The Butt Ugly Weblog

I've used this analogy before, but I think of my social media feed as my living room. I decorate it how I want because I want to feel comfortable there. Maybe put a plant there, TV there, nice couch. Lots of books. Analoguously (is that a word?), I block and mute people on social media - even though I don't own the space, I still feel somewhat responsible for it and for the atmosphere there. Sometimes house parties are fun even when they're noisy, and people don't need to agree with me, but bad behavior gets you thrown out. Or not even let in.

This has been my guiding principle since my blogging days, and although I now, as a middle-aged white man, avoid the worst trolls, this approach has worked well for me and kept social media relatively well-behaved. To continue the analogy, I gave up on X years ago when it started to feel like the neighbourhood had become too rowdy and friends were moving away from the area too.

Another important guideline I've followed is trying to limit myself to three comments in any thread. If I can't express my message in three comments, the situation usually doesn't improve no matter how much I argue. Of course, this isn't a strict rule; especially on platforms with strict character limits, sometimes you need to write more. And sometimes the conversation is genuinely interesting and you learn something new. And sometimes the banter is just too fun 😎

Nevertheless, I've recently noticed myself becoming increasingly cautious about commenting - especially in other people's feeds. In Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other closed environments, I might open up more and share my opinions - especially when asked - but publicly... the threshold has clearly gotten higher.

Part of the reason is surely the deconstructive nature of the internet: if your argument has even the slightest flaw (like a spelling error or a comma mistake), it invalidates your entire argument. Sometimes it feels like social media is one big malfunctioning computer, and if you feed it even a slightly flawed program, it spits back an enormous amount of error messages primarily aimed at insulting the programmer.

This is perhaps an unspoken dark side of meritocracy: putting down others' skills is just as valid a way to advance in the hierarchy as improving your own skills. And since meritocrats often view empathy as weakness, they don't see anything wrong with this approach. Even though it automatically excludes a large portion of humanity from their hierarchies and makes meritocracy automatically an activity for a small inner circle.

I won't start delving deeper into meritocracy and its problems; smarter people than me have surely written about them. I'm just highlighting this one aspect that I think plays a big role in social media.

I don't know how much of this stems from the internal and business logic of these social media systems, designed and funded by people living and breathing in the meritocracy, who perhaps can't even think in any other way. I'm too close to this myself that I might not even be able to imagine what the alternative would be. (And no, don't offer the Fediverse; if you do, you haven't quite understood my argument about meritocracy.)

But now that I've been observing social media for a quarter century, I have a strong feeling that there must be an alternative to this design. The basic feature of social media is that it's made by people, and the more people, the better it should be. Now it feels like there's a limit beyond which social media cannot scale without getting out of hand.

Small communities, like Discord servers, Reddit forums, and some FB groups, stay together precisely because they start from this "living room" thinking, where strong moderation keeps the discussion reasonable. But stupidity and greed (aka bots) scale faster than moderation capability.

Perhaps the most functional example of a large working community are wikis, like Wikipedia. They don't value "discussion" as inherently valuable, but as a means to reach an outcome.

I don't know. I have some ideas that could be worth trying. If only I had the time... but there's so much fun stuff to do in the world 😅

Pyysin Claudea suunnittelemaan promptin, jolla voisi tehdä sellaisen kuvan mitä AI voisi pitää esteettisenä ja sellaisena, että se sanoisi jotain maailmasta. Syötin luodut kuvat takaisin tekoälylle kunnes se piti lopputulosta niin hyvänä, että se ei enää ehdottanut muutoksia, eli oli ns. "tyytyväinen". Minä en siis ole ohjannut tekoälyä tässä millään muulla tavalla, joten tällä kuvalla ei ole tekijää eikä tarkoitusta, vain biaksia.

Silti tässä on kyllä jotain messiaanista.

Kamalaa sinällään sanoa, mutta pidän tästä kuvasta enemmän kuin monesta muusta AI-kuvasta, jota kuvavirrassa näkyy. Suurin osa AI-generoiduista kuvista on kuitenkin "AI-liejua", johon ei halua sen suuremmin sotkea itseään. Toki se johtuu siitä, että mediankulutustottumuksemme - loputon skrollaaminen - ohjaa siihen, että sitä kontsaa pitää olla myös loputtomasti, jolloin AI-liejulla ja tuhannennella kissameemillä ei ole paljoakaan enää eroa kuluttajalle. Naurahdus, klikkaus, ja scroll.

Niin kauan kuin ihmiset käyttävät aikaa skrollaamalla ja etsimällä jotain hetkellistä täytettä elämäänsä, niin järjestelmä optimoituu kohti halvinta ja helpointa tapaa tehdä sisältöä. Ja AI tekee sitä personoidusti ja loputtomasti. Ei vielä halvimmasti eikä hyvin, mutta se on vain teknistä optimointia. "Hyvä" tarkoittaa somen tapauksessa "eniten klikkejä ja tykkäyksiä". Olemmehan optimoineet interaktionkin niin vähäiseksi, että tietokonekin osaa.

