2024-12-07 01:00:00
Casey Newton on Platformer: The Phony Comforts of AI Skepticism
The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.
As is a common theme on this blog, I come back to the idea that internet discourse causes people to fall into very binary views of current events. There’s plenty of appetite for AI boosters who think it’s a bigger invention than fire and critics who think it’s just autocorrect with new branding, but nuanced opinions are harder to come by. For my part, I’m skeptical of many of the hype beasts’ claims, especially in how they want to apply AI to everything even if it’s not actually bringing user value, but I feel like I’d have to stick my head in the sand to say that it’s useless and just a glorified autocorrect.
On a related note, I was in a friend’s Tesla recently and they used autopilot to drive us from one location in town to another. I’ve been a self-driving skeptic for years, and I do still think we’re further away from it than the True Believers think we are, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed with how well it got us where we were going. I was similarly impressed with my Waymo experience earlier this year. Again, I don’t think my friend is going to be letting his Tesla taxi people around all day while he’s working or anything anytime soon, but I can see that progress is being made in this space.
Ultimately, my feelings are that skepticism of new technologies is very healthy, especially when they’re a wave of boosters out there suggesting this is The Next Big Thing and you gotta invest now, but I think that it’s important to let your impressions of tech evolve over time as well.
2024-12-06 22:30:07
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her new Flight Simulator obsession, we go on a tangent about PC gaming, Chris (who says he’s an iPad guy) brings another Mac to talk about, and I had the gang look for amazing open source software.
As always, listen in your podcast app of choice, or watch on YouTube.
2024-12-06 22:00:43
It turns out video games really can impact how you view the world.
2024-12-06 07:28:32
Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a product that has such a clear downside. I’ve gotten people ask how I can use Things since it doesn’t have shared task lists. More recently I was told the monitor I wanted to get would have been outdated in 2008 because it didn’t have Thunderbolt or 5K resolution.
Here’s the thing, neither of those things impacted my use of the product at all, so their omissions don’t make me feel anything at all.
A core thing that people seem to forget sometimes is that different people have different needs from the things they use. And even if there’s overlap in what people want, they may rank those things differently. If we focus on the display example above, there are tons of variables that go into choosing a computer display. Cost, resolution, brightness, viewing angle, response time, refresh rate, display tech, physical design, inputs, and more go into your choice, and different people want different things. I know a good portion of the “Apple Twitter” (I know we’ve moved on, but you know what I mean) population sets 5K resolution, physical design, and Thunderbolt input as the core features they want. They certainly wouldn’t turn away higher refresh rates, more inputs, or a lower price, but they’re lower priorities for them.
Meanwhile, I prioritize refresh rate, display tech, and inputs more because those impact my use case more significantly. Of course, I wouldn’t mind some of the other features to be better, but I care about them less and others don’t impact me at all.
All that being said, it’s a lesson in empathy, and it’s a reminder that most of us could use every now and again (including myself).
2024-12-02 22:30:09
Why nothing stays popular forever.
2024-11-28 07:33:15
Bluesky has the juice right now, and while it’s slowed down a bit this week, they were adding over 1 million users a day for a bit last week. One sentiment I’m hearing a lot recently is that Bluely “feels like early Twitter,” which to be fair, I feel as well.
But you don’t have to look back too far to see this “it feels like early Twitter” sentiment thrown around for other networks. Here’s John Gruber about Mastodon in January 2023:
Mastodon.social feels like early Twitter both culturally (good), and fail-whale-wise (not good).
Here’s another one about Mastodon in November 2023:
I joined the social media platform Mastodon a year ago. Given recent turbulent social media trends, I’m glad I took the plunge. Having been on Twitter (yes, I know it’s been renamed “X”, sue me) since 2009, I’d describe Mastodon as the old Twitter.
An iconically early, here’s The Verge in 2017:
But for anyone who misses “the old Twitter” — the days of purely chronological timelines, no ads, and an inescapable flood of harassment — Mastodon can feel like a haven.
But it’s not just Mastodon, here’s a few quotes about Threads:
Threads feels like Twitter used to, many years ago, with features and options that are built with the hindsight of Twitter use over the past few years.
Threads right now feels like the early days of Twitter, back when it was fun and welcoming.
Threads felt like the old Twitter when it started too.
So yeah, the real question to me about new social networks isn’t really if they feel like the early days of Twitter, but what happens after they pass that first impressions period. In my opinion, Mastodon has leveled out to be a great place to talk with nerdy people (aka my core demographic!), Threads has turned into an engagement bait hell that I don’t enjoy browsing much at all right now, and Bluesky still has that “first week of school” energy. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the long run, but the last few years have taught me that this “old Twitter” vibe will fade and the network will adopt its own identity.
But hell yeah, if you dig it right now, enjoy it while you can! Maybe it’ll last, maybe it won’t, but it’s so easy to get sucked into despair pits on the internet, so lean into what makes you happy.