I just had a thought. A lot of people I hear talking about using LLMs say they use it to do things they don't want to do... Maybe I can use an LLM to use an LLM so I don't have to use the LLM? :thonking:
Am I the only that avoids app stores these days? I basically ignore them for discovery as my assumption is that they are basically overrun with low quality software from questionable sources. (This goes for the app stores hosting FLOSS stuff too.) Everybody wants an app store, nobody wants to curate it.
About the only time I go to them is to access a specific application I learned about from somewhere else. I was doing this before slopageddon. I can only imagine things have gotten worse.
Also, I learned this morning that Wookiees have discovered DJing!
If you need a jolt of energy and good vibes this morning, this set from Baalti and Lapgan could have what you're looking for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xzRL9iSlDg
Edit: Also, it should work for other time zones. It's just early morning for me as I toot this.
Seeing this reminds me of that time the Firefox project changed up how it was managing version numbers seemingly in response to the Chrome team basically incrementing an integer on every release. Versions as a proxy for progress is unfortunately real. 😆
TIL Neil Young had a cyberpunk phase about ten years before Billy Idol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MK2wWZ2vRQ
There's quite a few additional tracks on "Trans" that are of that flavor.
Obviously slopageddon is causing the general youtube experience[1] to devolve ever deeper into trash, and I keep seeing things like this post:
https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/117309052859417965
And it just feels like there is an opportunity for a youtube like service focused on curation (even the ads if it had any). It could be a cooperative even. Is there such a thing already?
[1] I basically only use youtube to seek out specific creators, and I generally do not find new creators on that platform. I find them elsewhere and follow links to their channels if they have them.
This weekend I took the kiddo to a thrift store and snagged a CD from 2006 I didn't have thinking to myself, "Oh sweet. That's a recent release I missed." It wasn't until I got home and started to rip it that I did the math. 🤯
What were the motivations of people doing the original work anyway? Better compression? (which is about the only application I have been able to come up with that doesn't immediately make my skin crawl)
I think giving people easy access to technology that makes it trivial to clone voices or likenesses is irresponsible at best.
Yes, the technology exists now, but you don't have to give your assistance to every random person that wants to use it. And I really have a hard time imagining any worthwhile or legitimate use for it.
This thought brought to by musing about (online) social media being mediated by physical location.
Say you want to hang out with one set of your friendly freaks, so you go to the location you've indicated is your friendly freak spot, and all social media is properly directed both in and out. No risk of leaking or collapsing context.
Then you need to get your public persona out and make some announcements or something, so you go to that public space you like with that old tree. Now only the public facing ins and outs are available.
Then when you're done being social, you go home, and it all turns off, or maybe is set to a very small subset of "family".
Anyway, I was thinking about that, and then I was just like, "Geez, computers are not the solution here. Get a grip."
I say "unfortunately", but I think this is actually okay. This means computers and computer controlled things are only usefully applied to a limited number of problems and may not be the optimal solution in many cases. Just like any other technology! Once you recognize that and identify a situation where a computer is not usefully applied, you can just let it go. You're free to not computer in that case! It's great!
Unfortunately, the affordances of the physical world will likely remain unmatched by the computer, no matter how much computer you throw at the problem.
As a person trying hard to be a decent human being, I want software projects that reject fascism so that we can build a better world.
Oh, it's also proven itself to be a useful weapon for fascists. :/
As far as I can tell, the main problem LLMs actually solve is stagnant valuations for certain companies. It's helped along by the usual people hoping to get rich "disrupting" things and by being a new tool to punch down at labor as well as being a strange messianic object.
Our brave forebears didn't haul themselves out of their burrows, scrounging for whatever scraps they could find to survive after the asteroid hit so we, the inheritors of their efforts, would just capitulate to a bunch of GPUs!
(This toot brought you by replacing yet another toilet seat.)
I've never seen "Cowboy Bebop", but I sure am enjoying this soundtrack:
In a manner similar to how the set of all integers is smaller than the set of all real numbers, I suspect that the set of "good uses" of technology is smaller than the set of "bad uses".
Further, although I feel this less strongly, I suspect that at any given point in time, the set of all "good uses" of technology is finite. It's possible the "good uses" set grows over time, but it would always be finite.
I can't prove any of this. Just a feeling based on destruction being easier than creation, and you know, entropy.
Anyway, with this in mind, we'd always have to be ever watchful because I think It's very easy to accidentally a "bad uses" of technology when you don't have "good uses" clearly in mind. The odds are stacked against us.