A weird part about minimalism is you get excited about getting rid of stuff that the average consumerism-minded person gets excited about acquiring.
A friend exclaims about getting a new mechanical keyboard, while I express the lightness I feel after selling mine and just using the perfectly fine laptop keyboard.
Do I really need a more visceral keyboard experience or is it just a weak compensation for some other lack or dissatisfaction from another unseen source?
Communication through concepts is lossy.
When you talk/write, you compress a rich part of experience into abstract symbols.
Then, someone else decompresses them in their own mind based on their own conditioning, experience and available cues/context (e.g. tone of voice, body language or the listeners own frame of mind at the time).
It's so easy to get hung up on words, "truth", accuracy and semantics, but forget about the other persons decompression factors that are hard to change or see.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
- Frank Herbert, Dune
It seems very hard to look stupid or wrong in big-tech, at least to the busy masses. There is always some new shinier thing they can dangle to distract away from the last stupid thing, or some updated/new promise of the next thing.
I am gradually doing the same. I always wanted to do it for privacy reasons, but never took much action till now. The reason I'm taking action now is actually I realized Google products plain suck and many open source self hosted apps and alternative front ends have now functionally surpassed Google products in the main ways that matter to me.
Like google barely supports proper dark mode and markdown docs. Google photos is so slow to upload a photo from my phone to view on PC.
I think this is related to the confusion about what "consciousness" even is.
Many people tend to conflate it with seemingly outward behavioral "thinking" or "talking" (out loud or in your own head), rather than there just being an aware experience.
Now that we established the fact that very dynamic sounding "talking" is something that can be easily generated by a computer program, people are now re-thinking that link.
Love Joans post - clear relatable words about thought and nondualism, without sounding too lofty.
https://joantollifson.substack.com/p/a-few-thoughts-about-thinking
Surprising at first... but also not surprising when I remember the dynamics of the public Internet.
It's sad that so many good voices that ought to be heard, remain quiet and retreat into the shelter of the "dark forest" because of mass responses like this, while the loud-mouths and stirrers proliferate.
A coworker told me he would rather have no documentation than bad/wrong/outdated documentation.
Interesting concept.
I think in many ways its better to have no information than half-true/distracting/inflammatory information. This is why I don't consume mass news media.
Media: Keep your paywalls and nags up, they help remind me about the aforementioned.
@BernardoKastrup This is a fantastic talk thank you 🙏 I love how you both talk about things. The long process of recovering from distraction and reconnecting with nature and meaning has transformed my life.
@andybaio Endgame of this is company could be to record all inputs and outputs of office workers and then train an AI agent that does their job... then sell the agent to the employer getting them fired. Good luck to anyone who actually buys this thing or works for a company that forces them to wear it.
@atomicpoet Oh man I had forgotten all about this game! I spent so long playing it back in the day.
There is a lot of really dead basic tech stuff that "feels even more AI than AI".
Like a searchable interface with fuzzy prediction. No AI. Just type two letters and it almost feels like it reads your mind just by auto-completing based on MRU (Most Recently Used). e.g. Ubuntu/Gnome Activity Overview, KISS launcher or Spotlight on Apple.
No talking to a computer, no Internet, no bloat, no huge CPU/GPU usage.
Good, simple, useful tech that does its job efficiently without getting in the way.
I keep seeing scary looking replies to this post coming up in my feed, basically people suggesting Mozilla wants to put AI in FF browser. Is it true? I cant see anything about it. Maybe @mozilla needs to clarify it.
I thought Mozilla was talking about supporting many of the community-driven open source AI efforts for some time. That's all I heard in the past, and this post seems to be a continuation of that. They didn't say anything about browsers as far as I heard.