On MacOS I use multiple desktops, and I have Finder assigned to "All Desktops" since it is useful to interact with so many other apps. For several major OS releases now, this setup causes any open Finder windows to render on top of all other windows for ~1 second when switching desktops. It creates an annoying lag, and pollutes what would otherwise be a smooth, pleasant experience.
I thought Musk was pretty cool when he was just the guy making EVs and reusable rockets happen. I didn't even mind his over-optimistic projections, it's hard to be mad at optimism. But then he started becoming more of a public figure. He called that rescue worker a 'pedo guy' just for turning down a bad idea. He started broadcasting his philosophies, and they were mostly gross. He bought Twitter and made it so everyone had to see his dumb tweets. He revealed himself as a big, moist wad of lies and insecurities.
I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software.
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle
It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.
Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
This has been my suspicion since LLMs began eating the Internet. Whether it's code or writing, now that LLMs are consuming their own output, the Habsburg Jaw[1] is going to quickly become evident. It is very difficult--sometimes impossible--to know whether a given chunk of input is wholly or partially generated by an LLM. Nevertheless, filtering input may become a critical task. That expense will be passed to the consumer, and LLM prices will necessarily rise as their quality diminishes. It could become a death spiral.
If so, I, for one, will be relieved. I'm tired of LLMs trying to take over the enjoyable parts of writing and coding, and leaving the menial tasks to us humans.
Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest.
That makes sense to me, because if their models start getting worse because there's slop in the training data they can detect that and take steps to fix it.
Their entire research pipeline is about finding what makes models that score better! Why would they keep going with a technique that scored worse?
> Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest.
AI labs are insufferable hype machines, they are unlikely to sow doubt about their own business models.
> they can detect that and take steps to fix it.
Each model will need an endless diet of new content to remain relevant, and over time, avoiding ingestion of LLM output (and the accompanying inbreeding depression) will likely be a tricky proposition. Not impossible, but expensive and error-prone.
I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue.
I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.
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