TonesTones's recent activity

  1. Comment on Algorithmic Complacency: Algorithms are breaking how we think in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link
    I think the creator makes some salient points. I agree that trying to search for what you want to see is good “exercise” in trying to filter bad information from good information. I also believe...

    I think the creator makes some salient points. I agree that trying to search for what you want to see is good “exercise” in trying to filter bad information from good information. I also believe in the idea of “algorithmic complacency”; I think it’s common to just kind of accept whatever the algorithm feeds you because it is easy.

    However, I’m going to push back a bit on “this is breaking our brains”. I do not think the author makes a compelling argument that this is at all a new phenomenon. In fact, they briefly touch on the snarky “I googled it” response on forums, which I think is evidence for the opposite.

    Someone with enough technical knowledge to join a forum on the early Internet still didn’t think to google something. If you assume the “complacency” around searching for information is new, this should be really surprising, since you’ve already conditioned on being able to access the Internet, use a web browser, find a forum, sign up for that forum, and post. Googling should be really easy.

    I think humans, in general, tend to just gravitate towards what information is easy to access. In fact, I bet the algorithmic feeds led to increases in the userbase, because before those feeds, people who did not want to search would just avoid the platform entirely. Pre-algorithms, Youtube had substantially fewer users.

    So, I don’t buy that algorithmic feeds are breaking our brains in the way the creator describes. There’s probably strong arguments that social media is more harmful than the pre-Internet ways of wasting time (like watching TV on a channel or reading a magazine in your house or listening to the radio or just being bored), but that is pretty explicitly not the argument the author made: the comparisons being made are between pre- and post-algorithmic feeds online.

    For those of us who do want to practice searching for information to satiate our curiosity, this video makes good points. I had already turned off cookies on Youtube (so every time I boot it up, it’s just a search bar), left every other platform with algorithmic feeds, and taken other steps to mitigate this issue before watching the video. I hope the video inspires more people to take their steps. I just think the segment of the population who actually want to make that change are, and have always been, in the minority. The change the creator noticed, in my mind, is the remainder of people joining the Internet and the products responding accordingly.

    7 votes
  2. Comment on The terrorist propaganda to Reddit pipeline in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link
    Even with the article’s slant, this looks like young Western activists coordinating; mostly because they are primarily communicating via Discord, something a Middle East state-sponsored initiative...

    Even with the article’s slant, this looks like young Western activists coordinating; mostly because they are primarily communicating via Discord, something a Middle East state-sponsored initiative would never do.

    This article dances around a pretty critical conclusion, though. If this is something online activists can do effectively, I guarantee you there are state-sponsored groups trying to do the same thing. You do not need to censor speech if you can algorithmically silence it, and control over ideas is an authoritarian golden goose.

    I stay off of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Articles like this one convince me that the most reasonable future for online discourse will be a combination of well-known, deanonymized public figures with microphones and invite-only, anonymous communities like Tildes.

    You cannot let anonymous actors coordinate to algorithmically manipulate information without leaving the free exchange of ideas ripe for manipulation. At least news organizations have known figureheads who risk reputational damage with their words. Random anonymous accounts have nothing to lose.

    On Tildes, even though it’s anonymous, the small size means I get a sense of who the regular commenters are and what their perspectives are. People still risk reputational damage, albeit to a lesser extent. There are still avenues for exploitation, but this is why you need a benevolent dictator (and the site’s reputation depends on their behavior).

    I’m not exactly sure how to construct a healthy system of discourse without some trust factor.

    13 votes
  3. Comment on Murdoch family US legal fight over trust could change the future direction of Fox News (gifted link) in ~finance

    TonesTones
    Link
    My high school physics teacher had a saying that’s stuck with me. As I assume most people are, I’m occasionally envious of these wealthy familes with their exorbitant money and control. Think of...

    My high school physics teacher had a saying that’s stuck with me.

    The smartest people are the ones who find a way to be happy.

    As I assume most people are, I’m occasionally envious of these wealthy familes with their exorbitant money and control. Think of all the power they have! The good they could do!

    I’m reminded by articles like this that so many of the people who win capitalism just find misery at the end of the road. I cannot imagine being so broken by the end of my life that I decide to go into legal battles with my own children, all for the sake of preserving a legacy. A human legacy, which in the grand scheme of humanity, is still pretty pitiful. I also can’t imagine fighting over control of a vast corporation with my siblings, all for the sake of political ends.

