Stefan Lesser (no longer active here)

software and meaning • metacognition • augmenting human intellect • tools for thought • humane design • user experience •

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Software is this delicate bridge over the chasm between symbolic computation and human experience. What's required to make rocks think with electricity is very different to what's needed to make humans have a useful and enjoyable experience.

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Ok, that’s it, I’m off.
Although Twitter technically still works, it stopped working for me because many people I was here for have moved on.
I’ll try a longer break and won’t try to replace Twitter with something else (for now). 👋
Find me here:
https://t.co/vD5VZT09cW

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Ok, fine, even though I'm going to sit this out here as long as it takes to ride it into the ground, here's where we can stay in touch:

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Still not on Mastodon either. Nothing against it, maybe someday I’ll pop up on one of the instances run by some of my favorite communities, but for now I’m trying to stay away from it to focus on deeper work. 👋

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Ok, fine, even though I'm going to sit this out here as long as it takes to ride it into the ground, here's where we can stay in touch:

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

I’m retreating from Farcaster for now. It’s great and looks promising, and I wish them all the best. I’m going to take a proper time off microblogging.

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Commodify all the bullshit. Make it worthless through abundance. (That part is going great!)
Free up capacity and force humanity to figure out what’s really important. (Yeah, not going so great at the moment.)

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@prathyvsh @Mappletons And weirdly I consider this a great opportunity to bring to the table what machines (currently?) can’t — our humanity and meaning. Maybe this will force us to reflect what value we can add in the process, and make more coherent, purposeful, significant contributions to society.

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@prathyvsh @Mappletons And weirdly I consider this a great opportunity to bring to the table what machines (currently?) can’t — our humanity and meaning. Maybe this will force us to reflect what value we can add in the process, and make more coherent, purposeful, significant contributions to society.

[Maggie Appleton @Mappletons]

Profoundly misunderstanding what “design” is in a nutshell

Call me when midjourney can research & define the problem space, negotiate with stakeholders, do information architecture, develop a coherent conceptual model for users, build prototypes, run user interviews, and ship it

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

Last time I was 3 months into writing and publishing regularly, I had already given up. I was constantly unsatisfied with the results and it was too frustrating to keep up.
I can’t believe I’m now 3 weeks ahead so I can take the holidays off without dropping a beat.

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@theresiatanzil And maybe there’s even more… I find these four ways of knowing helpful: https://t.co/d3aWti0TEW

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@gordonbrander @Mappletons Which one would both of you recommend to begin with? (In the sense of most useful for what you’re currently working on and/or thinking about.)

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@impactology @Mappletons Yes! Let’s move away from propositional tyranny and recover the value of perspectival and participatory knowing. https://t.co/d3aWti0TEW

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

The observer effect in higher-level systems:
Whenever we think we’re objectively measuring something, it’s simultaneously creating the motivation to game that metric, therefore distorting its findings.
Social media lives from that principle. (Like & RT, if you understand. :)

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@prathyvsh @chatur_shalabh @gordonbrander @yoshikischmitz I’m thinking if the encodings are the objects, and they can be arranged in a lattice like that, you can derive the abstract capabilities each encoding has and how these relate to each other. That’s not exactly FCA, more like a reverse application of it… But seems possible…?

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@prathyvsh @chatur_shalabh @gordonbrander @yoshikischmitz I guess what I’m trying is to do FCA to get clarity on what the objects and their properties are (unless you consider that clear already?), but I’m still figuring out how that actually works… :)

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@chatur_shalabh @prathyvsh @gordonbrander @yoshikischmitz And this smells exactly like type systems to me – the more abstract the type, the more generic and limited the operations on it, and vice versa. If we don’t agree on more specific types (on the meta level), we don’t get more useful behavior (at non-meta runtime).

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@chatur_shalabh @prathyvsh @gordonbrander @yoshikischmitz paging @prathyvsh — so can I picture this mathematically as an intension/extension lattice with pure bits encoding at the bottom (top?), and full structure+behavior encoding at the top, with bag-of-bytes close to bottom and Smalltalk objects close to top? What are the properties?

[siggibecker @siggibecker]

Most people need their IQ to get accident free to work, not for doing that work. Commuting camouflages replaceability. #AI #nearfuture

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@iamronen @rjs (Both of) you are welcome to have a look over here and find a few others thinking about such things:

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

If the two previous tweets sound interesting to you, feel free to join us in this little cozy web Telegram group, where we discuss such things further. https://t.co/TgJbfVXDRs

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

https://t.co/ctNiAw4azx

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

But perhaps just enough time left for us humans to figure out what we really want after the excitement of generating images and articles from language prompts wears off a little and we need to figure out how to add value to most real-ish tasks. https://t.co/zYcMSRXbiG

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

“Don’t ban [AI] for students — or anyone else for that matter; leverage it to create an educational model that starts with the assumption that content is free and the real skill is editing it into something true or beautiful.”
https://t.co/40K0YlTsoi

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

@AFarnsy I’d hope so too. Although I believe that by the time we reach that point, the boundaries between what is us and what is AI will be much more blurry than they are today.
Perhaps by then it’s no longer competition, but cooperation.

[Stefan Lesser (no longer active here) @stefanlesser]

If you work in technology and freak out about AI models automating you away, does that tell us more about how advanced AI has become, or how primitive technology still is?