Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.
If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.
Yeah, this is one of the many things that annoys me about AI discourse.
“We can use it to solve climate change!”
We already technically know how to solve climate change, but politics makes doing that impossible.
And, no, AI can’t “fix” politics. We’re going to have to figure that out by ourselves.
Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in… there’s no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.
That’s not to say subjectivity means science can’t do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it’s not.
Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they’re always right (including many “scientists”).
But yeah, you’re right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what “pure objectivity and truth” means.
We’ve been used to having access to websites instantly, but you can’t scale forever. Servers have a real impact on the environment. We’re already using a significant proportion of the world’s electricity on running servers.
It’s all bullshit marketing hype until we actually see it. There’s no reason to believe AI will advance better than linearly in the next 5-10 years.
How long before it’s illegal to hack LLMs?
Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.
It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.
I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.