Category - Opinion

Word of mouth in the age of the ad-driven internet

Sara Gerretsen 12/28/2025

If you're my age or older, you probably knew the era where google was actual magic. No matter what you wanted to find, it was there at your fingertips. No matter how specialised or generic, you could find it, if not in one search, then definitely in two. But none of that exists any more. Profit incentives pulled the search engine owners' interests and those of the engine's users apart. Two searches make more money than one. And the advertising model is showing cracks big enough to spook the industry to the next false promise of infinite growth. Now the users of search engines are left with half-functioning and intentionally dysfunctional products. With very little sign it'll improve soon. A problem analysis What does a search engine give the user. Answers to questions yes, but more importantly, a way to discover the internet. The Pre-AI Problem A simple thought experiment, how would you browse the internet without a search engine? What if google, bing, yahoo, kagi, searx and all the me

OtherOpinion

How to appear as a kinder person

Forbidden Tempura 8/24/2025

Your life is difficult. You have a hard time getting along with others. Yet you can't identify why. This post gives some pointers on appearing as a kinder person. Perhaps appearing kind isn't the problem you have. But maybe it is. If you're in doubt, try it out and see. Disclaimer: I hold neither a degree in psychology or political sciences. These are merely personal observations of mine. Anyone pitching in with solid research to disprove my claims or to provide a stronger foundation thereto would be greatly appreciated. Important context: This text is aimed at people who aren't kind people at heart but who need to blend in with society. Maybe they just don't want to be hobos like in Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. If you find yourself here, you should have already exhausted all avenues of genuine improvement. Mindset about life and death It matters a lot how you frame things in your mind. Your mental framing frequently carries over into your phrasing, even without

OtherOpinion

hopefully you'd implement metacognition as cognition about cognition, right?

scijones 3/24/2024

For this one, I'm talking about the Soar Cognitive Architecture as AI engineering software, and not so much about it in relation to humans. This software attempts to support cognition. Core to this is a procedural memory that breaks decision making into phases. At least every 50ms, the architecture goes through the phases of 1) proposing different options for (changes to) its actions, selecting among those options, and determining how to actually do the thing it selected. Those are called “propose, decide, apply”. That's the core loop of how Soar implements cognition. Each of these phases are implemented as part of the architecture, but the specifics of how a particular agent proceeds through those phases depends on the knowledge it has. For example, let's consider an agent navigating a maze and pretend the agent hits an intersection. One way the agent could “propose” is it could propose movement to each branch at the intersection. What to “select”?

AIOpinionInfodump

Designing User Experience for Inexperienced Users

Mia Rose Winter 2/11/2024

Studying media information technologies while working and designing software at a financial company, I have made observations I feel are rarely, if ever, talked about, and it is actively harming many companies. When you study something with IT that isn't just building Mainframes and backends, you will inevitably run into user experience and accessibility lectures. The flow of information, the way you should lay out things, the colors and contrasts you need, what you should avoid, what you need to implement, these kinda things are essential for an application to be “User friendly”. A lot goes into the study of user experience, UX; not only what ratios of colors are the most readable to people with bad eye sight, or how to structure a website to be best navigable with accessibility software like screenreaders, there is also a lot psychology, how to guide a persons gaze, convey information in a coherent and efficient manner. Looking at the products of many big companies, you w

ITOpinion

thinking about parallel computing for thinking

scijones 2/7/2024

Soar is a “cognitive architecture”. It attempts to implement the necessary components to support general intelligence, but it's not like crypto/AI/techbro hype. It's a decades long academic research project, and it has been useful for some robotics and cognitive modeling. Soar is single core. With increasing availability of parallel computing, it may seem odd that an architecture that attempts to implement the basis for intelligence is largely single core. While aspects of our code-base could be parallelized for some performance gain, it seems that some serial bottleneck is inescapable and appears humanlike, at least for complex decision-making. This got me wondering whether underlying constraints could exist to demand that this must be the case. This led me to thinking about a swarm intelligence and about whether an intelligence embodied in a swarm would face the same constraints. From what I can tell, in such an intelligence, you would want the distributed knowledge in th

AIOpinionInfodump

My Time with GameMaker 2

Mia Rose Winter 2/5/2024

Now, since I worked with GameMaker 2 on a proper project, for four months, I want to put down some of my thoughts about it. I have dabbled with it in the past a bit but nothing major, so going into it with two other people and the target of developing a game in a semester at uni was quite the jump, but that's kinda how I roll best. The Project I worked on For our Project we wanted to make a small, turn-based strategy game. We already had the game concept worked out, so it really was mostly about game design and implementation, which made a lot of it easier. In the beginning I worked out the MVP with the others, laid out a project timeline, assigned task, and from there on managed it when I didn't code myself. Getting into it was a bit of a hassle in the beginning, Game Maker Language really was not intuitive to me, the way it kinda does a bit of jsdoc, and the difference between functions and methods was really confusing, and left quite some code smell. After some task were done and so

Game DevelopmentOpinion