simonra

I am curious about your view on accessibility tooling. Often screen readers or speech to text tools would effectively be external pieces of software instrumenting for instance browsers through their APIs. And surely using local AI going forward could enhance the tooling while also making the users less dependent on a small market charging exorbitant prices for poor user experience. What viable paths do you see for users perfecting user agents for themselves when the big browsers further lose their plot and focus on what's fun to maintain or profitable to ship instead of optimising for every user individually?

Sure, but at what cost? How quickly improvements are delivered is one thing, but the materials and chosen process also come at a premium. And while it probably is worth it in aviation due to life and health being highly irreplaceable, the value of for instance my chat history or photos is certainly finite and quite low. Should they be corrupted, leaked, or worst case gone, it would somewhat suck. But at the same time I've effectively concluded that safeguards are worth about 0.4% of my monthly take home after tax, and when the yearly bill comes due I'm each time increasingly questioning whether I actually do value them even that highly.

School is where we show people that society will sacrifice them for others without consideration. So it would be on brand and efficient to let it be up to the parents convenience. And now that it's said that large swathes of employment will be displaced by language models, surely there will be enough manpower going around to have two or three shifts of teachers?

I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?

Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.

Wouldn't it be the same as what the tax authorities expect of street buskers, where something was done publicly (just here on the internet) and as a result randoms gave you money/cash (here again the digital equivalent) after the fact with no strings attached?

People who want their games to look prettier and run smoother than what you can get out of the thermal and power budgets of laptops would be the ones still buying the desktops. If you additionally value a not too noisy environment home, then water cooling is way better and more accessible in the desktop form factor (though this is still niche at least for the gpus where all-in-one units are basically non-existent). Laptops are by all means nice toys as well, but on the go phones are better entertainment while in transit, and once you're somewhere you left the comfort of your home to experience it's rarely for your gaming hobby (however it might be a setting where you're reminded that computers are still relatively cheap compared to certain music instruments or sports equipment).

Wouldn't "audience" and "people" both just be a proxy for "time" though?

Depends on where in the world you are, Norway for instance has not been using card chips for 2fa consumer auth for banking. Instead the 2fa has been a separate code generating gadget, and now also alternatively an app (which I do get the feeling the company that the banks set up handle auth for all of them are kinda pushing everyone into, but for now there thankfully is an option where you only need 1 online device with nothing more than a functioning browser).

The fine dining was a reference to high art in general, the frozen was directly addressing the worry that pizza places with human made pizza would disappear given cheaper better alternatives. I think the picture still holds. I've been to places that serve human made pizza where I think I would prefer some of the better frozen ones food-wise, but still went and enjoyed the experience (mostly for the social component?).

Similarly, a lot of the fine dining is about showing off an artistic creation that surprises and/or delights, not necessarily the food-artefact beating out others in price nor quality. (Ok, there's the whole show around it as well, but even the places light on the craftsmanship that goes into the ceremony are hard to imagine succumbing to cheaper and better/equivalent alternatives assembled/delivered home, which arguably exist.) I foresee the other arts now competing with LLMs having a similar fate to the fine dining scene. Not capturing the masses, but still doing fine.

Or perhaps ultra small scale brewing of beer would be a better picture now that I've slept on it. It follows the same pattern of most consumption being mass produced good cheap product, but somehow artists putting awesome hand made creations into the world is happening both commercially and by people doing it purely for their love of the craft, despite the prices being higher and the technical quality not rarely lower.

If all you do is complain you'll find yourself left out, for good reason. The internet is really not all that different when it comes to this, if you consume other people's emotional energy without ever giving anything back it would be unhealthy to interact with you, regardless of where or why.

The bigger issue is perhaps whether one views someone else politely pointing out something they would like to see improved/changed as a complaint. I suspect a not insignificant portion of users of English unfortunately would interpret it that way. However, the ubiquity of the LLMs might give us some hope that the sending side over time ceases contributing to the problem by saddling the people they wish to freely sacrifice their lifetime for them with their frustration.

The fine dining scene is doing well despite cheaper alternatives being available (ubiquitous?). So I wouldn't worry about the possibility of experiencing amazing hand crafted pizza disappearing, even if convenient cheap machine made frozen pizzas should become what most people choose experience regularly. And I believe the same goes for other art forms, people enjoy producing and consuming them, and the experience of top notch human productions will be available and no worse regardless of what the masses choose to spend their time and energy on.

Where we might get fucked over is if Bauhaus displaces architecture where some resources are allocated to form instead of all going to function because buyers are cheap. It would be impossible for individuals with taste but little resources to set out with to meaningfully affect the public landscape. But that ship has sailed almost a century ago.

As long as I keep hearing about the need for reducing meat consumption and supply chain slack (food waste), I'm inclined to think Malthus was right despite the limit turning out to be soil capacity rather than labour capacity.

Communication is a means to an end, a tool, not an end in itself, or something with intrinsic/unassigned value. Why would we want more energy wasted on focusing on the packaging (or worse, how the packaging is made) by drawing attention to it, instead of helping directing it towards that which actually matters?