But humans like stories. We view movies from "that one director we like". Or read books from "that lady who writes so well". Or go apeshit about some band. If the trail ends up at "Oh, it's AI", there is no depth in the story. It's about as shallow as an ad. Heck, even Instagram influencers have more depth, no matter how inane they are. At least they're humans you can root for.

But AI? No. It's content designed to use your limited time so that you do not use your time with things created by people, because people are expensive and needy, and they stand in the way of corporate profits. (Note that I think there are wonderful ways to use AI to enhance your own creativity or productivity. I feel even giddy about some of the ways I've used AI recently. But the massive majority of AI-generated content will not be done by individual creators, but the corporate content machines.)

I would like to link this idea to the fact that there is a lot of talk about how AI will create all content in the future. Mark Zuckerberg even fantasizes about how artificial intelligence will be everyone's friend in the future, and the content offered to you will be completely personalized.

However, people don't actually want ''content''. They want experiences, and content is what you get when you think about the most scalable version of the worst possible experience that maximises the engagement. By "scalable" I mean the potential for the highest turnover, and by "worst" I mean what can be produced at the lowest cost.

When AI starts to create content it does it because companies want to have more scalable content production. Computers are far more scalable than humans, so this is not a big leap in imagination. And it doesn't matter whether it's personalized for you or not, it's still content, that is, the most efficiently produced that will keep you engaged the most. (Center for Humane Technology has a lot to say on this.)

The thing is, it will create an ever-increasing gap between content and experience. Different social media companies and news organizations already have to resort to dark design patterns to keep people engaged in this shitty content of theirs, and in the future, when the number of people you can hire is no longer the limiting factor on the amount of content you can produce, you will need to produce even more to be visible in this grand storm of mediocre content that will sweep the internet.

I think the human capacity for content is limited, simply because we run out of time. We only have limited waking hours, and most of those hours are not available for content: we work, we travel, we exercise, we eat. Yes, you can feel content slipping its tentacles to your travel time, or exercise time or eating time – even toilet time. But it is because of these dark patterns of addiction that the social media companies have learned to abuse. We can scroll for hours, but feel terrible afterward. At some point we learn.

But we're hitting a kind of a limit though. One thing that AI does well is that it provides you with interactivity. You can actually engage with a metal mind on topics that puzzle you. Yes, it's sycophantic, it hallucinates and it will make mistakes. It can even be politically influenced, and it can incorporate many dark patterns too. But all that time spent on talking to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever is away from passive consumption of tokens generated by massive bot farms.

And I think this is a good thing. There is conflicting evidence on whether is a difference between passive and active consumption of the internet, and $deity only knows that we can spend way too much time on trivial things. But! One thing that has always taken humanity forward has been standing on the shoulders of the giants, and building a common base. Wikipedia has been a shining example on how humans can build together something remarkable with just tiny contributions. AI is a supercharged version of that. I believe it is possible to use AI to create better versions of ourselves: more educated, more curious, more human. It's just that we have to actively fight the slop that is filling our screens and ears.

One of the reasons why I have given up on Twitter and Facebook is the amount of algorithmic content that always tries to sell me stuff, or make me more engaged with the content. I much prefer the feeling on Threads and Mastodon, not because of the lack of algorithms, but because they both feel more human. I can actually connect and talk to humans. I can go out with people I met online and have a meaningful experience with them. The Threads algorithm isn't actively trying to make me angry and Mastodon's algorithm is so dumb it hardly deserves to be called an algorithm. My experience with both is vastly superior to anything else.

So call this a gut feeling, but… I feel like we don't have to really worry about AI-generated content taking more of our time. The gap between AI-generated content (aka "AI slop") and real experience feels like it's widening.

So yeah, sure, use AI to reduce clutter in your life or do research or even talk to an infinitely patient AI friend. All of that stuff is away from content consumption. You don't have to be a passive consumer. You can use modern tools to shape your own life.

