via Photoshop not art? Are they not art if they were taken on a digital camera? What about electronic music? You could argue all these things are not art because they used technology, just like AI music or images... no? Where does the spectrum of "true art" begin and end?

They aren't arguing against technology, they're saying that a person didn't really make anything. With photoshop, those are tools that can aid in art. With AI, there isn't any creative process beyond thinking up a concept and having it appear. We don't call people who commission art artists, because they asked someone else to use their creativity to realise an idea. Even there, the artist still put in creative effort into the composition, the elements, the things you study in art appreciation classes. Art isn't just aesthetically pleasing things, it has meaning and effort put into it

Re: This is not the future

#248

Post by BloondAndDoom »

rng-concern wrote: post #176
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

No doubt, but if your Starcraft experience against AI was "somehow" exactly same with AI, gave you the same joy, and you cannot even say whether it was AI or other players, does that matter? I get this is kind of Truman Show-ish scenario, but does it really matter? If the end results are same, does it still matter? If it does, why? I get the emotional aspect of it, but in practice you wouldn't even know. Now is AI at that point for any of these, possibly not. We can tell AI right now in many interactions and art forms, because it's hollow, and it's just "perfectly mediocre".

It's kind of the sci-fi cliche, can you have feelings for an AI robot? If you can what does that mean.

Re: This is not the future

#249

Post by jlawson »

rmah wrote: post #123
Terretta wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nature . Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?

Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.

Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.

Re: This is not the future

#250

Post by nodenoise »

reedlaw wrote: post #162

This concept is also known as Borg Complex: https://thefrailestthing.com/2013/03/01/borg-complex-a-prime...

"Marshall McLuhan once said, 'There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.' The handwaving rhetoric that I’ve called a Borg Complex is resolutely opposed to just such contemplation when it comes to technology and its consequences. We need more thinking, not less, and Borg Complex rhetoric is typically deployed to stop rather than advance discussion. What’s more, Borg Complex rhetoric also amounts to a refusal of responsibility. We cannot, after all, be held responsible for what is inevitable. Naming and identifying Borg Complex rhetoric matters only insofar as it promotes careful thinking and responsible action."

This is great, thanks for the link.

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