agallant's comments

I'm not trying to dismiss your perspective here, I think you have a real point about the intimacy and personal importance of modern smartphone usage. From a layperson perspective, you're absolutely correct that these deliver on the promise of "personal computer."

But to those who choose to spend more time learning and understanding them, computers are (very flexible) tools, and specifically they're tools where you get to choose the computation being performed. This is why, to me at least, (most) mobile devices simply can't be "personal computers."

Smartphones and tablets are still useful to people with that perspective - but I see them not as a computer but as an appliance. I turn it on, I turn it off, I maybe get to fiddle with a few knobs, but most of it is a black box that hopefully "just works."

And hey, I like that convenience - as long as it's not the only way I have to interact with technology.

So, it may seem pedantic, but I think it is worth distinguishing true general purpose computers from phones. They are absolutely personal - a "personal smart appliance", if you will, but not a personal computer at the end of the day.

So, it's hard to call it a PC at the end of the day IMO.

Now, whether a statistical token generator makes "real art" is subjective (as human art already is). And again, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the "humans are special" perspective.

But the point of my comment is that this philosophical stance is not a practical reply to what will actually happen in terms of social dynamics and content creation/consumption. Whether we call it "real art" or not, generative tools exist and will be used. So, it makes sense to understand them, even if your goal for doing so is to mitigate their incursions into "real art."

In other words, art must adapt. Which, it always does.

I'm quite sympathetic to poetry - I actually wrote a blog post about this article last week https://gallant.dev/posts/whither-poetry/

But much like the "debate" between linguistic prescriptivism ("'beg the question' doesn't mean 'raise the question'") and descriptivism ("language is how it is used"), both perspectives have relevance, and neither are really responses to the other.

I certainly hope people keep writing great, human, poetry. But generative ML is a systemic change to creative output in general. Poetry just happens to be in some ways simplest for the LLMs, but other art is tokens and patterns as well.

There is a time and place for precision, and there is also one for concision. Marketing speak is dangerous not due to brevity but intent.

Those are two pretty big "ifs" - people can be inclined to satisfice and pat themselves on the back for having done some minor symbolic thing, and then not go deeper. And it's much easier to sacrifice plastic straws than question whether your "bucket list" should really have a ton of carbon intensive global travel.

  We will be exhibiting the Omnichord OM-108 and announcing the new official release date at the Winter NAMM show to be held in Los Angeles, USA from January 25, 2024.

I tweaked the theme just a bit, to add the faux scanlines, URL mouseover highlight, and background green glow (trying to mimic an old CRT). But pretty much everything else is just whatever the default was.

Haven't had the chance to write for awhile, but been wanting to get back to it. In addition to normal static site stuff it has webmentions/pingbacks, comments, and (probably now broken) interoperability with Twitter (likes would show up as webmentions) - overall it was a fun excuse to figure out IndieWeb stuff (https://gallant.dev/posts/a-blog-reborn/ is where I explain that).

Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale.

Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.

A straightforward blog (static site generated by Nikola), but I had fun styling it to look kinda like an old CRT. I also loaded it up with IndieWeb goodness (webmentions, pingbacks), bridged the webmentions to Twitter (will add Mastodon at some point), and added comments via GitHub. All this is described here: https://gallant.dev/posts/a-blog-reborn/

I have a 2020 model, and would concur with this post - good screen, build, thermals, lots of ram, no having to fight with drivers. Even firmware updates "just work" (apply as snaps).

I did find this review more helpful when making the purchase decision - https://www.engineering.com/story/dell-precision-5550-review...

An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.

Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.

However, I'd suggest that the new challenge isn't simply scale and omnipresence but algorithmization - modern platforms can tune and target to the level of the individual. In the past, (dis)information had to be broadcast in a far more one-size-fits-most style, perhaps segmented by broad geographic or demographic groups at best.

1. Sometimes you have things that need to be achieved in a time-sensitive fashion, i.e. the time to ramp up may be problematic, and "taking a chance" may have real business ramifications.

2. Even if you don't have anything urgent, naturally there should be some discount factor for future utility (due to intrinsic uncertainty, etc.) - it's still positive, but remember "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

3. Learning is not a clean linear process, and is also hard to really suss out in a few interviews - I still absolutely look for it in people I hire, but it's pretty easy to claim you take a few MOOCs and harder to know if you really engage with new ideas on a regular basis.

Again, I still very much agree with the spirit and substance of the post, but hiring is complicated, and as with most complicated things there are multiple considerations to balance.

More seriously - I'm well aware of the difficulties of causality, and also use causal direction as a great illustration of them. As I've said in pretty much every comment here - I'm not championing the study, I simply haven't done a deep enough pass to have a strong opinion, and it may have any number of subtle flaws (off the cuff my biggest concern is that they're focused on one city, and I'd like to see similar results elsewhere, preferably in different geographic areas and cultures).

In other words, yes - more controls like you said. But I am responding to the overuse of a simple statistical argument in the face of studies that, whatever flaws they have, are not cases of "the researcher forgot the controls." Demographics, income, and homeownership are actually not bad features to have I'd say, and again it seems like most of the large claims bothering people are from the coverage and not the research. To refute research you generally need to dig into the details of the research itself.

  This result supports the notion that the prevalence of Airbnb listings erodes the natural ability of a neighborhood to prevent crime, but does not support the interpretation that elevated numbers of tourists bring crime with them.

And again - I'm just responding to the idea that saying "correlation is not causation" can allow one to dismiss any statistical study. The study may have flaws, may overstate its results, could be completely terrible in fact - but the people who did it know about correlation and causation, and refuting them requires going deeper than that. In general, it requires looking at their paper, not the news coverage of it.