Why dig old speculative fiction? First, I like it. Second, sci-fi writers make their living by thinking very hard about the future, but without a lot of pressure to be “sensible” in whatever way “sensible” is defined in their times.

And third: You can be very sure that the current tech leaders have read the same books. Some of them are actively trying to bring some of them to life.

What got me thinking about this book was some of the weak (and not so weak) signals that I’ve been seeing recently.

We are losing the human connection

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was on the rise. The freedom to work any time from anywhere was holding great promise to certain expert jobs, but COVID-19 really broke the bank, and many people found out the hard way that yes, their jobs could also be done remotely.

And I get why people like remote work: commuting is terrible and skipping it frees hours of your time per day. Working remotely means you can also find more affordable housing away from the city. There are clear productivity gains for certain tasks when you are basically in focus mode most of the time and don’t have to suffer constant interruptions. For the more introverted people, remote work can be a great anxiety management system.

Also, while we are right now seeing AI replacing white-collar entry-level jobs, we’re also seeing the first steps of human-like robots stepping into the areas traditionally thought of as blue-collar jobs such as factory-floor work. It is obviously a huge disruption when a programmable, mass-producible tool can be used to replace workers in entire industries. It has happened before, and we remember those times as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.

At the extreme, we see the *otaku*, people who like to isolate in their own homes and not have any physical social interactions. Everything is ordered online, including social life.

A not-so-extreme example is how people in Western countries are turning inwards, something that the Harvard Kennedy School calls the “Friendship Recession”. People spend more time at home and less time seeing friends. The so-called Male Loneliness Epidemic (which is more likely an “everybody loneliness epidemic”) is just one aspect of this.

Return of the teenage bedroom

This is honestly a bit of a weak pet theory of mine, so you are free to ignore this chapter, but hear me out: A massive portion of the internet innovation happens because the young founders, barely out of college or university, desire to go back to the happiest period of their lives — the teenage bedroom. Dad drove you around? Uber. Mum made you food? DoorDash. Endless entertainment? Netflix. Hanging with friends around the mall? TikTok. Dreams of the conquest of space? SpaceX.

Many of the corporate founders are people who had only very limited experience of life when they started. They locked in a particular kind of culture, and the stereotypical CEO self-searching and experience hunting cannot really change the culture already established.

I like this hypothesis as it sort of kind of explains in my mind why we don’t seem to evolve as a society that much. Yes, tech evolves, but the big and massive societal changes seem to revolve around the comfort of the middle-class teenage bedroom from the 1990s.

The rise of the social algorithm

There is also a big social experiment running — the regular human contact is being mediated, perhaps even replaced, by social algorithms. You no longer just meet people because you happen to share the same job, hobby or local pub; no, you see content from people that the algorithm deems suitable for you. An algorithm that’s optimized to maximize your engagement with the site itself, not with the people. Sometimes it’s as simple as listing the latest content – the Fediverse is the linear-TV equivalent of social media – but the smartest algorithms are self-learning and very good at wasting your time. Time, of which you have a limited supply.

But the big thing is *scale*. Internet companies are built around scale: they need to grow their revenue constantly. Some economists argue that in service industries, there is no limit to growth, but most firms battle for eyeballs and user time, both of which are limited resources.

Frictionless wins

One key thing in the online battle is the idea that frictionless wins. The company that builds a service that needs less interaction, less learning, less commitment and less money from the user is more likely to win the fight.

The problem is that online is almost always less friction than physical. It’s easier to order stuff online than walk to the store. The assortment is always better. The prices often cheaper too, if you don’t mind waiting an extra day. In Finland, robots deliver your groceries so you don’t have even the social friction of meeting a human.

The need for growth automatically drives internet companies to less friction by reducing the physical activities of customers and moving towards online. Meeting people is a hassle. Calling them is less of a hassle. Messaging them is even less of a hassle. Watching a TikTok stream is even less, since you don’t really have to do anything; not even swipe.

