Post by @mcc@mastodon.social

2026-10-05 17:26 UTC

@misty@digipres.club A big problem is if you're the kind of person who uses software by building up a mental model of it, and then you catch it even once doing an "underhanded" thing like this, even if it's a *benign* or positive underhanded thing suddenly everything breaks, because your mental model is gone, anything could happen, and now you're afraid to do anything in case you hit one of the hidden "underhanded" behaviors again.

Replies (3)

@mcc@mastodon.social 2026-10-05 17:27

@misty@digipres.club Presumably folks who aren't "computer people" have never been building up mental models like this, and computers have always seemed mysterious and arbitrary in the way an "underhanded" program seems to one of the mental-modellers. and maybe from that perspective the new AI era, where *actual randomness* is introduced into computer interfaces, doesn't seem all that different.

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@misty@digipres.club 2026-10-05 17:46

@mcc@mastodon.social That is, for sure, the big problem. I’ve noticed in general that people I know are much less willing to try new things with technology than they were a decade ago - people who once had the confidence to explore and try things out are now no longer willing to go even slightly outside their comfort zone.

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@poetaster@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-10-05 19:43

@mcc@mastodon.social @misty@digipres.club there is only one mental model of computation: the lambda calculus.

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