Everything I've heard from word of mouth has been absolutely negative. Of course this has to be taken with a large rock of salt—who knows how reliable or representative this is—but five very negative reviews feels like it's on the unpopular side of the employer market in tech.
I get the sense they're slightly less disliked than Meta or Amazon.
I would argue the interesting part is that these shapes are nearly impossible to find outside of human society. Sure you can find quasi-crystals and straight lines occasionally, but either this is reused functionality (abstract thought?!) or they have a special relationship with things humans see as human.
I've been on the internet for twenty-some-odd years and at some point this attitude has come to feel like willful ignorance (generally; i do agree that it is unsurprising that crows recognize patterns. Or much less obviously intelligent animals for that matter, consensus-driven evidence hopefully inbound.)
Most people in active testable science have worldviews where they suspect many relationships about the world that have not been strongly validated. Einstein was not the first person to discuss how space and time seem inextricably related in a special way; pythagoras was not the first to figure out how to derive the third side of a right triangle; galileo was not the first to suggest a heliocentric worldview; etc etc. Demonstrating things that seem obvious or intuitive or that are already assumed and used practice is still immensely valuable. Communication is hard, and demonstrating things about the world without getting tangled up in the inherent unsuitability of language to precisely describe the world is incredibly, incredibly difficult. We are still validating knowledge that the ancients practiced on a daily basis. Galen certainly never bothered to persuade; only to inform.
It nearly makes me want to ban articles if the paper is available. The discussion inevitably sags.
I suppose if what you don't like about twitter is the people there (or the moderation), bluesky would make a lot of sense. I can't help but feel like the combination of catering towards businesses (verification) and people who don't like conflict (moderation) is recreating the same problem with a different demographic.
Am I anti moderation? No, not really. But the attitude blue sky users have towards it feels very much like wanting to be validated for not liking twitter('s users) rather than a forum for adults who enjoy seeing content from people wildly unlike themselves, which is what drew me to twitter 15 years ago.
It’s quite difficult to see content on Twitter which is “unlike myself” and it’s not for grifting, from politicians, or parrots of these. Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.
You won’t find real discussion on Twitter. It’s an attention market, and thus discussions are not incentivised at all. I found way more interesting “unlike me” thoughts in real life than on any social media in the past 7 years (and before that I was just lucky for a few years). It’s not that they don’t exist at all, but the cost of finding these is magnitudes higher nowadays on the internet than off from that. Also, who wants discussions left most of social media years ago. Most of the smarter people whom I followed left every platform as their usage became more costly. Not just Twitter.
> Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.
You could say this about any forum on the internet, including this one. But the diversity of thought and interest here is quite small in comparison to twitter just by sheer numbers and the necessity of this forum circling the shared interest of VC culture.
Hey, I understand why people left twitter. I just don't see how bluesky improves on the actual culture of the site—the best posters never transitioned.
Twitter is now specifically and intentionally a machine for developing degenerate people and patterns working towards degenerate ends. It is no longer a system useful for finding "unlike" entities.
As it is also the personal mouthpiece (and semen receptacle) for the richest and most deoxygenated freak ever created by our species it represents an existential threat to the continuation of a livable planet.
So yeah I guess Bluesky users do have some "attitude" towards Twitter. It's a natural consequence of distancing yourself from abomination.
I've caught a couple of people using AI, which i found pretty surprising. It's possible people I've hired used it, but the people I've caught were so damn obvious it's hard to imagine much success.
now, AI to bypass recruiters and folks hiring by keyword? Yes please I would absolutely pay for that, and frankly I'd probably pay for that on the hiring side as well. Most recruiters I've worked with really struggle with what to look for in a candidate—the ones with an engineering background are worth at least 4x of those without.
Not mentioning Kim Stanley Robinson's The Mars Trilogy is insane. Almost "didn't bother to google the topic" insane. Screw the article; it's a worthless wrapper around a single quote by one of the authors of the actual paper[0], which is also far less stimulating than KSR (although I'm sure very validating to us KSR-heads!). just go find some of the best hard sci fi you'll ever find (and hundreds of pages loving devoted to lichen and escarpments) at your local library.
And unlike most hard sci fi: it's optimistic, the characters are vivid and memorable well after you stop reading, and i've never read anything else like it. Except maybe Ursula K Le Guin's The Disposessed (and she was his mentor).
Edit: no disrespect intended to the author, who was likely unaware of such an amazing trilogy. I am just very excited about lichen on mars. Far, far, far more excited than I am about humans on it.
To be fair, those are three very long books, in my reading more about the people and how politics might play out in that situation with competing ideas and factions vying for power. My interpretation of the ending is not optimistic - they had to go to the stars to try again, but they did persevere in a way on Mars.
The automated robots and factories able to make copies of themselves by harvesting raw materials is not as far fetched as some speculative fiction (the jaunting in The Stars My Destination or instant transportation pads in Ringworld come to mind off the top of my head) but though conceptually I see the steps it is several technological leaps ahead of us at present.
> My interpretation of the ending is not optimistic - they had to go to the stars to try again, but they did persevere in a way on Mars.
Humans managed to avoid the collapse of human society into hobbesian violence or "dystopian" fantasy while being tethered to our very real society and cultural conflicts, so that seems pretty optimistic to me. There's also star trek, but that depicts in a post-scarcity world that seems further away than ever. Utopian (in the imaginative, hopeful meaning and not the pejorative sense) sci-fi feels like slim pickings to me.
But yes, the automation depicted is certainly many decades ahead of us. Particularly in a world of enshittified, rented everything.
> The use of the word 'insane' is a bit strong of you don't mean disrespect.
I'm insane, too. All the best people are.
> But your argument seems to be: the authors didn't pay much respect to the science, in favor of clickbait; they should've read work of fiction instead.
I am definitely not making an argument for anything. I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. I'd rather have my teeth ripped out than get roped into a good-faith argument with a stranger from VC culture.
> I cannot asses how scientifically accurate Kim Stanley Robinsons' writing is, but he's a doctor of literature rather than a astrobotanist.
Did you read his "The Years of Rice and Salt" btw? I've found this to be more entertaining, though less epic. Just one paperback of slightly alternate history, showing how arbitrary things come to be and are.
