openrisk

Collapse or no collapse I just hope that somebody sets up a HN equivalent in Europe. Discussing technology in a meaningful and fun way becomes impossible when moral values diverge beyond recognition and this is now becoming our reality.

Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil.

Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.

Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).

Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.

Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.

The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).

Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.

You are probably right. I would not discount the importance of many open source tools for making viz more widely available (and far more powerful than excel graphs) but its indeed tooling, not conceptual and in any case already available for more than a decade. Stagnation indeed.

Visualization seems to have stagnated in the AI craze era. Lots of androids touching holographic screens and what not, as metaphors for the almighty "AGI" coming any day now, but cant recall a major new development in the last five years?

One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelming with the sheer number of data points. That is indeed the art of visualisation.

Hard to know how significant this is because its impossible to know what the political class (and many others) mean by "AI" (and thus its potential risks). This is not new, similar charades a few years ago around "blockchain" etc.

But ignoring the signaling going on on various sides would be a mistake. "AI" is for all practical purposes a synonym for algorithmic decision making, with potential direct implication on peoples lifes. Without accountability, transparency, recourse etc the unchecked expansion of "AI" in various use cases represents a significant regression for historically established rights. In this respect the direction of travel is clear: The US is dismantling the CFPB, even more deregulation (if that is at all possible) is coming, big tech will be trusted to continue "self-regulating" etc.

The interesting part is the UK stance. Somewhere in between the US and the EU in terms of citizen / consumer protections, but despite brexit probably closer to the latter, this siding with dog-eats-dog deregulation might signal an anxiety not to be left behind.

In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.

Remarkable story and a glimpse at how nasty vested interests can become as the world starts to second guess the sustainability of an entire century's worth of "growth" at all costs.

Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.

Most science papers are only read by a tiny circle of experts, maybe a dozen or so. The process still works out. The critical challenge is to have some quality human readership (instead of the AI bot brigade and random zero second clicks).

Theoretically the internet would have enabled the long tail, making tiny domain focused niches viable. In practice discovery is the most gamed algorithm in existence. Unless you have the resources and inclination to spend quality time towards useless "SEO" nobody knows you are alive.

There is a certain amount of "convergence" of good practices thats happening despite the exhausting trend following. E.g. people happily(?) wrote c++ code for decades but today there is strong pressure from the success of ecosystems like rust and python. Open source accelerates that competitive evolution as it improves transparency and lowers the threshold for adoption.

Software is a cultural artifact. It reflects the society and economy that produces it, just as much as music, literature, urban design, or cuisine.

So you cannot "destroy" software. But you can have fast food versus slow food, you can have walkable cities or cars-only cities, you can have literate or illiterate society etc. Different cultures imply and create different lifestyles, initially subjective choices, but ultimately objectively different quality of life.

The author argues for a different software culture. For this to happen you need to create a viable "sub-culture" first, one that thrives because it acrues advantage to its practitioners. Accretion of further followers is then rapid.

Not sure its my filters working to remove nuisance news but the "singularity" plot and "AI safety" seem a bit less prevalent these days? Maybe the nature of these algorithms is finally diffusing to wider audiences?