Some paradigms of tech encourage tinkering, DIY, "try it and find out!".
Some paradigms of tech encourage "don't mess with it": black boxes.
All else equal I strongly prefer the former.
More humans leaning into their agency and creativity.
From other episodes
- The CLI has no affordances.2026-02-02
- When you give a goal to a swarm, it creates a monkey paw situation due to Goodhart's law.2025-06-02
- Imagine if all of the tokens in the think tag of a reasoning model was there for you to navigate.2025-05-26
- "Reward hacking" in models is just a specific example of Goodhart's law.2025-05-19
- Modern OSes treat the app like a black box, and primarily control its access to resources.2025-02-24
- When people interact with a big black box that has important effects on their life but is inscrutable, they tend to develop superstitious beliefs about how it works.2025-02-24
- One of the reasons DeepSeek went mainstream so quickly was because you could peek into the black box.2025-02-18
- An idea for a science fiction story: humanity has had a cataclysmic event that destroyed nearly all society.2024-12-16