Gregory's Server
What motivates open-source developers? This study claims that 89% are motivated by "helping others". If true, that's a rare bit of good news about humanity I would say.
https://opensource.com/article/21/4/motivates-open-source-contributors
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Today's #AIs are really just large statistical models gobbling up billions of data points from all over the internet and regurgitating them without understanding a thing. Like parrots. Super parrots. Very expensive ones. So I propose to rename AIs like #chatGPT #bard and #copilot to: "billion-dollar super parrot". IMHO it works well in conversation. When somebody says "#AI will take your jobs" you respond "Oh yes, all those billion-dollar super-parrots will do a much better job than me."  @J12t I enjoy the sentiment, but we humans are parrots ourselves, we learn from others and imitate/repeat. AI, parrots, can just do this at hyper speed, which will sadly push out low stakes or automatable work. This wouldn't be so bad if it were to benefit society at large and not just enrich the capitalist class:( The #EFF turns 33 today. 1990 was a different world, but those guys had the right hunch. Keep going EFF!!  Another from Douglas Hofstadter on #AI: choice quote: “I suspect that my university is not alone in our land in encouraging its thinkers to roll over and play brain-dead.” H/t @gardencourt @J12t @gardencourt Who am I to disagree with my hero Douglas Hofstadter? Yet, on this point, I do. https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/06/14/radical-just-in-time-learning/ So Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas #Hofstadter has a scathing piece on #ai like #chagpt in the Atlantic. I had been so waiting for his take … and he does not disappoint. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/godel-escher-bach-geb-ai/674589/  @J12t I would like to read that article but have been trying to read his book since 1997 or so and have only gotten a third of the way through, so I fear that reading his opinion piece will take a Herculean effort 😆 Where better to grow veggies than right here, right? What else is desert good for? Seen somewhere over Arizona I think. Humanity is strange. With #ai growing as it has, the next US presidential #election next year is going to be full of very realistic looking and sounding #disinformation pieces. Very possible that far more generated pieces will be shared on #social media than authentic ones, and nobody can tell the difference. Also, one side of the political spectrum will use it more, and benefit from it far more than the other. What shall be do about this to prepare? Nothing? What can we do? Apparently one can pickle #zucchini. Not particularly tasty, but acceptable. One way to deal with some of the monstrosities we found after merely being away for 8 days. “Tornado alley has shifted 500 miles to the east in 30 years” and other surprising facts you may not know (like me) about #climate change. The head of the #threads project says: "Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads - they have on Instagram as well to some extent - but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals." On Threads there seemed to be some push back on this. If Threads is just another Fediverse server then how they promote or moderate content is up to them. You can choose to use that server or not. Once it is integrated, I assume through my chosen server (newsie.social) I can follow anyone I like on Threads with a Mastodon experience.  Who, other than me, is pondering Geoff Moore Crossing-the-Chasm-style technology adoption cycles for the #fediverse right now? Want to compare notes? I have some thoughts and could use some feedback.  @J12t I was thinking about that some days ago, especially when it comes to other protocols (Nostr and Bluesky). Extremely curious to read your notes @J12t Sure, I looked a lot at Roger's stuff during grad school, and Moore came into the discussion too. I'd have to check some old conference papers, but drop me a line. #Instagram annual revenue per user is about $25, averaged globally. Will #threads revenue be higher or lower than that, if we assume threads is, as stated, instagram but for text? Twitter revenue per user was much lower at $12, with a more US-based (and thus richer) user base, in comparison. I’m asking because some of the company spend leading to this revenue could potentially be diverted into the fediverse, and the fediverse sure could use more investment. If we sssume that #threads will be just like #instagram once the user signups stabilize, and monetization / ads have been turned on, except for text (with picture annotations) as opposed to pics/videos … What is it actually useful for? The instagram user experience is optimized for passive consumption with minimal (“like!”) responses. How is that useful with text? Are Microblogging services (Twitter, mastodon, threads…) and (group) messaging services (WhatsApp, iMessage, telegram…) really distinct product categories? On the protocol side: ActivityPub and Matrix? Today they are. But why? They sure overlap in many ways.  @J12t They're all "number-independent interpersonal communications services". #threads is at 70 million accounts this morning. At this rate, they eclipse Twitter in mere weeks, and then the network effect turns negative against Twitter. So I expect everybody on Twitter to move to Threads in the next couple of months. I’m sure it will also suck out some #mastodon users — after all, there is a promise of #activitypub. So the #fediverse terrain has just shifted very considerably. How do we adjust and turn this to our advantage?
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@J12t I haven’t seen any shift here, just some posts about joining, seeing that’s it’s terrible, and being unable to back out without also leaving Instagram  In 2010 the social web was described as follows: "... still not a "first-class" citizen of the Web: Social applications currently largely evolved as silos and thus implementations and integration are inconsistent, with little guarantees of privacy and enforcement of terms-of-service." 13 years later this is just as true as it was then. But: the #fediverse, for the first time IMHO, has a some real momentum now. How can we deliver now at web scale? ("the social web" -- not just some corner) Reading the 2010 Social Web incubator group report of the W3C. It defines the social web as "a set of relationships that link together people over the Web." That's interesting. Is that still true in 2023? Still the best definition? https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/ Status: cheering for one feudal overlord (with a very bad history) over another (with an even worse history). When will democracy take root? |
