Neil Young
@elderpegasus.bsky.social
110 followers 41 following 2.9K posts
Games coder, input in particular. Have opinions on UX and hype bubbles. (Also politics, planes, parenting, accessibility, musical theatre from all aspects. Several of those overlap!)
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elderpegasus.bsky.social
I hadn't thought of this; digital cameras should make this easier as well. TV shouldn't just be short form serial films, they should be TV, and make the most of the medium, and this is a good example of that.
andreworton.bsky.social
The death of multi-camera TV: a thread. I know most of you will know the technical parts of this (and may have read it in the other place) but bear with me. 1/ 🧵
A shot from the studio rehearsal of Doctor Who: The Daleks' Master Plan episode 'Volcano', showing several actors ont he TARDIS set, with various video cameras around the scene.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
None of the chasers would look out of place stepping out of a blue police phone box.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Good thread on problems with outsourcing your feeds.

Reminded me of this,on a similar theme...

youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA
elderpegasus.bsky.social
The issue isn't just that the shills overlook stuff like this, it's that they have no decent solutions for it. This is feature-not-bug stuff (even though it's arguably an unintended side of a feature), so it's debatable if it even could be truly fixed.
youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com
this is sociopathic behaviour and I think we need to treat it as such! just because something has become easy to do doesn't mean it has become less creepy, or more acceptable!
elderpegasus.bsky.social
The "blaming civ for people being uneducated" argument yesterday was somewhere between hot dog guy and offensive, but this is a genuine brain fart that's observable in the wild.

I think the issue isn't games, it's people applying the wrong model
ccsewell.bsky.social
You see this (unsurprisingly) a lot in the tech space - in particular the view that something must be inevitable if you put enough work into the “prerequisite”.

Eg: if we pour enough resources into developing LLMs, we will surely eventually create AGI.
stephenkb.bsky.social
Completely agree with this - there is a lot of terrible policymaking where you can see the direct echo of “this guy played a lot of Civ as a child and teen”.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Machine learning is a genuine area for progress, so there is absolutely AI outside the bubble; the risk is that getting damaged if the bubble bursts too spectacularly.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
That there is an AI bubble is pretty much irrefutable now - the only grounds for disagreement are over its scope. Certain uses, genAI in general, or something wider?

BBC News - 'It's going to be really bad': Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley
www.bbc.com/news/article...
A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley
Some are worried that the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies may be a bubble waiting to burst.
www.bbc.com
elderpegasus.bsky.social
This is a good article about two serious problems - undervaluing of education and teaching, and misuse of AI.

AI grading tools can get in the flippin' sea, and one provided by a firm also doing AI detection software is just loathsome.
biblioracle.bsky.social
I strongly urge everyone to not just read this warning from @marcwatkins.bsky.social, but heed it, and be vocal and forceful pushing back against using AI to grade student writing. This must be anathema if we're going to have a world where learning means something. substack.com/inbox/post/1...
The Dangers of using AI to Grade
Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains
substack.com
Reposted by Neil Young
tracyking.bsky.social
Primary schools are doing this. Makes me feel sick. To remove individualised insight into a pupil’s progress and skills at such a formative age is lunacy.
drsurekhadavies.bsky.social
Vital words on why educators should push back against using plagiarism-slop machines for grading: "grading written responses is messy by design. It’s also one of the most human activities we can do within teaching." 1/2
biblioracle.bsky.social
I strongly urge everyone to not just read this warning from @marcwatkins.bsky.social, but heed it, and be vocal and forceful pushing back against using AI to grade student writing. This must be anathema if we're going to have a world where learning means something. substack.com/inbox/post/1...
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Younger child had GCSE computer science the other day that used genAI to "check" one of the answers. I've been anguished by her CS homework many times, but that was particularly awful.
Reposted by Neil Young
leithmotive.bsky.social
Just bizarre not only that they're dismantling the most fundamental parts of the state infrastructure necessary for civilisation, healthcare is usually the first thing built and the last destroyed, but that nobody is capable of stopping them.
sherylnyt.bsky.social
BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Hadn't thought of this one, but self service checkouts really are amazing examples of bad UX design in the wild. It starts with laggy unresponsive screens and goes downhill from there.

(And I'm actually in favour of them, I just wish they were designed and deployed much better!)
hollyqueenofspayeds.com
One thing that might make me hate self checkouts less would be if they used my loyalty card to record my preferences, so if I scan my card at the start, it turns the beeps down & knows I want a receipt
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Hopefully you've gone for something with a manageable cost per child?
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Not sure that's much better? It sounds like something that someone said as a punchline, and then went and put it together, either without thinking through if they should, or because they didn't care why they probably shouldn't.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Similar to the case for inheritance tax. Wealth pooling up too much Causes Problems, and a bit of careful taxation limits that, even if by making people avoid the taxation.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
See also: "your call is important to us" amidst half an hour of hold music. Doesn't exactly drip with sincerity at that point.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Quite. Just about every serious major use case I've seen that has an actual plausible benefit beyond "free* slop" is a tool for experts. It never removes the need for said experts.

*Until the VCs cash out, anyway.
Reposted by Neil Young
mjrobbins.com
One thing that marks out good founders/CEOs in start-ups is they get that communication *is* strategy, in much the same way that writing *is* thinking. So it's not just that they don't have a clear strategy IMO; they're not engaged in the process of developing strategy.
Reposted by Neil Young
resi-analyst.bsky.social
One of the many depressing things this year was realising that there is no clear strategy across the whole of government and not just with housing.
(1.5m new homes is a target, not a strategy)
stephenkb.bsky.social
It's never the comms. Labour's comms is grey because in the absence of a clear strategy for what the government wants to achieve, no-one can defend or articulate what the government says in an interesting or exciting way.
lewisgoodall.com
I do wonder if Labour might look at the sorts of people dominating the discourse and dominating the content wars and maybe, just maybe, rethink the sorts of grey figures they routinely put up for interviews, instructed at that to be as cautious as possible. Things have changed. Their comms hasn’t.
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Why the HELL was it still there to be hacked? Delete it once it's been checked!
404media.co
BREAKING: A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.

🔗 www.404media.co/the-discord-...
The Discord Hack is Every Users’ Worst Nightmare
A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...
www.404media.co
elderpegasus.bsky.social
Just burst out laughing at the music choice #celebritytraitors