thomastjeffery

Copy and cut are just redundant steps anyway. In Linux (generally), you can simply middle click to copy the current selection. Maybe we could add shift+middle click (or something) to do a move instead of copy.

The deeper underlying problem is that we treat arbitrary UI/UX implementations as objective truth. There is one decided way your computer can be interacted with, and you the user must accommodate it. This is what I want to change.

Maybe not to your self, but it has a significant effect on the actual interactions you have.

Yes, but the context itself is still omnipotent to everyone who participates with it. It's not a bar if it's everywhere. Wearing a mask to the everybar is a way to compensate for the fact you can't leave. You must fragment your self to compensate for the global scope of the bar, just like using a struct to reinvent lexical scope in a globally scoped program. The problem isn't really solved, it's just semantically moved.

What we are really missing is the ability for expression to be subjective by default. When we participate in socially global contexts, everything we read and write must be coherent to the generalized expectations of the entire group of people who are participating in that context. Instead of your words being taken out of context, they are constantly assumed into the context, implying your own interpretation is objectively wrong. The meaning of every expression is decided and relevant, even when it shouldn't be.

Unfortunately that isn't a solution. When you keep separate identities, the only thing that can exist across platforms is your own participation. Everything you say and do is isolated to whichever identity and platform you are using in that moment. You still don't have the opportunity to exist completely, because your self has been fragmented. Even if you did manage to create a cross-platform identity, the product of your participation is fragmented, and every story you tell is objective to that platform's context. Even if you tell a story that links across platforms, you are still isolated to that specific cross-platform context.

It's a shame the title doesn't just include the word: "uni-context". It's a really useful and interesting perspective.

The other relevant word is "objectivity". There so many systems in our society whose context we surround ourselves with, it starts to feel like every subject is objective. The reality is that every subject is subjective.

I think one of the big drivers for this dynamic is that our social systems are facilitated with software, and we always make software as a uni-context. An application is a fixed context.

If we can figure out how to introduce subjectivity into software, that would be extremely useful for both computing and society.

So we're just going to let tech monopolists make accessibility impossible, are we? Fuck that!

That's even worse

I'm actually a fan. It's an excellent exploration of sarcasm: what you literally say in a sarcastic tone might have a metaphorical meaning, or it might be a twice application of sarcasm that loops back to literal meaning, like in deadpan comedy.

I second guessed my usage, but decided it was a good way to communicate my lack of experience and confidence in the specifics.

A random factoid that will always stick in my brain is that the damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the weight on an axel...to the fourth power. I suspect rerouting semis to the roadway is by far the greatest factor.

There is more here then pedantry, but if you aren't interested in it, then go right ahead and live your life.

I think it's a good distinction to make between having and being, which seems to be what the whole "stochastic parrots" bit was intended to make all along.

It doesn't make sense to say a model is in possession of its self. That's exactly the sort of poetic anthropomorphization that Bender was criticising here, and a good reason to not refer to an LLM as "an AI".

But the stochastic parrot (LLM) is the world model, isn't it? What's the difference?

How can you articulate a criticism without a repetition of your criticism becoming "inherently pejorative"?

You can't. That's just the way the news goes.

Essentially, what you are saying is that because some people somewhere frame a statement as pejorative, the statement itself is inherently pejorative. By that logic, every criticism ever articulated is inherently an insult.

How about accountability? How could that possibly be too much to ask?

They can't afford to buy every other successful studio, which means that their anticompetitive moat has to be competitive. Otherwise, they could have made the whole thing profitable the usual Microsoft (monopolist) way.

...more like

> We can't afford it, and it's a bad investment anyway

It's because people are too obsessed with providing complete instructions to incorporate any package manager into their instructions.

What we are really missing is an explicit progression from new software to maintained packages across distribution. As it is, each distro expects each package to have a maintainer, and very few people actually want to do that across several distros just to release their software. Generally, the expectation is to instead just wait around for people to make and maintain those packages by virtue of their own interest in your software, but it takes a while, and discoverability isn't automatic.

And none of them are in my living room, nor do they belong there.