Onko mulla jokin pointti? Ehkä. AI-lieju menee sinne minne ihmisetkin, niin kauan kuin malli on loputon skrollaus. Siltä ei pelasta fediversekään. Mutta jos voimme muuttaa interaktion internetin kanssa sellaiseksi kuin mitä interaktio on ihmisten kanssa (eikä päinvastoin), niin ehkä se vielä pelastuisi. Siinä AI:lla voi olla hyvinkin paikkansa; ei sisällöntuottajana vaan keskustelukumppanina.

Clauden oma kommentti tähän kuvaan ihan vain näin loppukaneetiksi: "The final result achieves both the aesthetic beauty and meaningful commentary I was hoping for. It's a hopeful vision of how technology might integrate with nature in ways that preserve and enhance both realms. The visual storytelling is subtle yet profound - showing technology as a caretaker and partner to nature rather than its replacement."

Kävin pelaamassa tennistä ja törmäsin tuttuun. Mainitsin sitten että tuli nuorena pelattua enemmänkin, mutta niistä ajoista on kymmeniä vuosia jo, mutta yllättävän helpolta on pelaaminen tuntunut näinkin pitkän tauon jälkeen.

Lihasmuisti diipa daapa joo, mutta aloin miettiä, että onko tässä ehkä enemmän kyse siitä, että vielä muistaa, miltä hyvä näyttää ja miltä se tuntuu?

Mutta - Linkedin-hengessä - tätä ajatusta voi soveltaa moneen muuhunkin, kuten yritysmaailmaan. Kun menet ensimmäiseen työpaikkaasi, sinulla ei luultavasti ole käsitystä siitä, miltä hyvä näyttää. Millainen on hyvä työpaikka? Millaiset ovat hyviä käytäntöjä? Millainen tiimirakenne on hyvä? Sitä vaan roiskii menemään muiden seassa, joista kukaan muukaan ei ehkä tiedä, miltä hyvä näyttää. Silloin kaikki keksivät pyörää vain uudestaan ja uudestaan. Etenkin startupeissa löytyy kaikenlaista sekoilua ihan siksi, että nuoret puuhastelevat keskenään ja cargokulttaavat menestyneitä teknologiajättejä oikeastaan ymmärtämättä, miksi.

Mutta sellaiset, jotka päätyvät jo heti nuorena työpaikkaan, jossa on panostettu hyviin asioihin (mitä ne nyt sitten ovatkaan kullakin ammattialalla), niin kaikissa seuraavissa työpaikoissa on helpompi paimentaa asioita parempaan.

(Ja en siis tarkoita, että jotain tekniikoita tai menetelmiä pitäisi kopioida, koska ne eivät välttämättä siirry yritysten välillä. Tarkoitan ennemminkin sitä epämääräistä fiilistä, kun hommat hoituu, arki rullaa, ihmiset on kivoja, asioita saadaan aikaan ja tuntuu siltä, että tekee jotain merkityksellistä ja oikein, tiedättehän?)

Ihmissuhteissa sama juttu: jos sinua on koskaan kunnioitettu, rakastettu, annettu tilaa ja oltu kumppanina ylä- ja alamäissä, niin osaat myös vaatia näitä tulevilta suhteilta.

Kokemus suojaa huonoilta valinnoilta, etkä voi parantaa asioita, jos et tiedä mitä parempi tarkoittaa.

Siksi olisi itse asiassa hirveän tärkeää, että yritykset, joissa hommat toimii, ottaisivat sisään nuorempia ja päästäisivät heitä myös pois sopivan ajan jälkeen. Ihan näin kansallisis-kilpailullisistakin syistä, kun ei meillä hirveästi ole varaa huonoihin yrityksiin, jotka hukkaavat ihmisten lahjakkuutta kaikenlaiseen turhaan vitutukseen.

(Posted this on Bluesky, so the story is a bit jagged, as it was originally composed into 9 separate posts.)

I've been using AIs as a programming aide as I am delving into a slightly unfamiliar environment, and I'm realizing I'm not getting as deep of an understanding of the underlying system as before.

I've seen people lament this. "AI creates bad code and programmers don't know how to program anymore."

I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. We've seen this before when we moved from assembly and low-level languages to higher level languages.

I remember people lamenting how programmers no longer understand CPUs and how they treat CPU and memory like infinite resources. And how owning your own hardware is much better price/performance ratio than going cloud.

Yes. We (engineers) exchanged performance for development speed. We evolved the software engineering discipline to deal with the situation. Most of us now think in components and microservices instead of L2 caches.

Some people still live close to hardware and understand how it works. But it's a specialty now, unlike in the 80s.

So now I have a feeling we're doing the same kind of a jump: We're dumping performance again for efficiency.

Now, compilers for high-level languages like Rust (or even Java) have pretty much caught up with the modern processor architectures and they're not actually that terribly far off from hand-optimized code.