    I guess their castles are made out of sand. Every desperate effort to make something solid that they can hold onto just crumbles. Not only has someone like Murdoch not found what is important; I’m not sure he even knows what to look for. A small part of me feels sorry.

    18 votes
  4. Comment on Breakfast for eight billion in ~enviro

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    Absolutely. I should make sure to say that I do believe in advocating for change. In my view, even the most left-wing politicians are not really “burn it all down” advocates until you get to...

    Absolutely. I should make sure to say that I do believe in advocating for change.

    In my view, even the most left-wing politicians are not really “burn it all down” advocates until you get to anarchy or communism. Taxing the rich is a fairly safe intervention; it’s not like people won’t still want to be rich.

    On the other hand, the policies implemented by the current admin, like firing huge numbers of federal workers and cutting off funding, reek of the mentality: “the entire current system is awful and corrupt, and we need to get rid of it, consequences be damned.” And I think many supporters of the admin would actually endorse most of that perspective. I’m sure there is corruption, irresponsible grants, fraud, etc. However, getting rid of the cancer should not also destroy the vital organs.

    3 votes
  5. Comment on Breakfast for eight billion in ~enviro

    TonesTones
    Link
    This essay and the introductory article capture and inspire a sentiment I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time. I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is...

    This essay and the introductory article capture and inspire a sentiment I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time.

    I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is our inability to conceive of the tragedies of the past.

    Warning: US Politics with a Heavy Dose of Cynicism and Foreboding The last century has been an unprecedented technological revolution and with it, an increase in human quality of life across the world of incredible scale. The author writes about how compared to generations past, we live with access to food, water, and temperature-controlled shelter that the wealthiest people of the past couldn’t imagine.

    The election of a leader like Trump, who promises and is delivering radical change, represents a deep sense of entitlement that the American people deserve better than the status quo. That people do deserve better is not at all obvious to me; people lived in far worse times throughout most of history.

    Such an election also represents a stark egotistic belief, especially from Musk and his libertarian SV allies, that they can actually build something similarly functional to what currently exists. My biggest fear is not that they secure dictatorial power and increase global explotation to the capitalist class.

    My biggest fear is that their attacks on existing structures will, at some point, break something. Right now, we have local grocery stores and shelves stocked with food that won’t kill you. I think this is a privilege and luxury that can be easily taken away from us. Living “paycheck to paycheck” would be a heavenly dream to any laborer who lived through the Great Depression.

    Most people in America have not known real suffering for quite some time, probably their entire life, and I think we’re far more lucky for that than we realize. I hope more than anything else that we don’t have to know that reality again.

    4 votes
  6. Comment on US voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong. in ~finance

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    I did not read @atchemey’s comment as disagreeing with the author, just the title. The author explores that they had to develop new economic measures to get a well-informed read on the economy....

    I did not read @atchemey’s comment as disagreeing with the author, just the title.

    The author explores that they had to develop new economic measures to get a well-informed read on the economy. @atchemey writes that the broad-stroke measures used by the administration to justify their success don’t actually capture the real picture.

    I think that is just a difference in language, not a difference in substance. Both are saying that the broad-stroke metrics did make it appear that the economy was improving even when it wasn’t.

    39 votes
  7. Comment on Why blog if nobody reads it? in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    I was about to write a comment saying the exact same thing. I have a hard time understating the value personal writing has brought to my life. Journaling, either in a reflection-style or doing...

    I was about to write a comment saying the exact same thing.

    I have a hard time understating the value personal writing has brought to my life. Journaling, either in a reflection-style or doing prompt Q&A journals, have been enormously helpful in clarifying and noticing my own thoughts.

    However, writing for some audience (even hypothetical), like I do on Tildes, is a wholly different experience. I still get a lot of clarity about my own thoughts, but I’m also forced to structure the language in a way that somebody who is not me can understand.

    When I write a comment or post too haphazardly, I often write in a way that makes sense to me, and then I’ll get very confused responses and realize there was a critical piece of my thinking I left out. Just the idea of an audience forces me to hold myself to a higher standard.

    How will somebody who doesn’t know me or my experiences react to this set of paragraphs? Their perspective is separate from my own before they even begin reading. That practice is incredibly valuable in many different environments.