Frictionless scales.

Growth needs scale.

Therefore, the internet companies (well, any company really, but the internet companies are at the forefront) are compelled to drive *solarification* of the world. We simply need to be isolated and pampered by robots, because it’s the only way towards a truly frictionless world.

Roll “save vs limitless growth”

Of course, this is hyperbole. My desire is just to highlight that there is a logical end result for the growth needs of the internet companies, and call for more human technology.

Still, there is delicious irony in looking at internet CEOs railing against remote work, yet trying to make sure their users never have to meet a living human. Return-to-office does not make work have less friction, on the contrary! Work life is stressful, and with our population aging with less people supporting the economy, it’s likely to become even more so.

There is also growing awareness of the mental and physical toll that isolation and stress takes on you. People who work from home might move less (there seems to be conflicting research on this), and anxiety appears to be increasing on the whole.

Also, bluntly put, there are limits to growth. The “Limits to Growth” model from the Club of Rome, and its updated versions, does set some hard limits on how much growth can be achieved. But if you think about it this way: 20,000 people would not be a big burden on Earth, no matter how advanced a lifestyle they lead. So perhaps there is a callous movement out there as well, people who plan to be the progenitors of those 20,000.

So what?

A very good question indeed, my friend! I’m sure some of my readers are right now thinking that hey, that does not sound so bad, actually. Living in a utopia, where you don’t have to meet dumb people, and all your needs, wishes and fantasies are catered to by intelligent robots.

For others, this would be an absolute dystopia. Not being able to meet and feel other people? Spending your entire life in a high-tech version of Teams? Horror.

And, for engineers, you have to think about the brittleness of such a system: Is there enough genetic variance? Could power be grabbed and society be disrupted by bad actors? How about global tech malfunctions or natural catastrophes? Could society survive with such low numbers of people? What would happen to culture? Would they entertain themselves with an infinite number of old TV reruns and an unlimited stream of jabbering in Teams meetings? Would it be a monoculture, and we would lose all historical context of the thousands of cultures enriching humanity right now?

Could such a society *evolve* in any direction, or would it be a stagnant endpoint?

Sivusta, tuo maanmainio oravien pitämä blogi/rukousmylly, on siis saatavana syyskuusta alkaen kirjamuodossa! Tässä jonkinasteinen mainosteksti, joka on tarkkaan optimoitu hivelemään juuri SINUN ostohermojasi!

Minkä hyllyn tyhjentäisit kaupasta ensin maailmanlopun tullessa? Entä jos kuulisit, että oletkin oikeasti rovaniemeläinen taideopiskelija vuodelta 2032? Miksi aamuisin suussasi maistuu niin oudolta? Mitä on dementtisima ja kuka oli Eenokki? Ja kuka on maailman kuningas, edes hetken? Ja missä - oi, missä - on Kaaleppi?

Sivusta on kokoelma kertomuksia, lastuja ja runoja, jotka vaihtelevat empaattisesta epätoivoiseen, fiilistelystä filosofiseen ja reteästä raastavaan. Se on kirjallista jazzia, joka inspiroituu niin absurdin huumorin mestareista, muotiblogeista, kuin japanilaisesta haiga-tyylisuunnasta, jossa runoutta yhdistetään valokuvaan tai maalaukseen.

Sivustasta vastaa uukuniemeläinen sinappi-, silkki- ja sidontakonglomeraatti Sivusta Yhtymä, sen esoteerinen päätoimittaja Z, "asiakaspalvelun" Luigi, sekä muutama satunnainen orava.

Sivustaa kirjamuodossa voit tilata ainakin seuraavista asiantuntevista kirjakaupoista alkaen noin 20.9.2025!

