locallynonlinear @ locallynonlinear @awful.systems

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Commoditization is a real market force, and yes, it will come for this industry as it has for others.

Personally, I think we need to be much, much more creative and open to understanding ourselves and the potential of the future. It's hard to know specifics, but there is broad domains.

Lately, I've been hacking at home with more hardware, and creating interesting low scale, low energy input systems that help me... garden. Analyzing soil samples, planning plots and low energy irrigation, etc, etc. It's been fun because the work is less about programming in depth and more broad systems thinking. I even have ideas for making a small scale company off this. At that point, purely the programming won't be the bottleneck.

If it helps, as an engineer, take a step back and think about nature and how systems and niches within systems evolve. Nature isn't actually in the business of replacing due to redundancy, it's in the business of compounding dependency via waste resources, and the shifting roles as a result of that. We need to be ready to creatively take our experience, perspective, and energy gradient to new places. It's no different for any other part of nature.

since there’s nothing you can do to stop some asshole company from pilfering your code.

Currently. Though I think that there is a future where adversarial machine learning might be able to greatly increase the cost of training on pilfered data by encoding human generated inputs in a way that runs counter to training algorithms.

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this),

It's worse than that, because there's been incredibly simple, efficient ways to k-sample a stream with all sorts of guarantees about its distribution with no buffering required for centuries. And it took me all of 1 minute to use a traditional search engine to find all kinds of articles detailing this.

If you can't bother learning a thing, it isn't surprising when you end up worshiping the magic of the thing.

I think something like UBI will succeed but it won't look to us like UBI. Like, maybe it seems stupid, but as far as political systems go, the key is persuasion in absurdity and narrative. To persuade people into UBI it has to be dressed up politically as --something else-- in the same way that all kinds of welfare (social and corporate) tends to get simultaneously denied and reinforced with conflicting narratives.

Once enough disparate and contradictory parties are convinced that "more of the good guys benefit from this than the bad guys", it gets locked in and becomes political cannon. Until later when the political systems feint undoing it again for a different set of points.

I want to live in space where it's safer.

Good, we feel the same way about that.

Paradoxically, I think they literally are swimming in self shame. A lack of processing that shame is why dumping five more pounds of it into their psyche doesn't effectively alter any part of their behavior.