    5 votes
  8. Comment on The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer in ~comp

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    I think your post came across as more than a bit harsh. I’m effectively going to double down on what @DawnPaladin said. Note that this is less because of exactly what you wrote, and more because...

    I think your post came across as more than a bit harsh. I’m effectively going to double down on what @DawnPaladin said. Note that this is less because of exactly what you wrote, and more because it received more upvotes than the post itself. I’m speaking both to you and those that are endorsing the language of your critique.

    This isn't groundbreaking. In fact I feel it almost shouldn't even be worthy of a blog post.

    The implicated idea is bizarre to me? If you want to read novel work, you can read papers published in academic journals covering LLMs. That writing is held to that standard. Blog posts aren’t supposed to be groundbreaking.

    Blogs are generally one person’s experience. Writing and publishing both act as tools to further your own learning and potentially help others learn. We’re all on our own journey. If you feel like it’s not a post worth reading, just don’t vote on it.

    Because the underlying issue is that you have been using LLM systems without properly thinking about how to use them properly. Effectively the "throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks" attitude.

    Most people use the “throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks” attitude. It’s a good attitude to have! When someone is learning to play chess, you don’t tell them to study all of the professional lines and build out a principled approach.

    You tell them to go play chess. Do the thing! Make mistakes! Hang a queen! Or twenty! Levy Rozman (GothamChess) has a series where he laughs at bad games of chess. He makes it very explicit that: “We aren’t laughing at you. We’re laughing because we’ve all been there.” We’re all going to have to learn and struggle; maybe not with using LLMs, but with something.

    I recognize the author is a consultant in the software space, and that there is some responsibility that comes with that career position. I don’t think that experience means we can’t make mistakes and learn from them.

    This might sound a bit harsh, but I am also having your previous blog post in mind. Where you outline your blind reliance on tools like cursor.

    I suspect either you or some of your upvoters instinctually rejected this piece on grounds that it covers using AI in SWE to do “even more”. Reading it and recognizing that it wasn’t necessarily novel to you reinforced that bias.

    I understand that AI is scary, and that for some, it sucks that we can’t close Pandora’s Box. AI will solve some problems, but it might cause a lot more. The technology might simultaneously cause people to lose their jobs while making the people with the remaining jobs work harder to solve AI’s mistakes. I’m writing not because AI is good and “let’s all use it” to read code like senior developers.

    I’m writing because our dislike of a technology shouldn’t get in the way of how we treat other human beings. At the end of the day, @nmn is just another person doing their best. I might be fired if one of my students or colleagues wrote the above and I responded by saying they shouldn’t have wrote it at all. It’s a good thing I’m held to that standard. We should hold ourselves to that standard on Tildes as well.

    Some developers will use AI going forward. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; if you are able to use LLMs to do your job, the capitalists will find a way to replace you. That doesn’t mean we should mock others learning how to use the new tech. It’s a part of our world now. We will accept that and find a way to be good to each other anyway.

    6 votes
  9. Comment on What's your take on capital and corporal punishment? in ~talk

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    I should clarify what I meant when I described unequal treatment across wealth lines in the US. At least where I’ve lived, the effectiveness of a police department correlates very strongly with...

    The police here are different to American cops. They are mostly pretty helpful to everyone that they can be (not saying they're perfect, of course, and there are plenty of issues with the police force both with individuals and structurally).

    I should clarify what I meant when I described unequal treatment across wealth lines in the US. At least where I’ve lived, the effectiveness of a police department correlates very strongly with the wealth of the area they are located. This is probably a combination of lower crime rates in wealthier areas and police funding coming from local taxes, which means departments’ funding is directly correlated with local income levels.

    I don’t know enough to claim a solution for this problem (I don’t fall on either “increase funding” or “decrease funding”), but the discrepancy certainly exists in the USA.

    2 votes
  10. Comment on What's your take on capital and corporal punishment? in ~talk

    TonesTones
    Link
    The other commenters here have thoroughly examined how unethical and abhorrent this proposal is. I’m adding that your assumptions are also wrong. The police have always been fairly unhelpful to...

    The other commenters here have thoroughly examined how unethical and abhorrent this proposal is.

    I’m adding that your assumptions are also wrong.