• Momentum-kirjat (silleen kiva, että sillä lailla kustantaja saa eniten massia ja on tyytyväisin ja minä en saa piiskaa)
• Suomalainen kirjakauppa (joka luokittelee tämän runoudeksi, mutta se johtuu varmaan siitä, että heillä ei ole "häröpallo" -kategoriaa)
• Akateeminen kirjakauppa (mitään akateemistahan tässä kirjassa ei ole, paitsi että on tästä yksi opinnäytetyö tehty!)
• Prisma (josta et voi ennakkotilata, mutta sitten kun voit, niin saat bonukset! Bonukset! Booooonukset!)

Another important guideline I've followed is trying to limit myself to three comments in any thread. If I can't express my message in three comments, the situation usually doesn't improve no matter how much I argue. Of course, this isn't a strict rule; especially on platforms with strict character limits, sometimes you need to write more. And sometimes the conversation is genuinely interesting and you learn something new. And sometimes the banter is just too fun 😎

Nevertheless, I've recently noticed myself becoming increasingly cautious about commenting - especially in other people's feeds. In Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other closed environments, I might open up more and share my opinions - especially when asked - but publicly... the threshold has clearly gotten higher.

Part of the reason is surely the deconstructive nature of the internet: if your argument has even the slightest flaw (like a spelling error or a comma mistake), it invalidates your entire argument. Sometimes it feels like social media is one big malfunctioning computer, and if you feed it even a slightly flawed program, it spits back an enormous amount of error messages primarily aimed at insulting the programmer.

This is perhaps an unspoken dark side of meritocracy: putting down others' skills is just as valid a way to advance in the hierarchy as improving your own skills. And since meritocrats often view empathy as weakness, they don't see anything wrong with this approach. Even though it automatically excludes a large portion of humanity from their hierarchies and makes meritocracy automatically an activity for a small inner circle.

I won't start delving deeper into meritocracy and its problems; smarter people than me have surely written about them. I'm just highlighting this one aspect that I think plays a big role in social media.

I don't know how much of this stems from the internal and business logic of these social media systems, designed and funded by people living and breathing in the meritocracy, who perhaps can't even think in any other way. I'm too close to this myself that I might not even be able to imagine what the alternative would be. (And no, don't offer the Fediverse; if you do, you haven't quite understood my argument about meritocracy.)

But now that I've been observing social media for a quarter century, I have a strong feeling that there must be an alternative to this design. The basic feature of social media is that it's made by people, and the more people, the better it should be. Now it feels like there's a limit beyond which social media cannot scale without getting out of hand.

Small communities, like Discord servers, Reddit forums, and some FB groups, stay together precisely because they start from this "living room" thinking, where strong moderation keeps the discussion reasonable. But stupidity and greed (aka bots) scale faster than moderation capability.

Perhaps the most functional example of a large working community are wikis, like Wikipedia. They don't value "discussion" as inherently valuable, but as a means to reach an outcome.

I don't know. I have some ideas that could be worth trying. If only I had the time... but there's so much fun stuff to do in the world 😅

Silti tässä on kyllä jotain messiaanista.

Kamalaa sinällään sanoa, mutta pidän tästä kuvasta enemmän kuin monesta muusta AI-kuvasta, jota kuvavirrassa näkyy. Suurin osa AI-generoiduista kuvista on kuitenkin "AI-liejua", johon ei halua sen suuremmin sotkea itseään. Toki se johtuu siitä, että mediankulutustottumuksemme - loputon skrollaaminen - ohjaa siihen, että sitä kontsaa pitää olla myös loputtomasti, jolloin AI-liejulla ja tuhannennella kissameemillä ei ole paljoakaan enää eroa kuluttajalle. Naurahdus, klikkaus, ja scroll.

Niin kauan kuin ihmiset käyttävät aikaa skrollaamalla ja etsimällä jotain hetkellistä täytettä elämäänsä, niin järjestelmä optimoituu kohti halvinta ja helpointa tapaa tehdä sisältöä. Ja AI tekee sitä personoidusti ja loputtomasti. Ei vielä halvimmasti eikä hyvin, mutta se on vain teknistä optimointia. "Hyvä" tarkoittaa somen tapauksessa "eniten klikkejä ja tykkäyksiä". Olemmehan optimoineet interaktionkin niin vähäiseksi, että tietokonekin osaa.

