CS · HCI · Econ · Widely interested · Pathologically curious
Zurich 🇨🇭
Joined January 2009
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most of my growth of any kind seems to go like
ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I suck at this ugh I
…
wait wtf I‘m pretty good at this?!
stumbling across this fact again — googling basically any U.S. address shows you the house on Street View on Zillow with some metadata, some market history data, and a frequently updated price estimate
in Switzerland you get a listings page per unit if there's an active listing
I feel like this is a big problem with slop software‘s UX too. Usually things get refined by other people chiming in and reviewing and asking „is this logical and does it generalize“. With slop it’s one person’s mental model, at the exact time they built it.
The problem of AI for academic writing, and why you don't notice it in your own AI writing:
AI loves to use vague language. It will produce something that’s consistent with what you want it to say. The problem is that it will also be consistent with other interpretations that you didn’t intend. This confuses readers: which interpretation was meant?
But you won’t notice the problem when you proofread your AI’s output. That's because you’re checking whether the output is consistent with what you meant (which it will be), without thinking about how it could be misunderstood (which we're usually unskilled at, due to the curse of knowledge)
maybe there’s some governance model/workflow that prevents everything being littered with stuff that made sense to John From Accounting, or all interaction is going to be conversational anyway, but it also makes me more bullish on tasteful individuals who can resist temptation
extending the thought from this recent @signalsthreads episode, it is increasingly important to be smart and deliberate about defining your slop boundaries
Benjamin retweeted
This is the first time I've ever seen a site do this, the obvious simple response to a disclosure of a vulnerability without a fix: sacrifice availability to preserve safety. This option should be why we do full disclosure.
Benjamin retweeted
People complain about small things only when the big things are going wrong for them.
Benjamin retweeted
i kid you not this one time the whole hostel i was living at got drunk for new years eve and we tried garlic with tangerine and it was absolutely delicious
"We should define a standard form factor/interface for interoperability. It is important that the standard has some kind of mechanism allowing vendors to restrict interoperability for non-functional reasons."
