Got me thinking about what unintended consequences can spring up because of new technologies. Anyone have other examples, current or historic?
People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just get technology!" (recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s - it is the same thing of older people assuming current children innately understand the current tech)
Yet while today's kids may know how to stab at a screen to get videos of Peppa pig to play, there are people starting to come through to their mid and late teens who don't know how to use a mouse and keyboard with any level of dexterity, or don't know what a "file" is or what folders/directories are etc because that is all hidden away on an iPad. As a result they struggle to do even the most basic tasks that we all take for granted... and they don't get taught because everyone thinks they already know it having grown up with an iPad in their pram.
I chuckle to my self sometimes when I see a toddler walk up to a TV or video advert and try touching it a few times, then walk away confused because what they thought was a touch screen isn't doing anything when they touch it.
Fascinating.
We are not forcing her to use tech in any way. The Linux PC and Micro:Bit are just there and it’s up to her own curiosity to explore them when she feels like it.
I think the problem is that TV and iPads are convenient for parents. You can put your kid behind one, and they’ll occupy themselves for hours. Whereas with real computers, Micro:Bits, or even Lego, you have to help them understand.
For first-person "builder" games (current favorite is "Scrap Mechanic") WASD+mouse-look is a lot easier for them than tapping and dragging on a touch screen. Also: larger displays.
Forget mouse+keyboard dexterity...most other kids don't seem to even know about the Esc, Enter, Space, and Shift keys.
The idea is to get him comfortable with older computing paradigms and make him appreciate "new" software via exposing him to low powered hardware and how difficult it is to use comparatively.
He tried doing a raspberry pi computer for the kid but said it was too underpowered to do anything meaningful+setup was a hassle
The topic was computer literacy and knowing different, non-computer things is irrelevant and knowing stuff about Fortnite, while computer-related, is not literacy.
Now it seems it's all about consuming services in walled gardens - no learning required, or even allowed.
I also chuckled when my 2yo did this, but stopped chuckling when he actually got it to switch channels. Turns out our tv has small near invisible touch controls beneath the screen and we just didn’t know.
of course, he wouldn’t stop messing with the tv after discovering this, and found a control combination (undocumented) to put the tv in demo mode: superbright, oversaturated and automatically forgetting its settings after a while.
I was not amused.
It seems that the ressources for people who actually want to learn computers are excellent and are getting better all the time, so maybe there will always be enough well trained people coming up to solve all problems.
Engines are finally entering their appliance phase, just in time to be replaced by electric motors.
It’s okay for computers to become appliances too.
I sure know nothing about engine but can drive.
A computer illiterate needs the minimum of being able to maneuver it.
Files might disappear, they are an abstraction after all.
Mouse was because you couldn’t manipulate directly, iPad you can. Keyboard is because you can’t talk to it. But now one can.
As for not driving a car... why would you need to know how once it can drive itself better? The car’s purpose is to get you from A to B, not to be driven.
Clearly we are on an appliance trajectory there as well. Knowing how to drive is a skill that only a few generations may ever need.
While I can see mouse being pointless, voice recognition is slow, problematic (can you imagine saying something private by voice, like firing someone?) and prone to error. Keyboard usage is still very necessary for any profession that need to be efficient at using a computing device.
And for multi language speakers (using 2 terms from different languages in the same sentence for example), voice recognition is very behind. Not to mention is very behind on non-english languages (this is based solely on my experience with italian though, no objective data)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241535
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237540
I really have noticed that elderly people who have no computer experience have a better grasp of computing concepts than most kids. They understand physical media stores sounds and pictures, so it easy to explain that pictures and music lives on their sd card, like a phonograph or roll of film, except much more. They understand that you need an internet connection to communicate, like how you need your phone hooked up to make phone calls, since they have all had to deal with the phone company to get their phone working. And it is really simple to explain that a wifi router is just extending the internet into your living room. They understand sending an email and attaching a picture to it (use the paper clip and pick the picture). I was even able to explain the file system to someone, by saying that instead of just printing out his letters, he can store them inside a "folder", and print them out later as many times as he wants.
These concepts seem utterly lost on so many kids. They will send you a series of screenshots of a website instead of just sending the url. They are constantly losing data. They can not tell you where their data "lives"; whether it is in their iCloud or their phone or whatever.
