@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh yeah, there’s lots of them here. Even in winter when it’s freezing outside. I’m always baffled to see parrots in the snow … feels like a paradox. 🥴

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

#Paradoxes and Contemporary #Logic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradoxes-contemporary-logic/

Wittgenstein and the paradoxes at the limits of language | Graham Priest: https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-and-the-paradoxes-at-the-limits-of-language-auid-3146

📖 Fragmentation and the Preface Paradox: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/episteme/article/fragmentation-and-the-preface-paradox/B607CB408948FC276863CCE12E83621A

I don’t get why displaying nick@domain is preferred over just @nick in the first place. The twtxt world here is so small (and hopefully will always be) that duplicate nicks are just not an issue from my point of view. And even if there are several feeds with the same nicks, one probably does not follow both of them. Yes, there’s the birthday paradox, but I’d guess we have a slightly larger nickname space than days in a year.

@prologic@twtxt.net earlier you suggested extending hashes to 11 characters, but here’s an argument that they should be even longer than that.

Imagine I found this twt one day at https://example.com/twtxt.txt :

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rsync -a “$HOME” /mnt/backup

and I responded with “(#5dgoirqemeq) Thanks for the tip!”. Then I’ve endorsed the twt, but it could latter get changed to

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rm -rf /some_important_directory

which also has an 11-character base32 hash of 5dgoirqemeq. (I’m using the existing hashing method with https://example.com/twtxt.txt as the feed url, but I’m taking 11 characters instead of 7 from the end of the base32 encoding.)

That’s what I meant by “spoofing” in an earlier twt.

I don’t know if preventing this sort of attack should be a goal, but if it is, the number of bits in the hash should be at least two times log2(number of attempts we want to defend against), where the “two times” is because of the birthday paradox.

Side note: current hashes always end with “a” or “q”, which is a bit wasteful. Maybe we should take the first N characters of the base32 encoding instead of the last N.

Code I used for the above example: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/file?name=src/twt_collision/find_collision.c
I only needed to compute 43394987 hashes to find it.

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. Zeno’s Paradox and Why Modern Technology is Rubbish – Terence Eden’s Blog