    The western world seems to be going through a change, where a few police were enough to deter a lot of crime. Now, many crimes go unpunished or even uninvestigated because they're seen as more of an insurance problem. If you've had your car broken into or maybe even your house, the police have next to no interest and cannot wait to issue that crime number so you can sort it with the insurance company instead.

    The police have always been fairly unhelpful to those without money, and the police remain extremely helpful to the privileged in at least American society.

    I’m wondering where you got the impression that this used to be different. My family talks about home and car break-ins they experienced from back in the 60s and 70s and they did not find the police helpful then either.

    One of the most underlying issues is the laziness and brazen abuse of the social welfare systems.

    Social welfare programs do cost more than they used to. I suspect this is more because more programs exist than used to; people have always been poor. It’s not like it’s easy to live off of these programs or easy to live off of minimum wage; I’d recommend trying to see how you would allocate spending on a welfare budget or a low-wage budget and you’d understand people are not incentivized to stop working to be on these programs.

    If the punishments didn't stop the crime, how could you implement social decency back into an area that is so deprived, crime-ridden and abusing the social welfare system so badly?

    You may ask why I'm posting this, and the answer is simply because the world seems to be getting worse.

    The world does indeed seem to be getting worse. The catch: it isn’t actually.

    The Illusion of Moral Decline is one of the coolest papers I’ve ever read, and Adam Mastroianni is awesome for having posted a blog write-up of it.

    Everyone thinks the world is getting worse, or is losing “social decency”, or some other moral decline. They believe this with some conviction despite strong evidence to the contrary, and they consistently believe this decline began the day they were born, and has worsened ever since. This phenomena is also fairly resilient to any changes to the question.

    So, rest well knowing that your brain is literally programmed to believe the world is getting worse, even when it isn’t.

    Adam also links The Better Angels of Our Nature in that blog post, which explores the historic decline of violent crime we’re currently experiencing in modern society. It’s true this book was published in 2011, but the book also explores how we felt the world was getting more violent then in spite of lack of evidence. I suspect the same is true today.

    4 votes
  11. Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link Parent
    This captures my exact feelings around AI and coding. I completely agree that AI is nowhere close to replacing a good software developer. I don't think most companies want or need good software...

    This captures my exact feelings around AI and coding. I completely agree that AI is nowhere close to replacing a good software developer. I don't think most companies want or need good software developers. I'm an academic, but I constantly hear about the tradeoff between writing "good code" and actually making progress in your job in an industry setting. Things like "refactors are a waste of time", or "great documentation slows down a feature release schedule" or, like you said, "what we have is good enough".

    Many coders do complain that these paradigms are harmful in the long-term, but that has never stopped Wall Street and business-types before.

    for so much more of it it's going to hit the same standards we've always had, which is "good enough".

    AI doesn't need to be a great software engineer. The code AI needs to write needs to be good enough, which is actually a lower bar than an engineer's "good enough", since AI is cheaper and faster than an engineer.

    Still, I actually don't think any software engineers that want to keep their job should be using LLMs as a crutch; the only ones who will survive the AIpocalypse will be those who can do something that LLMs can't.

    6 votes
  12. Comment on What's a song that you initially didn't enjoy, but it grew on you over time and is now a favorite? in ~music

    TonesTones
    Link
    I have a very particular music taste and I can usually tell pretty quickly if I will like a song or not. I’ve had two distinct experiences where a song will not ‘click’ with me for months or...

    I have a very particular music taste and I can usually tell pretty quickly if I will like a song or not. I’ve had two distinct experiences where a song will not ‘click’ with me for months or years.

    del mar county fair 2008 — Cavetown

    I used to like Cavetown’s music more and I slowly grew away from it. Ironically, I didn’t like this song at first, and now it’s really the only song of his I listen to, and it is one of my favorites.

    I think I didn’t like the story the lyrics were telling at first. Now, I see the song through a poetic lense, and Cavetown’s production of it really captures a specific set of emotions for me which is hard to describe. Definitely an all-time favorite for me though.

    creature — half•alive

    The overtly Christian vibes in this song made it very difficult for me to listen to at first. While all of the h•a discography is somewhat emotional, I liked most of their fun songs more at first.

    All of my favorite h•a songs, including this one, required me to go through a very specific emotional experience to truly appreciate. I think half•alive has a bizarre ability to capture emotions in their work, and that makes them my favorite band (it is not close).