It's not that horrible, but I am disappointed because I honestly thought that by now we would all be more computer literate. Isn't this what schools are supposed to teach?
> at work with a 20 year old intern in the stock room
> clock on the wall above the door
> intern asks "Hey, do you know what time it is?"
> I look at the clock and say, "5:30pm"
> intern says "Thanks, my phone was dead"
I was in shock for the rest of the day a person less than a decade younger than me doesn't know how to read an analog clock.
Wristwatches are underrated. In the trades a $20 watch could pay you $x000 a year if it saved some minutes each day.
I've seen in shopping mall little girl standing in front of aquarium, trying to move around fishes with her finger...
Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek out what we want to see/hear/read and then get fed new information based on those queries. It doesn't lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense of identity and community.
People talk a lot about the political side of this, the "echo chambers" online. But I think it's worse than that. We see racial segregation on Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it.
It reminds me of Farenheit 451 in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it.
That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we live in an era where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with language and ideas. It's just a strange departure from where most futurists thought we were going to be.
Technology created polarized society? Before internet search, we were better educated and understood each other better?
In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
Today many people get most of their news from sites like Breitbart or RawStory. Doing this is voluntarily signing up for Pravda like propaganda. Yes, we have a free society and you aren't restricted to a single source of news like Pravda, but if people intentionally and voluntarily limit themselves to a site that is manipulating stories in the same way as Pravda and for the same motivations, we just have two groups of oppositely propagandized people, and of course that will increase polarization. There is no expectation that these sites would uphold journalistic standards, be generally honest beyond when it is convenient, and their bias is considered a feature.
This is part of the myth making that took hold after the New Deal, when the Establishment decided how things were going to be and made it so. If you have licensing powers over broadcast media you can use this to ensure that discussion stays inside the bounds of discourse you deem acceptable. Because these local media companies often had both broadcast and publishing arms they had a strong incentive not to piss off the regulators who could take away their broadcasting licenses.
This long period of manufactured consent lasted until the people who realised it was artificial retired or died and then technology allowed more diversity of opinion. Cable and talk radio allowed many, many more voices to be heard and expanded the Overton window, bringing the US back to normal politics where people really, really hate each other unless there’s an external enemy to hate more.
In the immediate post colonial period Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. In 1856 Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of Congress. Andrew Jackson was held in much the same esteem by large swathes of the US population as Trump is now. In the 1960s there were over 3,000 domestic bombings and riots and demonstrations aplenty.
The media being hyper partisan is not new. What’s new is how obvious it is. It took decades for Walter Duranty’s lies about the Holodmor, the Ukrainian Holocaust to be exposed, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee still hasn’t revoked it. This for a cover up of millions of deaths in the pages of the NYT.
The prestige press is no more unbiased than Mother Jones or Breitbart.
https://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times...
> For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
> It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
As a practical matter, I think the only thing a person can do is consciously seek out both sides of the story. Read a credible conservative daily (WSJ, Chicago Tribune) and a left-leaning Sunday paper (WaPo/NYT)/news magazine. Get both sides of the issue and see which you find more persuasive.
The fact that either the Washington Post or the New York Times is considered left-leaning is one of the problems in US media. They are both corporate rags pushing the neo-liberal plutocrat agenda. Try Jacobin or the London Review of Books as a somewhat left of center starters.
The above description of the NYT, however, is (a) not only a conservative's idea of what an opposing partisan newspaper would look like, it's almost a parody of such an idea (b) only sustainable through the lens of confirmation bias.
It's a huge difference. In one case you have a system meant to deliver information to inform, and which can be criticized if it fails to do so, which it often (or even mostly) failed at. Then there is these new media sources of 'information', which are not even trying, and nobody expects to try. One is a subversion of the standards which are explicitly expected, and the other is a system that has no standards whatsoever.
This is only partly true. One example that comes to mind, in the early 20th Century, Winston Churchill deliberately started a successful newspaper whose sole purpose was to disarm a general strike by workers who were underpaid. Not only did it suceed but Churchill bragged about it in Parliament to the opposition party after the strike had been defeated!
