thanks for linking this, was fun to watch
hadn't seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it's a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are
and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner
from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a "give us your actual phone number" thing even before felon took it over...
so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again
not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno
[0] - ....well, 4 years ago, "had". probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn't get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon's mania to rebrand it to "x" overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)
[1] - when going through the "your interests" list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you'd hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow
ruby's had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the "rockstar dev" archetype literally became big directly because of ruby's popularity and perception at the time
I haven't been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can't speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven't really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but... yeah
just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why
(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)
The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf
as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!
~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it's the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!
(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don't know if it could've gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)
meanwhile so many people (both those who've come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don't even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won't hold out (it's a truism that at some threshold people will start asking "wait why am I paying for this?") and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but...... fuck. there's been so much damage from years of this shit
I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can't hold), but I also grimace about what's coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)
this is one of those things that's, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that's fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!
to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it's playing on the definition of the conceptual "smart" computer, as it relates to human experience. there's been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole "omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)" arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it's one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express "grappling with $x to make sense of it"
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)
personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it's a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it's a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: "is it my knowledge of this domain that's spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?" is the question that comes up, and it's surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering
on the whole I think it's often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it's also worth keeping an eye on how much it's a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something(tm) is up
hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
guess that’s got tonight’s watching sorted :)
this post extremely quickly goes many places I didn't come close to expecting
impressive.
clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs
aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho
linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you
AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption
an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!
it's kinda hilarious how close "steelmanning" (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own