Onko mulla jokin pointti? Ehkä. AI-lieju menee sinne minne ihmisetkin, niin kauan kuin malli on loputon skrollaus. Siltä ei pelasta fediversekään. Mutta jos voimme muuttaa interaktion internetin kanssa sellaiseksi kuin mitä interaktio on ihmisten kanssa (eikä päinvastoin), niin ehkä se vielä pelastuisi. Siinä AI:lla voi olla hyvinkin paikkansa; ei sisällöntuottajana vaan keskustelukumppanina.

Clauden oma kommentti tähän kuvaan ihan vain näin loppukaneetiksi: "The final result achieves both the aesthetic beauty and meaningful commentary I was hoping for. It's a hopeful vision of how technology might integrate with nature in ways that preserve and enhance both realms. The visual storytelling is subtle yet profound - showing technology as a caretaker and partner to nature rather than its replacement."

Mutta - Linkedin-hengessä - tätä ajatusta voi soveltaa moneen muuhunkin, kuten yritysmaailmaan. Kun menet ensimmäiseen työpaikkaasi, sinulla ei luultavasti ole käsitystä siitä, miltä hyvä näyttää. Millainen on hyvä työpaikka? Millaiset ovat hyviä käytäntöjä? Millainen tiimirakenne on hyvä? Sitä vaan roiskii menemään muiden seassa, joista kukaan muukaan ei ehkä tiedä, miltä hyvä näyttää. Silloin kaikki keksivät pyörää vain uudestaan ja uudestaan. Etenkin startupeissa löytyy kaikenlaista sekoilua ihan siksi, että nuoret puuhastelevat keskenään ja cargokulttaavat menestyneitä teknologiajättejä oikeastaan ymmärtämättä, miksi.

Mutta sellaiset, jotka päätyvät jo heti nuorena työpaikkaan, jossa on panostettu hyviin asioihin (mitä ne nyt sitten ovatkaan kullakin ammattialalla), niin kaikissa seuraavissa työpaikoissa on helpompi paimentaa asioita parempaan.

(Ja en siis tarkoita, että jotain tekniikoita tai menetelmiä pitäisi kopioida, koska ne eivät välttämättä siirry yritysten välillä. Tarkoitan ennemminkin sitä epämääräistä fiilistä, kun hommat hoituu, arki rullaa, ihmiset on kivoja, asioita saadaan aikaan ja tuntuu siltä, että tekee jotain merkityksellistä ja oikein, tiedättehän?)

Ihmissuhteissa sama juttu: jos sinua on koskaan kunnioitettu, rakastettu, annettu tilaa ja oltu kumppanina ylä- ja alamäissä, niin osaat myös vaatia näitä tulevilta suhteilta.

Kokemus suojaa huonoilta valinnoilta, etkä voi parantaa asioita, jos et tiedä mitä parempi tarkoittaa.

Siksi olisi itse asiassa hirveän tärkeää, että yritykset, joissa hommat toimii, ottaisivat sisään nuorempia ja päästäisivät heitä myös pois sopivan ajan jälkeen. Ihan näin kansallisis-kilpailullisistakin syistä, kun ei meillä hirveästi ole varaa huonoihin yrityksiin, jotka hukkaavat ihmisten lahjakkuutta kaikenlaiseen turhaan vitutukseen.

I've been using AIs as a programming aide as I am delving into a slightly unfamiliar environment, and I'm realizing I'm not getting as deep of an understanding of the underlying system as before.

I've seen people lament this. "AI creates bad code and programmers don't know how to program anymore."

I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. We've seen this before when we moved from assembly and low-level languages to higher level languages.

I remember people lamenting how programmers no longer understand CPUs and how they treat CPU and memory like infinite resources. And how owning your own hardware is much better price/performance ratio than going cloud.

