jfarmer (u/jfarmer) - Readit News

jfarmer commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

greenavocado · 18 days ago

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

jfarmer · 18 days ago

Plants "want" nitrogen, but dump fertilizer onto soil and you get algal blooms, dead zones, plants growing leggy and weak.

A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, and there's an "ecology of friction" here. The fertilizer company doesn't say "well, the plants absorbed it." But tech companies do.

There's something puritanical about pointing to "revealed preference" as absolution, I think. When clicking is consent then any downstream damage is a failure of self-control on the user's part. The ecological cost/responsibility is externalized to the organisms being disrupted.

Like Schopenhauer said: "Man kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will." One can do what one wants, but one cannot will what one wants.

I wouldn't go as far as old Arthur, but I do think we should demand a level of "ecological stewardship". Our will is conditioned by our environment and tech companies overtly try to shape that environment.

jfarmer commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

jjkaczor · 18 days ago

This is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you!

And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it.

It was friction that made me learn how to program and read manuals/syntax/language/framework/API references to accomplish things for hobby projects - which then led to paying work. It was friction not having my "own" TV and access to all the visual media I could consume "on-demand" as a child, therefore I had to entertain myself by reading books.

Friction is good.

jfarmer · 18 days ago

I think of it like this:

Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradicated is like deciding mosquitoes or spiders or wolves are bad and should be eradicated.

Sometimes friction is noise. Sometimes friction is signal. Sometimes the two can't be separated.

I learned much the same way you did. I also started a coding bootcamp, so I've thought a lot about what counts as "wasted" time.

I think of it like building a road through wilderness. The road gets you there faster, but careless construction disturbs the ecosystem. If you're building the road, you should at least understand its ecological impact.

Much of tech treats friction as an undifferentiated problem to be minimized or eliminated—rather than as part of a living system that plays an ecological role in how we learn and work.

Take Codecademy, which uses a virtual file system with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Even after mastering the lessons, many learners try the same tasks on their own computers and ask, "Why do I need to put this CSS file in that directory? What does that have to do with my hard drive?"

If they'd learned directly on their own machines, they would have picked up the hard-drive concepts along the way. Instead, they learned a simplified version that, while seemingly more efficient for "learning to code," creates its own kind of waste.

But is that to say the student "should" spend a week struggling? Could they spend a day, say, and still learn what the friction was there to teach? Yes, usually.

jfarmer commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

ceroxylon · 19 days ago

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you".

This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend.

It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.

jfarmer · 18 days ago

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air.

Friction isn't fungible.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying:

> We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void.

And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void.

I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc.

Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out.

But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person?

This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest.

Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.

jfarmer commented on Why friction is necessary for growth jameelur.com/blog/overcom... · Posted by u/WanderingSoul

jfarmer · 3 months ago

From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."

“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”

jfarmer commented on Teacher AI use is already out of control and it's not ok reddit.com/r/Teachers/com... · Posted by u/jruohonen

internet_points · 5 months ago

> * A teacher sponsoring a club put student artwork through Microsoft Copilot to 'clean it up' because he thought it looked too unfinished and the kid felt incredibly disrespected and upset.

and rightly so! kids deserve better, that is awful

jfarmer · 5 months ago

I sometimes find Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication helping in thinking about situations like this.

Link: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...)

  1. One cannot not communicate

  2. Every communication has a content and relationship
     aspect such that the latter classifies the former
     and is therefore a metacommunication

  3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the
     punctuation of the partners' communication procedures

  4. Human communication involves both digital and analog
     modalities

  5. Inter-human communication procedures are either
     symmetric or complementary

Re: (1), the "mere" act of using AI communicates something, just like some folks might register a text message as more (or less) intimate than a phone call, email, etc. The choice of modality is always part of what's communicated, part of the act of communication, and we can't stop that. Re: (2), that communication is then classified by each person's idea of what the relationship is.

This is a dramatic and expensive way to learn they had different ideas of their relationship!

Of course, in a teacher/student situation, it's the teacher's job to make it clear to the students what the relationship is. Otherwise you risk relationship-damaging "surprises" like this.

Even ignoring the normative question of what a teacher Should™ do in that situation, it was counterproductive. Whatever benefit the teacher thought AI would provide, they'd (hopefully) agree it was outweighed by the cost to their relationship w/ students. All future interactions w/ those students will now be X% harder.

There's a kind of technical rationale which says that if (1) the GOAL is to improve the student's output and (2) I would normally do that by giving one or more rounds of feedback and waiting for the student to incorporate it then (3) I should use AI because it will help us reach that goal faster and more efficiently.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

The act of receiving and incorporating feedback is not "inefficient", especially not in a school setting. The consummation of that process is part of the goal. Maybe the most important part!

Full Dewey quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597741

jfarmer commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph

jfarmer · 5 months ago

CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.

