Yep. And it’s a point well made.

To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.

Thanks for this! I wasn’t aware a good independent fork of all of this had been set up (I’d kinda forgotten about conda-forge).

What about the package repos and conda forge? Apologies, it’s been a while since I paid attention to them (and Python packaging too). Does conda work well just against PyPI?

Oh I get you, and it’s an insight into the priorities and operation of the company. They’re clearly worried about snaring all of the “free loaders” as they move to a more extractive business model. And so there’s probably a bunch of people with licence quotas hounding anyone they can.

While I’m sure it was inevitable, especially in today’s climate, it saddens me to see Anaconda (and conda by extension I presume) go down like this. When they first came out it was such a breath of fresh air in the Python ecosystem.

I’m not sure in the details, but what’s the point in relying at all on any of their infrastructure? Is any of it independent enough?

Yea, and then being able to traverse the layers in a reasonable way when needed/desired without needing be stuck or live in one of those layers.

Working with some proprietary no code tools at the moment, and, yea, not letting people just program in a decent language is a mistake.

I’ve felt for a long time that continuous gradients of complexity with sensible defaults all along the spectrum is a general architectural pattern necessary for wide spread empowerment. But I don’t see anyone thinking in those terms. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels obvious. As you say, but everyone is going to dive into the source code. So let them find the level at which they’re comfortable.

Tech monopolies must be held to account, the outsized influence of some tech billionaires must be held in check, and competition must be allowed to thrive. We may also need to consider the protection of both consumers themselves and human-created works (including our history) as part of a conservation effort before extractive models permanently pollute our shared cultural resources.

Honestly feels like the main and perhaps only thing to do. Sure we can all do our own individualistic things, such as what we’re doing here on the Fedi.

But the whole AI thing reveals I think just how big of a problem this all is … big tech would rather consume and replace the whole internet with some fuzzy hype tech than empower its users in any way.

As a nerd, I don’t like the end of the article where she says we need to get revenge on the nerds.

I hear you, as many would I think. But realistically, I think calling tech culture into question, even beyond its manifestation in the psychotic tech CEO types, is worth while. It’s really had a dominant run both materially and culturally (a revenge as many would see it), and I think it’s worthwhile questioning the value of a lot of it, in a way I don’t think many nerds and tech people are capable of (sadly IMO).

There may be an inclination to separate the capitalism and nerdy parts. But as an industry/profession/whatever that generally tends to care a lot about itself in various ways … I think tech is disturbingly uninterested in caring about the quality of its profession beyond the bike shedding stuff let alone acting on it in any collective way. There are reasons for this, but given the dominance tech now has in the world, pushing back in the culture wholesale is justified I think.

Well I’m not talking about general conditions or labour rights, which certainly make any historical comparisons in this particular issue difficult or meaningless. But rather how an ordinary office job was managed and conceived. And the nature of work too.

Edit: specifically “knowledge” work, which has always been around. Generally though, I’m probably thinking of mainly boomer knowledge work, probably 60s-90s, as a historical comparison. I’ve just heard a few too many stories of someone totally checking out of their job, due to personal difficulties or whatever, and it being fine on a way that feels difficult to fit into todays “hustle culture” world.

Any one with insight on how this compares with recent or even not too recent times?

My immediate thoughts on this are that business may have become simply more active and noisier. That is, there’s always something to tend to, whether it be an immediate demand or working towards something in the future. Basically business practice growing and accelerating without accounting for what limitations people may have. I’d also wager it’s also noisier, as in full of meaningless stuff. Communications that mostly fluff, planning that isn’t actually thought through but closer to empty ambitions, requests for help or explanation due to not trying hard enough to work out them selves.

But then they get into a positive feedback loop. Too distracted to do anything well? Then just forward the cruft and minimally viable product down the line, or, produce an easy to make communication or plan that looks like productivity but really isn’t.

In the end, we run into Kessler syndrome, but for time and concentration rather than space. Everyone is burnt out and so passes along some distraction to the next person and so on until no one can get anything meaningful done as that would require uninterrupted time and concentration. What’s more, people adapt to their environment. If you expect to be interrupted, then you’ll never bother to work in a way conducive to longer periods of work. Instead, to seem productive, you’ll come up with our look for small and easy pieces.

Which gets to productivity culture. How mindful are we all of having to constantly prove our worth and productivity? If so, and given the above, how much are them inclined to do something that signals productivity rather than something that actually is productive? And much distraction is that likely to cause for others, both short term and long term? How much is that then going to encourage others to signal? Seems like Kessler syndrome again to me.

I’d wonder if in the recent past there was more of a sense that you had your job and that was that. It was fine. Don’t fuck it up and everything will be fine. Nothing urgent to do right now, go to the doctor it will be fine.

The problem with this answer is that you go from your anecdata to a sweeping statement about the relevance of public health information.

Plenty of people would really prefer to not get covid and for very good reasons. If you’re having basic cold symptoms, great, not everyone finds it that minimal. Just like how some have bad hay fever and some don’t get the news sometimes reports on pollen levels.

Eh, shifts on the stock market and pretty random political moments make the news all the time. Not to mention the weather and sports.

A little, “hey, contagions are about at the moment, if you’re vulnerable or just not keen, act accordingly” wouldn’t be misplaced at all.

Bottom line is we have a cultural problem with general illness. Something something capitalism something something.

The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.

Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.

BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.

This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d

He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.

Yea. Even nicer if it could be adjusted on a post-by-post basis (however viable that is).

It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.

Oh yea I hear you.

Thanks!