Notices by ælena mxaffee (cobaltvelvet@octodon.social)

so anyway, all of this is just marketing department managers going into a collective fever dream. none of it is good, useful, revolutionary, or relevant

the whole idea of 'personify the tool, making the interface as intuitive as a person' is standing on many assumptions, most of them being the imagination at the interaction of 'rich guy' and 'loves science fiction'

what was easy to show into a film or describe in a book in the last 50 years is, to the surprise of everyone, not exactly the peak of user interface

chat bots tried to practically replace web sites for a decade but it never worked because natural languages are an infinitely complex and ever changing mess, as it turns out, and 'it will work better if we trick ppl into thinking they're talking to someone' is not really a thing and you should just display the dozen available options plainly

ultimately i think chat-based computer interfaces are just another of those things that capitalists will bet their lives on but will never really catch on because it's pretty bad. there were many pushs towards this, the lln chatbots being only the latest one

AI Scientists hard at work printing all combinations of amounts and unit conversions into a text file ' we have achieved a new breakthrough in artificial intelligence based computation ' ' please only input numbers under one million '

it is deeply fascinating how bitcoin bros get so easily sold on the idea that shit 'on the blockchain' is moved to a whole new plane of existence beyond any meaningful concept of 'decentralisation'

oh just put the supply chain on the blockchain and it won't be vulnerable to physical issues anymore. oh no you can't hack it it's on the blockchain. no this economy can't crash there's math that i don't understand trust me bro

there's something pretty spiritual in this, even. with enough obfuscation your software reaches heaven

people have been experimenting and practicing this kind of 'ultimate' decentralisation for decades before bitcoin. i mean here cases where data is spread and in a way that you cannot know where it phisically is, which is not even what bitcoin or subsequent blockchain do. it works terrifyingly well, and it's still somebody else's computer, but at least admitting that the computers are common to be shared

comparatively to those, bitcoin has a funny quirk of progressively demanding higher power, meaning that in any catastrophic event (or just contemplating its power consumption) it's completely fucked. they love to dream of post-apocalyptic blockchain but no blockchain can survive even a mild computing power reduction

proof of work and proof of stake both, along with all the blockchain nonsense, instead of decentralisation, are a recentralization around capital, in a way that the centralised web couldn't achieve on its own because it was still dependent on fundamentally distributed early-web tech

i think i went away from the whole 'robots deserve rights' thing on two main points
- what we call 'robots' is and will revolve around the most practical, least amount of automation. it's simply a sophistication of the tool
- calling anything sentient 'robot' would be an affront and declaration of war and exploitation on its own
therefore if your society has to give 'rights' to 'robots' you've already fucked everything