The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow).

For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says:

“[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”

jfarmer commented on ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/Topfi

Aurornis · 5 months ago

> how it normally takes him 4 to 8 hours to put together complicated, data-heavy reports. Now he fires off an agent request, goes to walk his dog, and comes back to a downloadable spreadsheet of dense data, which he pulls up and says "I think it got 98% of the information correct...

This is where the AI hype bites people.

A great use of AI in this situation would be to automate the collection and checking of data. Search all of the data sources and aggregate links to them in an easy place. Use AI to search the data sources again and compare against the spreadsheet, flagging any numbers that appear to disagree.

Yet the AI hype train takes this all the way to the extreme conclusion of having AI do all the work for them. The quip about 98% correct should be a red flag for anyone familiar with spreadsheets, because it’s rarely simple to identify which 2% is actually correct or incorrect without reviewing everything.

This same problem extends to code. People who use AI as a force multiplier to do the thing for them and review each step as they go, while also disengaging and working manually when it’s more appropriate have much better results. The people who YOLO it with prompting cycles until the code passes tests and then submit a PR are causing problems almost as fast as they’re developing new features in non-trivial codebases.

jfarmer · 5 months ago

From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct:

“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”

jfarmer commented on AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion fakepixels.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/jger15

13years · 7 months ago

> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.

This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.

We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.

For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale

jfarmer · 7 months ago

John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."

> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.

> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.

jfarmer commented on Peirce Edition Project peirce.indianapolis.iu.ed... · Posted by u/rnjailamba

jfarmer · 9 months ago

Always a pleasant surprise to see Peirce linked here!

He influenced many people, both directly and indirectly, but had a...difficult personality. He has many thousands of pages of written work, but resisted finalizing anything "publishable". His style is (IMO) an extreme example of that dense, meandering, 19th-century Victorian style, which can make for very hard reading.

But he made significant contributions to many fields, from mathematics to experimental physics to logic to (nascent) computer science to philosophy.

This 2019 article from Aeon magazine outlines much of it: The American Aristotle https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-peirce-was-americas-g...

Umberto Eco said: "Charles Sanders Peirce is undoubtedly the greatest unpublished writer of our century." (cf. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2907146)

Cornel West said: "Charles Sanders Peirce is the most profound philosophical thinker produced in America."

For example, Peirce coined the term "fallibilism":

> For years in the course of this ripening process, I used for myself to collect my ideas under the designation fallibilism; and indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety-nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady — of whose inroads they are most strangely unaware! Collected Papers, §1.13

He was the first to articulate the type/token distinction. He has truth tables ~40 years before Wittgenstein. He had diagrams of electrical circuits that could do basic logic. He was the first to show (in the 1880s) that NOR and NAND were sufficient to reproduce the other logical connectives.

He was the first to propose tying a standard unit to an absolute measure (in Peirce's case, defining the meter in terms of the wavelength of a spectral line): https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/62/12/39/390647/Ch...

The ideas in the paper where he proposed that were taken up by Michelson and Morley, who credit Peirce in several of their interferometer papers.

jfarmer commented on Mathematics in the 20th century, by Michael Atiyah [pdf] (2002) marktomforde.com/academic... · Posted by u/practal

phwlarxoc · 10 months ago

The most stunning point of this paper is the paradoxical benefit of deliberately assuming some kind of "blindness" in one's own thinking as a mathematician: in reckoning algebraically we proceed eyes closed so to say. What we look at is neither the real world nor our own mind but abstract signs on paper. That is the algebraic, formal", "symbolic" way of thinking.

Atiyah has this tradition start with Leibniz, and it marks exactly his opposition to Newton, the latter being mainly interested in physics and therefore restraining math by its grounding in the real world, whereas Leibniz would have understood the formal nature of the discipline. The antagonism re-emerges in the 20th century with Poincaré-Arnold on one side and Hilbert-Bourbaki on the other.

The point has been aptly made in the polemics of Brouwer against Hilbertian formalism, by saying that for the formalist mathematical exactness is basically grounded in paper: "Op de vraag, waar die wiskundige exactheid dan wel bestaat, antwoorden beide partijen verschillend; de intuitionist zegt: In het menschelijk intellect, de formalist: Op het papier", see Hermann Weyl, Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft, 1927, p.49.

I guess a very large majority of people would still think that math is the rational, systematic account of what is ("real world"), but Atiyah seems to say that from an inner-mathematical perspective, the purely formal conception of mathematics prevailed. Algebra was the "Faustian offer" handed over to mathematicians: in exchange for the formidable machine of symbolic reasoning, we would have to sacrifice the meaning of what we are dealing with, at leat temporarily.

jfarmer · 10 months ago

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

— Alfred North Whitehead, "Introduction to Mathematics" (1911)