Yes. We (engineers) exchanged performance for development speed. We evolved the software engineering discipline to deal with the situation. Most of us now think in components and microservices instead of L2 caches.

Some people still live close to hardware and understand how it works. But it's a specialty now, unlike in the 80s.

So now I have a feeling we're doing the same kind of a jump: We're dumping performance again for efficiency.

Now, compilers for high-level languages like Rust (or even Java) have pretty much caught up with the modern processor architectures and they're not actually that terribly far off from hand-optimized code.

So I think this is going to happen with AIs as well.

Possibly it's going to need more than LLMs, but right now LLMs are like compilers that turn your intention into maybe okay code. We are still badly lacking in the necessary engineering disciplines to deal with all this I think, starting from reproducibility, QA, ops, or even version control.

But I think we can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. Power requirements for individual models are going down, and specialized hardware is being born. Millions of engineers are thinking about these things every single day, as opposed to thousands of data scientists two years ago.

Engineers are a powerful, fairly unstoppable force that tends to flow through any crack if it sees a treat on the other side of the wall.

With AI, we see the treat. We just need to see the threats too.

As a teenager, I was a voracious reader. And this continued actually for a pretty long time, but it became more difficult over time. Many have complained about the same thing, and I see a lot of answers: social media, streaming, kids, work, other pressures of daily life... Sure. They all contribute. And I've been saying the same things about my own reading. But I wanted to see if they actually were true for me. So as my summer holiday started this year, I just decided to read as many books as I could and see, if I still can and want to.

I know a lot of people prefer audio books these days, but for me they just don't work. My brain is wired so that I quite often pause to wonder about a passage, or it triggers some memory, or I start daydreaming, or I make notes about it for a role playing campaign. With a book, all I have to do is to lift my eyes from the page, and when my thought is complete, I can just lower my eyes and continue reading from where I left off. Not so with audio books. With audio books, I just lose the passage, the narrative and everything, and while I sort of complete the act of reading/listening to the book, I find that I have missed half of it and have only a generic idea as to what happened in the book.

Having said that, I did listen to one audio book during the summer, which was a pretty cool experience. I went on a walk, then I borrowed the book from the library on my phone, listened to it, and then returned it before I got home. (Edith Södergran's poetry. Poetry is always hard to listen to, since so much depends on the delivery. This was a good audiobook though.)

Aaanyway. During July and August, I was able to read 17 books, ranging from poetry and high fantasy to military fiction and business literature. During holiday, reading was a bit faster, but even after returning to work I was able to read pretty much all I wanted. I started off light, borrowing just one book from the library, and now I am in a state where I have five books checked out from the library and I'm pretty confident I can finish them all within the month. (Yes, one is missing from the pic.)

What I found out was that the reason I had not been able to read as much before as I wanted to was... lack of practice. My skills of reading had simply rusted due to low usage. I started off easy, reading pageturner, not-much-thinking-required books in my native language, just to see when and where I can read. So instead of doomscrolling, I read during breakfast. I read a quarter of an hour here and there. I made the book easily available. I read before bedtime. And my skills returned. I got into more complicated books (Harry Martinson's Aniara especially was quite emotionally heavy) as reading again became effortless like it was during my youth.

This experiment has made me a lot happier and relaxed than before. I've missed reading and books so much.

So I suppose here's a lesson: If you want to read more, give it a try? It might be just rust, and you might not know it until you try. Worked for me; might work for you.

Anyhoo, this was a weird book. It is a hero tale of an IT manager, who suddenly gets promoted to a VP of IT operations and is suddenly responsible for saving a multi-billion company from serious trouble and his entire IT team from being outsourced. And naturally, he accomplishes this with the help of a mysterious stranger who brings in his sensei-like wisdom about DevOps, and a few people who are eager to grasp onto these pearls of wisdom escaping his lips.

