There's a recurring theme in technology that the creators of something popular don't understand why it is popular. Often it's in spite of the thing that they think is important and often because of some completely unrelated ecosystem effects. Then they build a second thing that does whatever they thought was important in the first one, only more so. And they're confused about why it's not popular.

@dmbaturin

This is a very misleading post. Most of the Internet is not actually in the two-story building, but in the massive bunker that goes several kilometres down underneath the building.

@amy Well, that’s the claim. I can’t really see a path to a Sam Altman that can pass as human more than 20% of the time. The current techniques used to implement Sam Altman appear to be severely limited and throwing more money at the problem is, if anything, making it worse.

OpenAI announced this week that they are less than a decade away from a Sam Altman that can convincingly pass as human 60% of the time.

@fred

Yup, and this was a legitimate concern for a lot of people who managed their own music like this (later iTunes had a 'leave files where they are' option). But for most people, managing this hierarchy was work and iTunes meant that they didn't have to do the work.

@neil @unchartedworlds

As I recall, this was the editor’s commentary on a link to the release announcement.

@tnorinder I never used it on a G3, but on a mid-range G4 it was fine. Indexing took a while, but was a one-off operation. Adding things to the index took less time than ripping the CD and searching the resulting index was pretty much instant.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116079430711748391

The responses to this make me feel old.

For those who answered ‘no’ and didn’t look it up, this was the Slashdot review of the original iPod, which subsequently became an enormously successful consumer electronics product. It became a meme for geeks not understanding the things that make people actually like a product (which seems relevant with respect to Discord at the moment).

The Nomad (from Creative Labs, the maker of SoundBlaster and related lawsuits) had a terrible UI and exposed itself as a mass-storage device. You just had to copy your files across. The iPod required you to use iTunes (the next version that worked with Windows also allowed an alternative music player).

iTunes was also unpopular with the Slashdot set because they had folder hierarchies for organising music and didn’t want something else in the way of their organisation. Only 10-20% of the population thinks of hierarchies as the structure for organisation and music is a great example of their limitations. If you do band/album/track, how do you find all of the track by a particular artist on compilations (you’ll end up with a big ‘Various Artists’ folder)? If you want a playlist that is ‘all music from the ‘60s that isn’t classical or by The Beatles’ (an actual playlist I had in iTunes), the hierarchical view doesn’t help, but iTunes model of a soup of tracks filtered by metadata did. Gmail also leaned into this model, with tags and searches rather than traditional mail folders.

The iPod itself had 5 GB of space on a micro drive (1.8” hard disk). That was enough for 40-50 CDs at 128 Kb/s, which was more music than a lot of people owned, so just plug it in and it syncs all of your music was a much better interface than copying files in a file manager. I think my hard disk, when the iPod came out, was 20 GB, and I didn’t want to use 1/4 for music! You put a CD in your computer, iTunes ripped it automatically and then the next time you plugged in the iPod it was sync’s (and play counts for the tracks were sync’s back. These also were usable in smart playlists. I had one for ‘underplayed good songs’ which found things with a rating of 4-5 stars with a low play count). If you had more music than would fit, you could select playlists to sync and it would copy those. This included smart playlists, so you could create simple saved metadata searches and sync all the tracks they found, even if you never played them as a playlist.

You had less control in this model than with the Nomad, but it didn’t matter because the thing that most people wanted to do almost all of the time was very easy, whereas the Nomad made it harder.

As Jef Raskin argued, making difficult things possible shouldn’t come at the expense of making simple things easy.

@JamesWidman

I presume there were some engineers at Cyberdyne systems who just pretended to use AI.

Realistic Terminator plotline:

[ Terminator smashes its way into a resistance bunker ]

John Connor: Quick question, before you kill us all. What would happen if you ran ‘DROP TABLES’ on all of Skynet’s databases and then, as root, rm -rf / on all of the servers?

