A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
I completely hear you (and think this “spectrum of technology” perspective should be much more of a thing) … but I feel like there are relatively discrete categories at play here, different types of technology and the tension between what choices we have between them and why. Maybe not just tech and anti-tech.
All good friend!
I mean that’s mostly to my point … 25, 29, and 27% … are not much better than 30%!
A fun enough graph, but the story is simple here … every where has 30-40% obesity. Fighting over which states have higher rates, by a few percent, would be missing the forest for the trees.
I mean kinda, yea … “brainfuck but good actually” Is probably a succinct way of putting the idea.
I hear what you’re saying … but earning a living may be a necessary priority after coming out of academia.
And it certainly is a weird time to set course for a new career.
I tried to go through the tutorial a year or so ago.
I can’t recall when, but there’s a point at which doing something normal/trivial in an imperative language requires all sorts of weirdness in Uiua. But they try to sell it as especially logical while to me they came off as completely in a cult.
It’s this section, IIRC: https://www.uiua.org/tutorial/More Argument Manipulation#-planet-notation-
When they declare
And there you have it! A readable syntax juggling lots of values without any names!
For
×⊃(+⊙⋅⋅∘|-⊃⋅⋅∘(×⋅⊙⋅∘)) 1 2 3 4
Which, if you can’t tell, is equivalent to
f(a,b,c,x) = (a+x)(bx-c)
With arguments 1, 2, 3, 4.
I wanted to like this, and have always wanted to learn APL or J (clear influences). But I couldn’t take them seriously after that.
The way I look at it, it’s either going to need some kind of collapse or we’ll all soon live in a techno-feudalist dystopia.
This where I’m at. And I’m now thinking that techno-feudalism is where we are headed (and are already TBH). I’ve just seen too many people exhibit gross acceptance of basically this destiny/outcome, to the point that the logical conclusion is the ground work for the transition was successfully laid decades ago.
I don’t want to be to too doomer, but I fear the complacency we or many may have. The lack of a willingness to dwell on what world we want for each other, the lack of values and conversations about them, the consumerism and doom-scrolling ©opium. Including, I’m sorry to say, presuming a collapse/reset is guaranteed. We may just end up serfs (again) because Facebook and Google were just too convenient in 2010!
How sure are you that the collapse is coming? Personally, I’m seeing people embrace this stuff without caring too much.
I’m starting to think if there’s a bubble, it’s deeper than big tech. And if there’s a collapse, it may not be of the industry but if things many of us hold dear. I’m starting to think sitting back and waiting for the collapse may be completely the wrong move many of us will regret.
Ya Rayah by Rachid Taha
Loved it on first listen and it made me a fan of Taha’s. It’s kinda Arabic pop rock but with traditional instrumentation.
If you like this, maybe checkout the album Diwan 2 afterwards.
I’m not equipped to teach you lua, the language, but you’ll find plenty of resources online, including those in the neovim documentation.
In the end the lua scripting thing is pretty simple … it’s a language that is general purpose though pretty light weight) and used elsewhere for good reasons. So if you want to learn about scripting your editor, with neovim, the language will be something potentially useful elsewhere. With vimscript, that’s not the case.
And maybe it helps for the dev team to not have to maintain a scripting language on top of everything else?
What’s people’s thoughts on the vim and neovim separation?
After being away from vim for a while, and never being a power user, I came back and opted for neovim because scripting with lua just makes sense to me. But the split feels uncomfortable.
Ok … as someone who knows only the superficial of Chomsky and similarly Epstein (apart from the big news items) … am I the only one wondering why or how the hell these two would be so close and even conspiratorial. Not that Chomsky’s a hero or anything … I just would never have guessed.
Was this Epstein big trick: networking really well; or was Chomsky also a giant dirtbag?
And it’s what’s happening here too. AI is just corporate control and monopolisation with new tricks.
It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.
I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.
I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.
In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.
BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.
This is written by the president of Mozilla, which important context I think.
Honestly, to me, it’s a worthy talking point in general, though it reads to me like a fantasy.
Which isn’t to mention that the issues they cite with AI may be intrinsic to the technology itself (and you can’t just sculpt historical metaphors however you like), and that what utility some have found with it may also have intrinsic issues or be, in part at least, attempts to patch over the ways in which technology/world has gotten shit (which is maybe the problem that should be solved).
I’m anti-AI, essentially, but I think this touches on what may be an important arc in all this (very speculatively at least).
Namely, maybe humanity had ~20 years to make tech “good” (or not bad), from 1990 to 2010 say, and failed. Or maybe missed the mark.
What that would look like, I’m not sure exactly, but I wonder how much your general sentiments are distributed amongst tech people — how much the average person who’s substantially touched tech is just over all of the minutiae, yak shaving, boilerplate, poor documentation, inconsistencies, backwards incompatibilities … etc etc. Just how much we’ve all been burnt out on the idea of this as a skill and now just feel it’s more like herding cats.
All such that AI isn’t just making up for all the ways tech is bad, but a big wake up call on what we even want it to be.
I mean, it makes sense that it’s addictive, right?
I also suspect it’s one of those things that just naturally splits people. For some, the addictiveness and appeal just don’t make sense. For others it’s irresistible.
It’s part of the reason why I’m so doomer on the state of things, from a generally anti-AI/sceptical perspective. There’s just something compulsive that this kind of tool triggers in many people.