Dave Bittner

@j9t@mas.to And even worse, often an endless loop.

@feoh@oldbytes.space It's maddening how many presentations include the statement, "I know you probably can't read this from where you're sitting, but..." No!!! If we cannot read it, it does not belong in your presentation.

I wonder if there's a parallel between all of the long-undiscovered bugs that AI systems are discovering, and the old rusty hand grenades and mortars that magnet fishers keep pulling up from the muck in their local rivers or lakes. The bomb squads seem almost annoyed that they keep being called out to deal with these things that could have simply been left untouched.

But I think there’s also a quieter, more immediate question we can ask ourselves. How do we reclaim our humanity inside these systems? How do we build boundaries around our emotional lives? How do we recognize when our attention is being harvested? How do we create spaces, personally and culturally, where manipulation simply stops working? Because ultimately, the real issue isn’t technology. It’s whether we allow human experience, our curiosity, our empathy, our relationships, to become just another resource to be mined. The encouraging thing is that once people begin to see a system clearly, they begin to resist it. And that awareness is already growing. People are learning to recognize outrage bait. To question what they see online. To step away from systems that demand constant engagement. These are small acts. But collectively, they matter. Because preserving our humanity in an age of optimization isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a cultural one. And the first step toward solving any cultural problem… is realizing that we are allowed to change the rules.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @shapr@recurse.social @feoh@oldbytes.space Slideware all have a "notes" section these days, yes? My experience is this can used both for the presenter and the post-presentation audience to fill in the gaps. To me, it's a good comprise. Granted, my bias is to make sure the audience, the people who show up in person, have the best possible experience.

And now, we’re adding another layer. Artificial intelligence. AI can now generate convincing text, images, voices, and video at a scale we’ve never seen before. Which means that something very fundamental is changing: the relationship between our senses and reality. For most of human history, “seeing is believing” was a pretty reliable rule. That rule is breaking. We’re entering a moment where what we see and hear can no longer be taken at face value. And that means every one of us is being asked to become a kind of full-time detective, constantly evaluating, verifying, second-guessing. But here’s the problem: humans aren’t built for permanent vigilance. Our brains evolved for trust. For cooperation. For social connection. Not for navigating an endless stream of carefully engineered manipulation. So naturally, the question people start asking is: what do we do about it? Some people say regulation. Treat this as a public health issue. Just as we eventually put guardrails around industries that harmed our bodies, unsafe food, polluted air, dangerous products, we might need guardrails around systems that harm our attention, our emotional stability, even our sense of reality. But that’s difficult. Because the same economic forces that created these systems have enormous influence over the institutions that might regulate them. Others think the answer might only come after a crisis, some kind of economic or social reset that forces us to rethink the incentives that shape our technologies. Maybe.

@shapr@recurse.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @feoh@oldbytes.space Back when I was helping folks put together slide decks I was a fan of Presentation Zen, which it seems likely borrowed much from Takahashi. I kept multiple copies of the book on hand to give out. https://presentationzen.com/

@ObsidianUrbex@mstdn.social There's always a piano.

@tvaziri IMAX is the "contains natural flavors" of cinema.

@discontinuity@infosec.exchange One of the things I've seen slip away during my lifetime is the notion that things are, generally speaking, better when companies operate and exist at what I describe as "human scale." Cable TV is a decent example — when cable first came through our community it was run by a local interest, the county cable company. If you had an issue chances are you knew someone who knew someone who could help. There was local accountability. Fast forward to today, that's gone, and not just from cable TV. We can all think of countless examples of the things we rely on for every day society being consolidated and gobbled up by huge multinationals. We're left with a version of Lilly Tomlin's famous telephone operator, "Sir, we're the phone company - we don't have to care." Look at a platform like YouTube. They've got no meaningful competition, and yet there's nothing stopping anyone from taking a run at them, which helps shield them from antitrust claims. Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple's App Store all enjoy massive scale and a government uninterested in regulation. Perhaps cynically, I've come to believe that we are, more or less, a reactive species. (I hate being cynical!) So change may come when there is no other option, or when the powers that be find themselves directly affected. ("Senator, based on this publicly available location data we purchased, it seems you have been spending many overnights at your intern's apartment.") I wish there were easier answers, and that's a big part of my frustration. That lack of "human scale" makes it feel impossible for one person to make a difference. So, for me, I vote. I demonstrate. I engage directly with my elected officials. I share what I'm thinking so others know they aren't alone. And I try not to give up hope. “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”