It occurs to me how fascinating I find all of the language tidbits that accrue around the tools we like using. Handles and taglines and slang, oh my! Just all of it: the names of obscure command line utilities, code comments, server names, API in-jokes, boot messages, slogans > tldr.txt
Especially satisfying is the passage starting at 3:48 or so. She holds a very long note over what I can only describe as intense humming. :-) Never fails to straighten my spine.
Just like every new teenager thinks they invented sex, every new programmer thinks they can create a free standing intelligence comparable to humans. #gentlelaughter
Hey, #chatbot dummies, here’s some free historical training material.
Check the record on Eliza, the Eliza effect, and J. Weizenbaum.
“I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” — J. Weizenbaum
I love that. He stopped, listened, gently suggested not being asshats, stopped, listened again, grinned, and walked off. Get flipped!
Okay, so I hope the basic idea is clear. This imaginary device simply brute-force generates every possible image for the resolution and colors we specified. It just keeps spitting out images, you see; I imagine them in a sort of slide show carousel. We are going to be dealing with a very large number here in a minute—but not to worry, it isn’t infinity, you won’t need any special equipment—and we’re not going to get all “mathy” or anything either.
Stairs erase up and down whereas ropes and slides insist on them. Too many ropes and slides in public software today. Don’t try to decide beforehand where users want to be; make it possible for users to get to where they want to get to in plainly reliable ways, then invite them for a climb or a plunge.
And no, I’m not ‘anti-elevator’…ach…this metaphor is deteriorating rapidly in earths' atmosphere…
Do these stairs go up or down?
To get at why stories seem to me fundamental building blocks of reality I have to backpedal and talk about pictures for a bit. ❡ Building blocks of reality? Dude, smoke another bowl… ❡ Pictures. We know what those are. Kind of freeze frames of the light available at some particular moment. Pictures of things, pictures of words. We consume and conceptualize them now as pixel collections, sometimes printed, mostly on screen.
As I was saying, telling a better story is important for me. I feel somewhat compelled to do it, if only in my head, but preferably also to create artifacts for future data waves. And what do I mean by better? More coherently truth congruent with repeatedly identifiable phenomena; the propositions therein match up with consensus reality; the shit rhymes. ‘But why stories?’, I pretend you ask. Because I’m convinced that in strange ways it is actually ‘stories’❡ that are the building blocks of our reality.