> In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
I think it's worth mentioning here how most media companies are totally or partly controlled by the acting CEO of FOX News, Rupert Murdoch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch). In the UK he controls almost all paper-based newspapers that the public read, in addition to most non-BBC channels. As a result, the papers have a staunch xenophobic, neoliberal attitude -- to the point of openly calling leading members of the opposition party in the UK "Maoist" (One newspaper in particular published 1500 words of fan fiction about the opposition party's socialist policies, mixed in with the ordinary news) and naming and shaming members of the UK high court for ruling that does not agree with the paper's stance. The papers have been known to publish outright lies about the European Union -- to the point the EU set up a website specifically to debunk the lies published in mainly Murdoch-controlled papers: https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/
Newspapers ignored inconvenienent facts all the time, probably for all of human history. Even when they don't completely ignore some facts, they often choose to make a big deal of some facts and not of others.
Some examples of the former would be the missing reporting on the US atrocities in South America, except maybe the Contra deal. The 100 catholic priests murdered in SA by US or US-supported troops were never mentioned, but the Soviet murder of 1 priest was an international scandal (as well it should be, but the others should have been an even bigger scandal).
A very good example of the latter should be the COINTELPRO[1] revelation of the FBI actively seeking to blackmail and even assassinate members of civil rights groups, including an attempt to convince MLK to commit suicide, threatening to reveal his extra-marital affairs otherwise. This was reported to some extent, but then Watergate happened at around the same time, and, despite being much less worrying for normal people, it became one of the largest scandals in media, and COINTELPRO was forgotten from public discourse.
There's the matter of both motive and degree. Of course newsprint journalism always had its issues (heh). Of course there's always been various struggles to rise to journalistic standards of objective reporting. And of course there's always been people with agendas who wanted to bend reporting a certain way.
It still wasn't anywhere near as common for outlets to aspire to be Pravda or for individuals to aspire to read from an outlet that was.
For one, few in the Soviet Union trusted Pravda, whileoat people in the US trust the picture of the world that the newspapers present. So, while the US newspapers were overall far more correct than Pravda, they were nevertheless much more effective propaganda tools, when they did choose, intentionally or through deep-seated biases, to 'massage' the truth.
I'm not entirely convinced this is accurate. It definitely is in part, but not in whole. We wanted these better search tools and we like recommendation systems. But I know a lot of people are frustrated with algorithms like YouTube's recommendation system trapping them. (e.g. watch one Joe Rogan video and you get firehosed with more JRE videos). The thing is we also don't notice that this reinforcement also pushes us away from one another. But the solution sounds very similar to the solution to the complaint. People are complaining about being walled in by the algorithm (I for one am one of those people). People are asking for new suggestions. As in new topics, not just other youtubers doing the same thing. I think the difference is that it has become so obvious now that we're noticing and saying "wait, that'd too far."
That's a very different situation though.
This is as if you went to the library and the librarian only showed you other books by that author and the books that might be (poorly) related to the one you just read.
Like books with similar words in the title or books that people grabbed after that one.
YouTube is pure trash for discovery 90% of the time because the algorithm is tuned for addiction : you are fed content that is designed to keep you hooked and it will always, always bias towards that because that's the business decision.
I'd love to see a recommendation engine that intentionally surfaced "similar but different in key ways"
I think it works because I don't see those topics in my feeds.
What we’re seeing today in online spaces is the possibility of people connecting online, forming their own bubbles of people with their own spirals – it has become much easier to sidestep the “general” spiral of silence.
[0]Tmur Kuran https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580
Auditory: I can't tell you how accustomed to hearing stuff constantly everyone is. Cars (even just the tires on a busy street), Air Handling, Refrigerators, Beeping timers (ovens/microwaves/calendar reminders).
Visual: Web notifications, web advertisements, billboards, "news," spam phone calls/texts.
Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them to an immediate response. In the age of quick answers from Google, people often forget about slowing down for the speed of thought.
Mental: We (humans) can only make so many decisions in a day yet we are overwhelmed with false dichotomies constantly in order to choose one or the other of basically the same thing.
Or just the light pollution. I definitely think this has an affect on people. I used to live in AZ for awhile and the nights were so beautiful. I'd spend hours looking at the night sky. Now I'm in the PNW and almost never look up (something I've done pretty much my whole life). I'd think light pollution has similar effects as cloudy skies. I used to do some of my most creative thinking late at night staring at the stars. But maybe that's just a change in me. Maybe both.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...
