It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.

I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.

I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.

In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.

BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.

It’s shit like this that makes me glad to be completely outside of the AI hype circus. It sounds toxically unhinged. In the sense that being into this sort of dynamic and vibe, I suspect, at some point, involves some unhealthy attitudes, desires, sentiments and directions.

Like, I suspect some anti-AI sentiments come from just finding it creepy to be into having a digital slave … and, conversely, being pro-AI must involve being into that kind of energy and dynamic to some extent, all irrespective of the productive aspect.

Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.

Yea I got the general or vague impression that this was reminiscent of their initial maps roll out.

Are any heads gonna roll for this?

I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!

Surprising twists there about the tomb having been vacated by Egyptians due to flooding with the second tomb yet to be discovered.

Thank you!

I’ve only watched the first minute or two, but I think I get the idea. Clickbaity generalisations etc … yea that makes sense and are obviously shitty (I guess I just expect that more from YouTubers who are otherwise reasonable people).

The whole “most research is BS” claim isinteresting though. I’ll be interested to see how the video addresses it. If we’re talking about >50%, and that it’s substantially imperfect in its constitution due to systemic issues, I dunno, I’d be interested in an actual investigation TBH.

Thanks again though!

as people are losing more and more faith in academic research and science

Counter argument: it’s happening with or without her and it’d be better to rationally highlight the issues rather than allow the uneducated to hijack the issue.

IME, the biggest deflator of faith in science etc for laypeople are their friends who left academia telling their own stories aligned with Sabine’s general point.

Broadly, I’d wager the erosion of faith in research is a much bigger picture and getting to the bottom of the causes is more important than getting precious about maintaining the status quo.

Sabine is the poster child for science populism. She got chewed out by academia for having mediocre research ideas and now she loves to claim that there’s a conspiracy to take funding from her favorite fringe fields and give it to the establishment.

Gotta say you’ve got me sceptical.

I don’t follow her closely and am no mega fan or anything. But it’s not like it’s uncommon for good people to get pushed out of academia for shitty reasons.

Plus, I don’t think you need to conjure conspiracy theories before you start arguing that there are dominant dogmas, cultures, practices and even some sort of “establishment”. I’d wonder how many fields of science don’t have some internally recognised “establishment” and “counter-establishment” ideas.

And I’m not sure I see the “poster child … populism” claim? Sure, she’s probably popular, but for my money she does a decent job of YouTube science. Not sure she’s a household name or all over tv or anything.

Got any more substantive links/sources about her being mediocre or conspiratorial?

Yes this basically.

I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.

But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.

A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.

Yep. And it’s a point well made.

To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.

That is interesting! Thanks for the tip!

Also, it’s their icon a community reference?

Thanks for this! I wasn’t aware a good independent fork of all of this had been set up (I’d kinda forgotten about conda-forge).

What about the package repos and conda forge? Apologies, it’s been a while since I paid attention to them (and Python packaging too). Does conda work well just against PyPI?

Oh I get you, and it’s an insight into the priorities and operation of the company. They’re clearly worried about snaring all of the “free loaders” as they move to a more extractive business model. And so there’s probably a bunch of people with licence quotas hounding anyone they can.

While I’m sure it was inevitable, especially in today’s climate, it saddens me to see Anaconda (and conda by extension I presume) go down like this. When they first came out it was such a breath of fresh air in the Python ecosystem.

I’m not sure in the details, but what’s the point in relying at all on any of their infrastructure? Is any of it independent enough?

Could be a pretty easy flag to be displayed on any community. Basically last time the mod logged in or was active (should be available).

Yea, and then being able to traverse the layers in a reasonable way when needed/desired without needing be stuck or live in one of those layers.

Working with some proprietary no code tools at the moment, and, yea, not letting people just program in a decent language is a mistake.

I’ve felt for a long time that continuous gradients of complexity with sensible defaults all along the spectrum is a general architectural pattern necessary for wide spread empowerment. But I don’t see anyone thinking in those terms. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels obvious. As you say, but everyone is going to dive into the source code. So let them find the level at which they’re comfortable.