Me: There is no perfect setup…
The Internet: Hold my beer…

#humor #montypython #holygrail #theycouldbecarried #foundontheinternet #pleasebetrue

@davetron5000 Hello from Brazil. I have the same questions and no answers.

@bsletten So awesome. Barry Gibb is one of the best songwriters to ever live. One of the things that shocked me in my 3 years living in Australia (1990–1992) was that we never heard The Bee Gees on the radio (maybe because of “tall poppy syndrome” or because the disco backlash was still strong at that time). It was like Australia had disowned them. I hope that’s changed now.

Slow clap. Chef’s kiss. No notes.

Meme perfection.

#meme #humor #dialectic #foundontheinternet #selfreference

Has anyone ever written about the power politics of microphones, audio quality and how they influence a remote meeting?

I leave so many meetings realizing that the people who had the most influence on the call were those with the best audio quality.

I wish people would realize that those who are qualified to build statistically-based, optimized, data-driven learning algorithms are not necessarily qualified to evaluate the larger notion of consciousness, how the human brain works, or how purely inductive reasoning systems are going to magically become self-aware and terminally-misaligned from a goal perspective.

We aren’t remotely close to AGI and you’re being duped by people with a strong financial incentive to convince you we are.

#ai

600,000 new climate refugees in Brazil now

#ClimateCatastrophe #Climate #ClimateChange #flooding

https://archive.is/E7V49

@michaelkeeling @RuthMalan That’s how I got my copy of The Design of Design … it’s from Bucknell University, first checked out in 1980!

@RuthMalan I'm pretty sure that's right. I had first heard of it in the preface to Brooks' book, but it took a recommendation from @michaelkeeling before I actually sought out a copy.

@lambdasierra Here's a good follow: @jessamyn, a librarian who often posts about her experiences helping older or non-tech-savvy people navigate online complexity. Those posts are often quite revealing about how complex and impenetrable our systems seem.

@lambdasierra Yep. And here's another discouraging thing: when I have sampled the opinions of people who *don't* have those problems, a common theme is that we have learned to *slow down* when we're signing up for a new account, because we have to get it right and record everything very intentionally. Why is that discouraging? Because I'm not optimistic about the prospects for getting most people to change their habits in that moment when they just want to sign up and get something done.

Once again I was questioning the value of mastodon til I discovered @dailyHotWheels

@GeePawHill Wow, it really is. Thanks for the pointer.

It's a real shame, though, that the automatically generated subtitles overlaid on that video were generated under the assumption that it's in Spanish rather than Portuguese. 🤦‍♂️

@bsletten have you been to the Computer History Museum? I’m guessing so, but if you haven’t, it’s well worth an extended visit.

@marick Wow, I’d forgotten about that scene. Such a great book.

@marick @wallingf Erlang didn’t even have maps until 2014 (Elixir already existed by then). The implementation draws on the Clojure implementation. So the Erlang VM does use that kind of structural sharing, at least for maps over a certain size.
2/2

@marick @wallingf That’s a good post. I can clarify one thing. The first note says “The underlying virtual machine would be allowed to share common structure between my_map and other_map, so long as no user code can tell it’s happening. Some virtual machines, like Clojure’s, use such sharing heavily. I don’t think the Erlang virtual machine is one of them.”
1/

@wallingf @marick I would recommend that. The Elixir ecosystem has lots of good lessons.

In trying to describe how the things that are happening to us (AI, DNA editing, climate change, resource contention, autocratic leanings, etc) are happening together in self-reinforcing ways, I summarized it as “The Suarez Multiverse”. Imagine all of @DanielSuarez’s books happening simultaneously.

😳

@lambdasierra Good point … the real world doesn't give us much experience with orthogonality at all.

Here are the first 2 pages of the section on orthogonality (out of a total of 7). The whole thing is pretty good.