A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.
Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.
I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.
Yea … you can just use a Mac.
I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.
The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.
Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.
This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.
Yea. Nice pickup.
Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.
well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.
The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.
And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.
Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.
And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.
Sorry … I don’t know what that is
I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.
It was never broke, why fix it?
Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.
I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).
But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?
That seems interesting!
In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:
Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.
The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.
I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.
It’s brilliant IMO (I haven’t seen the latest season but the one before … season 3 did feel like it was losing its way a bit).
The thing with mainstream super hero stuff is that it seems to very much about supporting the status quo without really examining it. Generally, the MCU has been pretty guilty of this AFAICT. It’s also why Winter Soldier is probably the best MCU film IMO … Captain America becomes “the enemy” by standing up for his principles and destroys shield.
The Boys is about examining the status quo and so stands out massively compared to all of the other mainstream superhero stuff.
The number of people I’ve come across who also dislike the character limit, the number of platforms that don’t have it, the number of times people write long microblogging threads and the prior and continued existence of the “blogosphere” count against this defeatist pessimism IMO.
The truly dark take here, IMO, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a medium’s configuration to shape not just the content and culture on it (that’s obvious) but the way its users come to think.
Yep this.
It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.
Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.
If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.
yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.
Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.
A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.
I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.
Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.
EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.
your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice
I hear you … most people are still there (I’ve claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).
But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I’m not saying there’s nothing useful on Twitter (I don’t actually know). But we’re talking about microblogging and social media here.
I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.
I suppose pointing out MS also owns linkedin isn’t the talk down you’re looking for?
If you’re a dev, this along with GitHub, and your employer using teams, is a pretty severe panopticon.