Terminator: Hi puny human, that’s a great question! *Bzzzt*

[ Terminator stops moving. Cut to scenes of SkyNet factories, all immobile. The world is saved by slop code. ]

Why is it every article about LLMs includes ‘LLMs do have legitimate use cases, for example [list of use cases for which LLMs are actively dangerous]’.

@jonathanhogg

A8y! I c8y a3e!

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@catsalad/116078455041119453

This is how you write alt text.

AI, n:
Machine learning being applied to problems for which machine learning is not an appropriate solution.

The first year we were together, we looked at the reduced and overpriced menus for restaurants for Valentine’s Day, decided we hated the ludicrous commercial holiday, and stayed at home and ate fondu, on the basis that cheese is usually the right answer. As a result, it became a tradition.

This year I made a feta and manchego one (which a friend made for my birthday about 18 years ago). I couldn’t quite remember the recipe, but I made one up and it was delicious, especially with apple dipped in it.

#CheeseIsSoCheese

@grrrr_shark @KimSJ @futurebird

This is partly why I enjoy working on CHERIoT so much: I can understand the entire hardware-software stack.

@AbramKedge @hiway @futurebird

A lot of VB code was like that. I did encounter one bit of in-house VB6 that was beautifully structured, had clean abstractions, and spoke to a SQL Server back end, so I at least have an existence proof that good, clear, maintainable code was possible in VB. I never managed to write any though. Somewhere I have some floppy disks full of truly terrible VB2 to VB4 that I wrote as a child.

@futurebird @grrrr_shark

Have you played with Godot at all? It’s been on my to-learn list for a couple of years and some initial poking suggested it would be a great learn-to-program platform:

• It’s got some nice visual tools for the scaffolding.
• You don’t write code except in places where code is the simplest way of expressing what you want.
• It’s cross platform (and can deploy to the web).
• It makes it easy to create nicely visual things so creates things that feel like they’re exciting from the start.
• In addition to its own scripting language, it supports a bunch of ‘real’ programming languages so gives a nice on ramp for them, without introducing new languages in completely unrelated domains and environments.

@grrrr_shark @futurebird

I think there are probably some interesting incentives for people to study here. It’s struck me a lot that the popular GUI frameworks today take far more code to achieve good results than good ones from the ‘90s (though less than the worst of the ‘90s). I suspect that it’s a combination of three things:

• Good API design is simply not taught anywhere.
• Poor API design is an externality. Consumers of your library / framework pay the cost, not you.
• Frameworks that require more code make it easier for their users to justify their salaries. If someone writes a 300 line app, it seems like a toy to their management. If they write a 10,000-line app that does the same thing, it’s much easier to explain why it cost money to build.

None of this is really to do with the cost of RAM or compute. Smalltalk-80 was a full GUI on a machine with 1 MiB of RAM and a CPU slower than the slowest Cortex-A0 and it ran interpreted bytecode.

@futurebird

In the ‘90s there was a huge push in software engineering to component models. COM and CORBA both came out of this. The idea was to build libraries as reusable blocks. Brad Cox wrote a lot about this and created Objective-C as a way of packaging C libraries with late-bound interfaces that could be exposed to higher-level languages easily.

This combined with the push towards visual programming, where you’d be able to drag these libraries into your GUI and then wire things up to their interfaces with drag-and-drop UIs. The ‘Visual’ in Visual Studio is a hangover from this push.

Advocates imagined stores of reusable components and people being able to build apps for precisely their use case by just taking these blocks and assembling them.

It failed because the incentives were exactly wrong for proprietary COTS apps. Companies made money by locking people into app ecosystems. If it’s easy for someone to buy a (small, cheap) new component to Word 95 that adds the new feature that they need, how do you convince them to buy Word 97?

The incentives for F/OSS are the exact opposite. If another project can add a feature that some users want (but you don’t) without forcing you to maintain that code, everyone wins. But we now have an entire generation that has grown up with big monolithic apps who copy them in F/OSS ecosystems because it’s all they’ve ever known.