As a book, it's shit. Characters are uninteresting, plot is thinner than the paper the book was printed on, and I could not help but facepalm occasionally. There are three kinds of people in this book: Smart and Wrong, Stupid and Wrong, and Smart and Right. Of course the people who are Smart and Wrong become people who are Smart and Right, because of DevOps wisdom sprinkled by the protagonist and his sensei. And people who are Stupid and Wrong are the main antagonists here, and they of course lose. Because the hero story, right?

But as an illustrated case study for DevOps principles, it is brilliant. Basically this is a list of all different issues your company might be having, ranging from too much work-in-progress to managing unplanned work to managing conflicting business priorities and whatnot. It's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, and just execute smart plans using solid principles to solve each problem as they come along. In that sense, it's not that different from a lot of hero epics, such as The Martian by Andy Weir (which, unlike this, is actually a good book that I recommend).

This book is an interesting approach. It has certain, well, aynrandistic preachiness in it, but still a free-flowing fiction might be in some cases a good way to make your reader to think about the ideas you have. So if you read it as a marketing text on DevOps, it's pretty good. It's easy and fast to read, doesn't really slow down anywhere, and comes with a useful appendix of an excerpt of the business book they really want you to buy after this one.

Just don't expect a great narrative, well-rounded characters, or actually, well, caring about any of them.

So the news isn't obviously good (because it seems that there are two nuclear-capable nations just lobbing missiles at each other), so I get distracted a bit. As I am slowly moving towards leaving for work, I check my bank app. It's payday, so I sortakinda want to just see the numbers, as it's also "pay my monthly house loan dues" -day.

Nothing. No money in, no money out.

WTF?

Slowly it dawns on me. Is it... Sunday? Could it be?

Oh darn. It is Sunday. But hey, that's good right! I'm already up early and ready to go!

(A few hours later I've squandered most of the morning by debugging some spam filter issues and ugprading things left and right...)

Although... Why didn't I notice it's Sunday? Probably because in the digital world, Sunday is pretty much the same as all other days. No more Sunday issues of newspapers - they all look the same in the app. No morning TV - Youtube and Netflix have the same stuff every day. No morning radio - it's all just Spotify. So it's a bit weird to realize that one thing that this hyperpersonalized age and information work completely deletes is the gut feeling for passage of time. In a way, it is a return to earlier times, when seasons where the defining factor in people's lives. Industrial age was very much about dividing labour into hours and weeks and months over seasons and years, but information work does not care. We expect to have our services available when we want them, not 9-16 on weekdays. Information workers are not only allowed, but sometimes encouraged to ignore "regular hours". And the further we drift from the industrial age, a day, week or month is pretty much the same as any other. Seasons we notice, years we feel passing.

I take no value judgement on whether this is good or not. But the change is likely not to halt here.

There's another surprising thing that is similar, and it's that configurations don't move well. It's very difficult to end up with the same order of books on the shelf in the new place, or the same configuration in the kitchen, and most likely you don't even want to. Some of the stuff you just chuck in place, and for some you spend hours contemplating what would be the best configuration be - should the sofa be in that corner? What's the best way to get lighting on my desk? Should this lamp be there?

Same with digital stuff: Web server needs to be reconfigured; your <program> config needs to change (since the original is probably from 2012 and the server config file format has changed)... When you own your furniture/server, you need to think about configuration as well. If you have a web hotel and just copy stuff from one place to another, it's almost like moving from one furnished apartment to another - no need to think, just fill the cupboards and you're done. But when you insist on renting just the walls/server, you need to configure things on your own.

And I know I don't need to. Most of the things I use my server for is, well, you could just rent the equivalent - probably better even - from a SaaS provider. And modern software development revolves around docker containers and serverless these days, so there's little to no need even professionally to know the ins and outs of servers anymore. And this tinkering can be a bit frustrating too. However, I do appreciate the fact that by tinkering on this server I gain far deeper knowledge of how the internet really works on a very concrete, even visceral, level. After all, I've always been a bead curtain kind of guy.

