Alex Bird

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116811128152569506 Some great alternative terms and phrases to communicate about "AI" without adopting all the misleading marketing terms: "artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation" "prompt → text input" "answer → output" "chatbot / conversational agent → conversation simulator" "who’s right? → is the machine output correct?" (& more in the article)

"programming properly should be regarded as ... forming or achieving a certain kind of insight ... into the matters at hand" "This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be the more common notion, that programming is ... a production of a program and certain other texts" 💯 The work is to produce the insights; the text we generate is not the work, it is the record of the work.

The weirdest thing just happened. I updated the Ente Photos desktop app (it prompted me to update), and then it showed me a dialog with the list of changes in the update. And many of the changes seemed valuable to me! One of them was genuinely exciting! I can't remember the last time "a new version is available" led to anything positive. Refreshing.

We don't know what to build unless we empathize with the people using the software. We feel what they feel, influenced by a lifetime of art we have experienced, and make a decision about what would be best for the person using the software we're writing. Technology development work is about understanding, caring about, and improving the experience of others. Your statistics engine doesn't care about me so it can't make good choices about what software to make me.

Advice for an intern friend at work: I care a little about how much you know, but I care a lot about how well you learn.

@sundogplanets Thank you for doing this work!! It's so hard to create articulate, logical responses to infuriating nonsense. I really appreciate you powering through! Keep the rants coming if they help you! There are supportive strangers on the internet cheering you on 🥳 😡

@qcoding@iosdev.space Yes! So helpful! I like to use the variant "intend to" instead of "going to" to make it more comfortable to disagree with me -- "I intend to do this thing, any objections or comments before I start?" Or sometimes I put a time limit for comments: "I will do this thing at 11:30am unless I hear otherwise -- any objections?" and then at 11:30 "I haven't heard any objections, so I'm doing the thing now"

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Yes!! I tried this out in a conversation with a coworker; it went well. Me: "One sec, I'm just going to disable interruptions" Them: "pardon me?" Me: "You know, the number badges on the app icons? Interruptions. Some people call them notifications." We had a good laugh. I think I may make this a permanent change to my vocabulary 😅.

A related peril is the stage where we have built enough that we have collected a set of regrets about the technology choices we made. Now we know how we could have done it differently. If we're not careful, we'll start rewriting the software before we've delivered it. Even if we give in to the urge and start swapping out components, we're likely to collect new regrets and form new ideas for improvement. I've heard of projects wallowing for years in rewrites and optimizations, never quite releasing. I think it's a superpower to use the proven-but-worse tool you have in the face of exciting tool improvement ideas. Can you think of a tool improvement and not act on it? Can you deliver in the face of viable improvement ideas?

You know when you go into a store ready to spend $100 to solve a problem and someone working there tells you about a life hack and a $2 product that solves the problem better? I want to build software like that.

An antipattern I'm noticing in bot coding: instead of "goal → work → intended outcome", I'm seeing "goal → generate surprising outcome → reframe the goal to match the outcome". I'm hearing things like "it technically works" or "it's done but we still need to polish it" as a euphemism for "it's not quite what I wanted, but I'm calling it done anyway".

@mipsytipsy@hachyderm.io Thank you!! Really minor, but instead of a goodreads link for "More Everything Forever", you linked to a Google Search for "more everything forever goodreads"... which, to be fair, did bring me directly to the goodreads link, but I imagine it was not an intentional indirection 😂

@MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us Good point! Have you come across a good list of the more precise terms and how to know which one applies?