Thanks for the reply! Makes a lot of sense to me.

And yea, names, Tolkien, and this series which is going pretty hard on correct pronunciation … Is a tough combination!

I hear you and I’m probably exactly the same! I’ll almost certainly watch it till its end.

Come back and let me know how you feel!

Interestingly, I’m kinda down with the orc stuff. As far as lore is concerned with, I don’t think Tolkien was every happy with what he’d done with the orcs, or at least felt like the ideas weren’t finished. That they are derived from elves is right there, thus Adar, and given that this is all supposed to still be “early”, and kinda not that long after the first age, it makes sense to insert some diversity from that. It’s not like the show’s orcs aren’t orcs, they’re still plenty awful creatures. They’ve just added some backstory and depth to the “race” I’d say, pretty much inline with the lore AFAICT. And also consistent with how Tolkien wasn’t entirely sure about having a race that’s intrinsically “evil” to the point that it gets passed directly or genetically on to its children. Given that their origin is through the torture of elves, it makes sense that they could be conditioned to revert and that being lead by Adar, an essentially half orc half elf creature, has that effect.

One could also argue that it adds weight to the harm done by Sauron’s work. That a truly better world could have come about had he not sought to rule it.

Yea, despite this being the era of TV, I’ve been feeling for a long time that something has been lost or taken away from TV. The small writers rooms but still under pressure to pump out content tracks with this.

Because streamers have shorter seasons, writers’ rooms last a shorter amount of time. There’s fewer episodes – something like six to 10 – on streamers, whereas networks would do 22

I suspect that there’s something essential to allowing TV to breath and grow and that that’s been taken away by streaming companies that see themselves more as movie studios. It struck me a while ago that TV seasons now are basically LoTR productions and are probably produced similarly. Written, pro-production and filming all happening in series and all at once. So, if it turns out a character just isn’t working in episode 3, or episode 5 falls completely flat, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late and has been filmed and wrapped already.

It’s gonna get edited and shipped and maybe they’ll try to correct next season, so long as they get renewed! On average, each episode might be better, or at least better produced. But I think it reduces the chances of those magical episodes where things just come together to produce classics.

Oh yea I hear you.

Thanks!

Yea, the “cheaper than droids” line in Andor feels strangely prescient ATM.

Not a stock market person or anything at all … but NVIDIA’s stock has been oscillating since July and has been falling for about a 2 weeks (see Yahoo finance).

What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype? There were open reports from some major banks/investors about a month or so ago raising questions about the business models (right?). I’ve seen a business/analysis report on AI, despite trying to trumpet it, actually contain data on growing uncertainties about its capability from those actually trying to implement, deploy and us it.

I’d wager that the situation right now is full a lot of tension with plenty of conflicting opinions from different groups of people, almost none of which actually knowing much about generative-AI/LLMs and all having different and competing stakes and interests.

AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.

What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.

Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.

1. Fix picking an instance. It’s an irredeemably bad UX, even for tech people who could run an instance if they wanted to. Gotta remove that as an initial UX barrier first, which would require a new layer of system with integration with all of the clients.
2. Accept that this isn’t like mainstream social media and likely never will be, even if instance picking becomes easier for newcomers. So instead focus on what can be done well here. IMO it’s customisable community building.

Currently all the big fediverse platforms kinda suck at this, in part because it likely requires a bunch of features, but also because they’re all made in imitation of big social platforms that were always less “homely” and more engagement farms.

To bring normies, something new and unique needs to be offered. IMO there could be a rich ecosystem of content and structures and communities that draws people in.

My fear is that the protocol and federation are the limiting factors on this, and so I suspect some restructuring or redesign is necessary.

Yea, instead of a default instance, I think there should be a default system that assigns you to one of a set of participating “general” instances without you having to decide or think about it.

Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!

Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.

It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?

I would think that it’s naturally an opt-in feature and therefore essentially fine with only a practical upside.

Yea I know, which is why I said it may become a harsh battle. Not being in education, it really seems like a difficult situation. My broader point about the harsh battle was that if it becomes well known that LLMs are bad for a child’s development, then there’ll be a good amount of anxiety from parents etc.

Similarly, heroes are emphasised in the film more and villains under emphasised. Sauron, Saruman and Denethor all having less screen time than mentions.

That Sam is relatively underplayed is interesting also. Pretty sure Tolkien is on record saying Sam is the actual hero of the story. Which is there in the film, but clearly with a preference for focusing on Frodo more.

Yea, this highlights a fundamental tension I think: sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, the point of doing something is the doing itself, not the result.

Tech is hyper focused on removing the “doing” and reproducing the result. Now that it’s trying to put itself into the “thinking” part of human work, this tension is making itself unavoidable.

I think we can all take it as a given that we don’t want to hand total control to machines, simply because of accountability issues. Which means we want a human “in the loop” to ensure things stay sensible. But the ability of that human to keep things sensible requires skills, experience and insight. And all of the focus our education system now has on grades and certificates has lead us astray into thinking that the practice and experience doesn’t mean that much. In a way the labour market and employers are relevant here in their insistence on experience (to the point of absurdity sometimes).

Bottom line is that we humans are doing machines, and we learn through practice and experience, in ways I suspect much closer to building intuitions. Being stuck on a problem, being confused and getting things wrong are all part of this experience. Making it easier to get the right answer is not making education better. LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn’t be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn’t too far away.

All that being said, I also think LLMs raise questions about what it is we’re doing with our education and tests and whether the simple response to their existence is to conclude that anything an LLM can easily do well isn’t worth assessing. Of course, as I’ve said above, that’s likely manifestly rubbish … building up an intelligent and capable human likely requires getting them to do things an LLM could easily do. But the question still stands I think about whether we need to also find a way to focus more on the less mechanical parts of human intelligence and education.

What difference does it make?

Sure, but IME it is very far from doing the things that good, well written and informed human content could do, especially once we’re talking about forums and the like where you can have good conversations with informed people about your problem.

IMO, what ever LLMs are doing that older systems can’t isn’t greater than what was lost with SEO ads-driven slop and shitty search.

Moreover, the business interest of LLM companies is clearly in dominating and controlling (as that’s just capitalism and the “smart” thing to do), which means the retention of the older human-driven system of information sharing and problem solving is vulnerable to being severely threatened and destroyed … while we could just as well enjoy some hybridised system. But because profit is the focus, and the means of making profit problematic, we’re in rough waters which I don’t think can be trusted to create a net positive (and haven’t been trust worthy for decades now).

I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.

I mean, yes of course. But I don’t think there’s any way in which it is just about that. Because the business model around having and providing services around LLMs is to supplant the data that’s been trained on and the services that created that data. What other business model could there be?

In the case of google’s AI alongside its search engine, and even chatGPT itself, this is clearly one of the use cases that has emerged and is actually working relatively well: replacing the internet search engine and giving users “answers” directly.

Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop.

IMO, to ignore the “carnivorous” dynamics here, which I think clearly go beyond ordinary capitalism and innovation, is to miss the forest for the trees. Somewhat sadly, this tech era (approx MS windows '95 to now) has taught people that the latest new thing must be a good idea and we should all get on board before it’s too late.

I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.

What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy “everything portals”.

Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they’re now more like their original competitors than their original successful self … but that’s a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.

The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn’t just about “stealing” content, it’s about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.