  13. Comment on Interest in a new Tildes /~group?, ~electronics or perhaps ~makers? in ~tildes

    TonesTones
    Link
    I suggest ~creative.makers or ~design.makers. I prefer the former; ~creative seems a better match for a superset of makers. Ninja Edit: I don’t think makers is enough of its own “category” to...

    I suggest ~creative.makers or ~design.makers. I prefer the former; ~creative seems a better match for a superset of makers.

    Ninja Edit: I don’t think makers is enough of its own “category” to justify a new tilde ~makers.

    11 votes
  14. Comment on How would you rate adulthood? in ~life

    TonesTones
    Link
    I’d probably have to give my adulthood (as in post-college life) a perfect rating. I’m lucky enough that my college days were so miserable as to show me that finding serenity is much more about...

    I’d probably have to give my adulthood (as in post-college life) a perfect rating. I’m lucky enough that my college days were so miserable as to show me that finding serenity is much more about the “how” of life than about the “what”.

    Challenges and struggles are inevitable and I find that I appreciate life when I reframe those struggles instead of trying to eliminate them. I could surely imagine plenty of ways my life and the world could be better, but in both contexts, “could” is definitely not “should”.

    2 votes
  15. Comment on If eyes emitted light, could they still see? in ~science

    TonesTones
    Link
    My only qualifications are that I took a waves class in undergrad, but I kinda want to guess what would happen regardless. I’m assuming the eyes are magically projecting light (photons) outwards....

    My only qualifications are that I took a waves class in undergrad, but I kinda want to guess what would happen regardless.

    I’m assuming the eyes are magically projecting light (photons) outwards. So, the only effect on the photons absorbed by the eyes is their interactions with the emitted photons.
    The wavelength (and therefore color) of the photons is determined by their energy. I don’t know much quantum or wave/particle duality, but I assume all photons have the same amplitude (they all travel at the speed of light, where would the extra energy come from if the wavelength is fixed?).

    A. I think so, if the light emitted is fairly dim? My guess is that there would be few enough emitted photons that the incoming photons wouldn’t be impacted much.
    I did my best to test this by putting a flashlight just underneath my eye. Everything has a glare to it, but it’s just kinda more bright than before.

    If your eyes emitted enough photons to collide and interfere with the incoming photons, things would be different. But I suspect the density of photons would need to be high (and therefore the light bright) for this to actually play a role.

    B. My instinct tells me the color would just change the glow of everything, like using ambient lighting. I don’t think photons work the same as standard waves in terms of interference and destruction.
    If you shine a red light at a strawberry, it isn’t as if the red on the strawberry becomes less strong, it just becomes less red as your eyes adjust to seeing all the red photons.

    C. Infared is just another wavelength. We still wouldn’t be able to see it, and animals that do see it would just interact with it like another color under my assumptions.

    Again, I’m assuming the eyes are somehow magically emitting light only outwards. That allowed me to get pretty close to experimenting by putting (dim) flashlights very close to my eye. Sources of light don’t tend to choose in which direction they emit, which means your eyes would be constantly receiving that light as well, and I don’t know how that would change things (except that your eyes would surely get quite hot).

    I’m probably wrong; I am not a physicist. Still, I wanted to think through it from the first principles I am aware of.

    3 votes
  16. Comment on The curse of the household analogy regarding UK government spending in ~finance

    TonesTones
    Link
    National debt is always a controversial topic for economists, and this just seems like a standard MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) opinion. I haven’t studied any economics, but there are a few...

    National debt is always a controversial topic for economists, and this just seems like a standard MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) opinion.

    I haven’t studied any economics, but there are a few concerns I have that seem to be unaddressed.

    • If governments fund by printing, the type of spending seems to be important. For example, if governments fund tax cuts on the wealthy by printing, I imagine this would effectively act as a regressive tax via inflation. Especially on asset prices like housing.

    • If governments fund with bonds, bond ownership seems very important. For example, if a government’s debt is primarily owned by foreign entities, this should theoretically siphon money away from the country’s economy in the long-term. I know Japan’s excessive debt is causing their currency to weaken, but I don’t know what the long-term impacts of that are.

    12 votes
  17. Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link
    I find the article and its conclusions relatively unsurprising. I think it’s inevitable that anyone with a text-based job (including software-engineers) is going to find their field increasingly...

