Rick van der Arend

Software solution engineer who likes autonomy, mastery and purpose. Turns some brain waves into tweets. Working @ Kjerner on Alan -

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

Time to draw my conclusions: I am not switching from Twitter/X to Bluesky, but retiring from social media altogether. Hoping everybody who wants to keep their thoughts sane, does the same. Do not let your thoughts get infected by uncurated drivel from just anybody with an opinion

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

When I started with social media, about 25 years ago, I thought it was a good thing that many new people got the freedom to express themselves. A democatization of media, so to say. I must admit I was wrong. Most private opinions should just stay that: private.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

Without thought, truthseeking and an effort to stay objective most of these opinions bring no value to the table, only chaos and people being mislead. Luckily they were mostly private until Hyves, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

The value that any of these social networks bring nowadays is non-existent or negative. In the beginning there were interesting people sharing thoughts, so I was positive, but I was naive: I should have known that it attracts reactionaries, pundits, trolls and plain old dirty ads

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

I'm signing off here. I didn't do anything with the account for many years anyway. I'll be testing the waters at bluesky. See ya!

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@meinte37 hij kwam vanmiddag binnen!

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

Op dit moment? Tsja, uit het zuidwesten, zou ik zeggen.

Maar ik vermoed dat dat niet is wat ze willen weten..

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

haha.. even aan het kijken naar een offerte voor zonnepanelen. Krijg ik deze vraag tussendoor. Ik vind hem lastig.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@gssgek @unclebobmartin Alan

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@daan_van_berkel Congratulations!

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@meinte37 @markusvoelter @MicrosoftTeams Yes, agreed, its login functionality is confusing and it always opens with some very old meeting that's already weeks back in the calendar.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends We can do away with 'pic or didn't happen' now.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends The effect is less than you might expect: texts are already easy to 'fabricate' for quite a while, even for human actors. And it is still possible to convey useful information with text. It's just that knowing and verifying the source is much more important.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends Ok.. but in the mean time I'll just continue what we are doing, as well as possible. :-) Actually with very exciting results as well, just not that visible yet.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends When working with Alan, most work goes into understanding a (custom) problem domain. Very hard to use current AI reliably for that. And once described, it is not bound to a desktop/mobile gui, so a conversational frontend might work well.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends The thing is that I don't really see where I could really use this technology - yet.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends Sam has a high stake in this, so not a trustworthy source. I agree that the impact will be likely be high, even of the current level of this technology. Very hard to predict what, though.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends My main point is that progress mostly comes from outliers, with ideas that defy common knowledge. It requires a fundamental understanding to be able to do that, you cannot just extrapolate.

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends Ok, but this not guaranteed 'improving'. Are you sure it doesn't just make it better at following average knowledge?

[Rick van der Arend @rvdarend]

@rikarends Is ot really self improving? I have not seen any evidence of that. From what I hear it uses a heavily human-curated static dataset