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Oh, and Happy New Year 2024! I think this blog can now legally buy beer even in the US...

Yet almost overnight, EVs and chargers are suddenly everywhere (in richer countries). Tesla is big, yes, but not everything [in Europe & China; US is weird]. It just took the understanding on how to make them cheaper and faster to build, and then building the factories and supply chains. Fundamentally they are better vehicles, but the first implementations were buggy as hell. They are not perfect, but they have become _good enough_.

There's a ton of panel gaps and quality issues in current generative AI tools as well. But consider the speed at which they are improving - ChatGPT is nary a year old - and we don't yet know if they are hitting any sorts of limits. It again becomes a question on how to make them cheaper and better so that they can become ubiquitous. We're still pretty much at the "throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks" -phase of AI; figuring out where and how it could and should be used.

Neither do we know what the real dangers of AI are. EVs didn't become a public menace because they are so quiet either, even though that was a big argument against them a few years back. We solved it by making all EVs make a mandatory noise.

So don't take the current AIs as representative of the future. Neither take the hyperbole. Reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

(Unless someone gives them weapons and makes them eat organic material and self-replicate. Then we might have some Horizon Zero Dawn -level problems.)

Anyway, what I find interesting is not the tool themselves, but the meta-discussion around the tools. Many people announce their escape from Twitter and almost invariably the first question on a new platform is a question of identity - what should I write about here? How will others see me? What kind of a response do I get? How do I engage? Who should I follow? How do hashtags work? It's kind of endearing to watch: like a number of puppies in a new pen, poking around all the toys. Everyone's account is the same with a single post and a few followers. Fun! Much potential! Wow!

The next post, regrettably, often is about "nice place, how do I keep this place from turning into a toxic pool of twitterisms" or "how do I deal with trolls when they eventually arrive". It feels like people escaping a war zone. People, who are sure the war will follow them wherever they go. Social PTSD, almost.

The obvious answer is to bubble up - create your own Discord and discuss there. Community will throw the misbehaving people away, and new account moderation will keep bots at bay. But there are significant advantages to having a public forum too. You find new people, new information, joy, sadness that you cannot find from inside your own bubble. Social bubbles are after all quite slow-changing and static, much like cosmic bubbles (and entirely unlike soap bubbles. But I digress.)

To me dealing with trolls is about energy consumption. Assume a trollish message written by a human costs one unit of energy for that person. Doesn't matter what the unit is, let's just call it "1 troll". Since time and human capacity are limited, I believe the best way to respond is to make sure your response costs less than "1 troll". This is why things like engaging in a debate does not ultimately work: if you spend 10 trolls worth of energy to respond to a single troll, they will respond with another 1 troll message, and you will use again 10 trolls of energy to respond. The end result is that you will spend most of your time just dealing with a single troll. God forbid if there are more!

However, if your response takes, say 0.5 trolls, the more the troll responds, the bigger the gap between yours and their time usage will be.

This is why blocking almost works - it takes only 0.1 trolls to block someone. I say almost, because the whole thing is broken due to bots - the cost of creation of a bot and making it spew out nonsense goes asymptotically towards zero. So you cannot win a manual block war against bots.

This is where the platform must take a firm stance and make sure that there is a big enough - but not too big - a cost of creating and operating a bot. Yes, I know of the big debacle around paid API access on Reddit, but in my mind, this is necessary. The key is to remember is that the cost does not have to be monetary - it can also be less tangible stuff like red tape. Make the free API option such that you have to request an API key via a fax machine or a physical letter, and it might deter the bot authors somewhat. (Don't actually do this, it was just an illustration of an idea. :-D)

But as long as there's not a bot problem, blocking hard and fast is simply the best long-term way to engage with trolls in any social media. And I say this as someone who has been on pretty much all of the social media before they were even called that, and who has probably tried all of the methods from backtrolling to completely ignoring trolls. The only thing that really works is blocking; starving them of space and time.