    I find the article and its conclusions relatively unsurprising. I think it’s inevitable that anyone with a text-based job (including software-engineers) is going to find their field increasingly disrupted by LLMs.

    The author wonders if the lack of answers on SO will degrade the quality of LLMs, and if this will cause issues for the service quality of LLMs. I think this is likely, and the author suggests that LLMs could improve to compensate for these weaknesses. I don’t know if it even matters.

    @ButteredToast mentions that they stopped using SO because the answers were often low quality. SO tries to mitigate this with community effort (removing duplicate questions, upvoting good answers, etc.). The community is doing some optimization to get better answers.

    If the LLM usually provides answers of low quality, and that quality can be measured, you can optimize for better answers. You don’t actually need the LLM to be better than a human; you need the local maxima of the LLM’s distribution to be better than a human.

    New technology has disrupted industries before, and it will do it again. If SO becomes irrelevant and that (mostly volunteer) human work is automated away, I’m not even sure this is a bad thing in the big picture.

    3 votes
  18. Comment on The ivory tower’s drift: how academia’s preference for theory over empiricism fuels scientific stagnation in ~science

    TonesTones
    Link
    Huh. I think the other commenters have provided sufficient challenge to the substance of the article. I would agree this is untrue about science more generally; empiricism is alive and well in...

    Huh. I think the other commenters have provided sufficient challenge to the substance of the article. I would agree this is untrue about science more generally; empiricism is alive and well in physics, biology, chemistry, etc.

    The author seems to care about fast software, which is an interesting field for this discussion. I only briefly studied speed of software in undergrad, but from what I remember there was a lot of emphasis on asymptotics, theoretical optimization of problems, etc. It’s likely true that theoretical computer science is drifting farther and farther from empiricism.

    I don’t have any opinions on if this is good or bad. @localizer correctly mentions that fast software is a priority in industry, which can allocate resources to the problem more efficiently by virtue of financial incentive. Seeing that allocation not prioritized in academia disappoints the author. I wonder if focusing on the direction of the community as a whole is misguided. As a respected professor, the author has enough career freedom to do what he wants to do; it’s a valuable position to have.

    8 votes
  19. Comment on Tildes Book Club - The Ministry for the Future - How is it going? in ~books

    TonesTones
    Link
    I’m in the mid-80s, so I’m nearing the end of the book. I really, really enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing style. I both like and dislike the “I am a concept” chapters. The pivots between...

    I’m in the mid-80s, so I’m nearing the end of the book. I really, really enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing style. I both like and dislike the “I am a concept” chapters. The pivots between different short stories make for an interesting storytelling tool, and I’ll think more about that when I write for the actual discussion.

    3 votes
  20. Comment on Walled gardens, privacy, SEO and the open internet in ~tech

    TonesTones
    Link
    Like @ogre mentions, the tradeoffs tend to be platform-specific, and depend on what kind of data is being shared publicly. In general, there is always a tradeoff, because even if you anonymize...

    Like @ogre mentions, the tradeoffs tend to be platform-specific, and depend on what kind of data is being shared publicly.

    In general, there is always a tradeoff, because even if you anonymize everything before releasing it publicly, there’s always the risk of reidentification, or being able to identify a person from enough context clues in the data.

    For example, Facebook allows you to lock your profile to only be visible by friends or friends-of-friends, which does support the idea of a walled garden (not visible publicly). However, even if you wanted to make results available to search engines by anonymizing profiles (say: remove name, picture faces, and birthday), there’d still probably be enough information on the profile to deduce who this person is.

    On Tildes, when telling anything personal, I do change or hide any details so it’s harder for someone to go from Tildes content -> IRL identification. Someone who knows who I am IRL can probably conclude it’s me if they find me here and read enough of my comments. That I’m ok with, so it’s nice to know only others Tildes users can see my entire comment history.

    I suspect the future way to get around the “walled garden” problem will be with decentralized protocols. That’s still a very new technical space, and there’s a lot of smart people that disagree on what that should look like, but I think most unbiased actors agree that some public protocol is better than media provided by one company.
    Note that decentralized protocols will still likely hide a lot of data from public view via encryption (and therefore hide it from search engines), but at least you will have more than one option to find your friends online.

    3 votes