So I think this is going to happen with AIs as well.

Possibly it's going to need more than LLMs, but right now LLMs are like compilers that turn your intention into maybe okay code. We are still badly lacking in the necessary engineering disciplines to deal with all this I think, starting from reproducibility, QA, ops, or even version control.

But I think we can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. Power requirements for individual models are going down, and specialized hardware is being born. Millions of engineers are thinking about these things every single day, as opposed to thousands of data scientists two years ago.

Engineers are a powerful, fairly unstoppable force that tends to flow through any crack if it sees a treat on the other side of the wall.

With AI, we see the treat. We just need to see the threats too.

As a teenager, I was a voracious reader. And this continued actually for a pretty long time, but it became more difficult over time. Many have complained about the same thing, and I see a lot of answers: social media, streaming, kids, work, other pressures of daily life... Sure. They all contribute. And I've been saying the same things about my own reading. But I wanted to see if they actually were true for me. So as my summer holiday started this year, I just decided to read as many books as I could and see, if I still can and want to.

I know a lot of people prefer audio books these days, but for me they just don't work. My brain is wired so that I quite often pause to wonder about a passage, or it triggers some memory, or I start daydreaming, or I make notes about it for a role playing campaign. With a book, all I have to do is to lift my eyes from the page, and when my thought is complete, I can just lower my eyes and continue reading from where I left off. Not so with audio books. With audio books, I just lose the passage, the narrative and everything, and while I sort of complete the act of reading/listening to the book, I find that I have missed half of it and have only a generic idea as to what happened in the book.

Having said that, I did listen to one audio book during the summer, which was a pretty cool experience. I went on a walk, then I borrowed the book from the library on my phone, listened to it, and then returned it before I got home. (Edith Södergran's poetry. Poetry is always hard to listen to, since so much depends on the delivery. This was a good audiobook though.)

Aaanyway. During July and August, I was able to read 17 books, ranging from poetry and high fantasy to military fiction and business literature. During holiday, reading was a bit faster, but even after returning to work I was able to read pretty much all I wanted. I started off light, borrowing just one book from the library, and now I am in a state where I have five books checked out from the library and I'm pretty confident I can finish them all within the month. (Yes, one is missing from the pic.)

What I found out was that the reason I had not been able to read as much before as I wanted to was... lack of practice. My skills of reading had simply rusted due to low usage. I started off easy, reading pageturner, not-much-thinking-required books in my native language, just to see when and where I can read. So instead of doomscrolling, I read during breakfast. I read a quarter of an hour here and there. I made the book easily available. I read before bedtime. And my skills returned. I got into more complicated books (Harry Martinson's Aniara especially was quite emotionally heavy) as reading again became effortless like it was during my youth.

This experiment has made me a lot happier and relaxed than before. I've missed reading and books so much.

So I suppose here's a lesson: If you want to read more, give it a try? It might be just rust, and you might not know it until you try. Worked for me; might work for you.

On a colleague's recommendation, I ended up grabbing The Phoenix Project from my local library. Which has, pretty much since COVID, become my happy place. Not that it wasn't before, but the biggest thing I found myself missing during lockdowns was that I couldn't go to the library. Everything else I could cope with, but not being to access a library at my whim felt really, really bad. So I now make a point to visit it regularly.

Anyhoo, this was a weird book. It is a hero tale of an IT manager, who suddenly gets promoted to a VP of IT operations and is suddenly responsible for saving a multi-billion company from serious trouble and his entire IT team from being outsourced. And naturally, he accomplishes this with the help of a mysterious stranger who brings in his sensei-like wisdom about DevOps, and a few people who are eager to grasp onto these pearls of wisdom escaping his lips.

As a book, it's shit. Characters are uninteresting, plot is thinner than the paper the book was printed on, and I could not help but facepalm occasionally. There are three kinds of people in this book: Smart and Wrong, Stupid and Wrong, and Smart and Right. Of course the people who are Smart and Wrong become people who are Smart and Right, because of DevOps wisdom sprinkled by the protagonist and his sensei. And people who are Stupid and Wrong are the main antagonists here, and they of course lose. Because the hero story, right?

But as an illustrated case study for DevOps principles, it is brilliant. Basically this is a list of all different issues your company might be having, ranging from too much work-in-progress to managing unplanned work to managing conflicting business priorities and whatnot. It's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, and just execute smart plans using solid principles to solve each problem as they come along. In that sense, it's not that different from a lot of hero epics, such as The Martian by Andy Weir (which, unlike this, is actually a good book that I recommend).

This book is an interesting approach. It has certain, well, aynrandistic preachiness in it, but still a free-flowing fiction might be in some cases a good way to make your reader to think about the ideas you have. So if you read it as a marketing text on DevOps, it's pretty good. It's easy and fast to read, doesn't really slow down anywhere, and comes with a useful appendix of an excerpt of the business book they really want you to buy after this one.

Just don't expect a great narrative, well-rounded characters, or actually, well, caring about any of them.