The government does not get to put child locks on my liquor cabinet, or even keep me from leaving booze out on the counter. They get to restrict businesses from selling to people without identification. Note that this has already always been the case on the internet, too.

> I'd say it's not really so much a theory as a definition of the word "value"

And that's my point. It's a tautology that demands our participation, while at the same time literally devaluing participation itself.

If you want to understand my position, then you need to step out of that tautological frame, and consider labor as valuable. If you avoid doing that, then you are just avoiding what I'm trying to communicate here.

They say "arguing", but really this is about bickering. Arguments are constructive. Bickering is just engagement. I argue with people so I can construct my worldview, and maybe sometimes even construct the world around me. And, being honest, I occasionally find myself bickering, too; though I do tend to avoid it well.

Maybe that is the case. I'm definitely not an expert, just sharing my understanding of the situation.

I was glossing over that detail, yes. You can pay the municipality for filtered water, or dig a well.

If you dig a well, you probably own the lot, and also own associated water rights. Otherwise, you are paying for water processing and municipal reservoir management by the gallon. That's how it works for people in houses.

Your mistake is assuming a datacenter is more like that, and less like an agricultural consumer. It's the other way around. A data center and/or power plant handles its own water processing, which only involves water rights.

That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?

There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.

An identity doesn't need to be more than a public gpg key. Anything else is just what they (or anyone, really) say about themselves relative to a given subject.

Fun!

People in a town square still have identities. They are just likely to not know each other.

I think this is a significant part of a great idea. What it, and most/all other communication software is missing, is the ability to continue a conversation into a new context. It would be great to move a convo from the public square into a shop, then maybe share contact info to get together another day.

If I would have spent ten years writing the Great American Novel, but spent all my time working elsewhere so I could afford to live, then yes.

Why in the hell would anyone spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again? Because they have no intrinsic meaning to provide, or because their life has no meaning to reflect?

We may as well set aside this argument anyway, because it actually isn't relevant. If I accept your premise that the product of work is the only value in labor, then why are there specific categories of product that I can value, and others that I cannot? That's the situation copyright has put us in: if I create the right kind of work, but it's derivative, then that's a violation of someone's copyright. If I create derivative work, but it's the wrong kind, then I can't copyright it. The only kind of work that I can profit from freely is "original", which is a false premise to begin with.

So what is the alternative? Speculation. In a society without copyright, labor must be funded somehow. Rather than promise a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, we would simply fund artists who we believe will create valuable products. We already do this to a moderately significant extent: everyone knows about Patreon and OnlyFans. Most successful creators rely on ad revenue instead of royalties. The problem with this model is that it must compete with copyright holders, who get to monopolize entire swaths of derivative work, and leverage the guarantee of their already-performed work as much easier to sell than speculative investment. Get rid of copyright, and the market simply becomes fair.

Because you don't pay for the water, you buy the rights. Water is treated like an infinite source with a limited flow rate, and the source itself is sold as property.

The solution is not to price water as a commodity, either. If we priced water high enough to disincentivize waste, we would create an incredible burden for regular people. Water should be as cheap as possible, and at the same time regulated to guarantee an amount of conservation. People who can afford to more than double a state's power grid capacity, all for a single data center, can afford more water than the populace can afford.

What we need is to regulate water use generally so that the watersheds and ecosystems we rely on can be reasonably conserved.

Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.

The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.

> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses

In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.

You feel entitled to recompense from the publisher, because they are profiting from your labor. The problem I brought up is still there, just in the hands of the publisher, and not the writer. Now the publisher gets to profit from work they did not do, and you are lucky to get a good cut.

Your labor has value to everyone else, even if that value is speculative. If we don't have a mechanism to commoditize the ends of labor, then we can just speculate instead. Speculating the value of labor is more uncertain than valuing copyrighted works, which means that the business of labor speculation cannot compete with the business of copyright valuation. At the same time, copyright is a lie: the "product of a work" is a totally arbitrary imagined boundary that can't always be meaningfully drawn in the first place; meaning that entire categories of work are impossible to copyright at all. Removing that lie would put everyone on a level playing field, where all labor is valuable, and all valuation is fair.