This one honestly bothers me the most. “But I sent you a message! You didn’t respond, you could have been dead in a ditch!”.
Or, you know, I didn’t look at my messages for a few days. If you were worried you could have called any time.
If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey “takes 17 minutes”, one psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination fifteen minutes late.
It’s no big deal and quite a grumpy old man thing to say, and I also don’t know if tech is the root cause, but squeezing travel into unrealistically small and algorithmically created windows of time has killed most people’s sense of punctuality, including mine if I’m not careful.
Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.
The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes.
I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.
> anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe
Anything above 150-160kmh is certainly pushing it for most cars, the highways themselves tend to be fine for even faster speeds. There's a vast difference between speeding in a WV Polo and a BMW 7series, it's downright terrifying to go 160 in the Polo but the BMW won't start shaking like that even at 260.
I drive between Barcelona and Berlin pretty regularly, sometimes I go all the way to Bucharest. There are definitely stretches of road on those routes where you can't go fast in low traffic conditions, but they're in the minority.
This is why if you spend much time over that line, you will find that people will seemingly jump out from behind an LKW and cut you off. It's not because they're idiots or trying to intentionally crash, but rather they most likely completely misjudged your speed due to the innate human capacity for judging speed.
Therefore I've been told that while it's not against the StVO to drive over 130, doing so is a liability risk.
I have no problem slowing down from 200 to 130 whenever I approach an entry ramp or pass a big truck, and I certainly aggressively avoid situations where I'd have to do so frequently.
Also, while going over 130 might strictly be a liability risk it does not mean that you're going to automatically be liable. See this case of a guy going 150, he didn't do anything wrong and wasn't held liable https://www.verkehrsrundschau.de/nachrichten/urteil-schnelle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Germany
If you're driving through France or Spain after 1 AM you'll see see that everyone else tends to be speeding too.
I could only see the cost/benefit looking not worthwhile if you already have a lot of free time. An adult commuting 90 minutes a day might only have 2-4 hours of free time per day during the workweek.
Ask a paramedic whose worked in a big, commuter city about their experience.
The effect also depends on the natural speed at which traffic flows and how the extra time is spent, as fatigue also increases crash risk.
Their bike estimates are consistently wildly optimistic however. If it’s an easy route and I pedal flat out with no traffic and without hitting any red lights, I can get close to the estimated time.
OK, I don’t have a road racing bike or e-bike, and there are people who are more athletic than I am, but I’d say I’m fitter than the median. Their model seems to assume around 25km/h average speed, which isn’t really sustainable (Or safe) in everyday cycling with other road users about.
In the moment it might not feel lonely. Exchanging DMs and posting on Reddit / HN / social media might feel like real communication. But ultimately there's a sense of emptiness to it, and it can't substitute real flesh-to-flesh human connection.
But it feels like we're always expected to be on our "grind", always bettering ourselves in an increasingly competitive labor market, so it's harder to go offline and just enjoy life because there's always that lingering sense of guilt that one is being left behind in our collective arms race to...nowhere.
It's fine. There's more stuff to do without the Internet than a person can reasonably do, anyway, even if you're pretty picky.
And they can't/won't change again? That seems wrong.
We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering holes. The highest CTR on text comes from well, clickbait. At this point everyone realizes this but some still don't notice that data-driven decisions optimizes for weird things.
IOT doesn't scale as well as we thought, because hardware doesn't scale at the rate of web software that we're used to. So hardware companies do more poorly than expected. Replace "hardware" with anything else that's hard to upgrade, and you get software-other hybrids like Uber and WeWork which didn't scale as well as anticipated.
There are lots of efficiencies that only show up once you monitor equipment for a couple of years but project leads don't really have that kind of time to show benefits
I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this.
Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure out what else you could mean.
After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half the team is remote.
But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.
I think most employers assumed that employees with a 2x faster computer would send 2x the emails (or whatever task) in the same amount of time. In reality, they might send the same number of emails in half the time, then go home early.
"This London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire"
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscrap...
I have to force myself to stop thinking about the ways may daily activities can be tracked. I find myself feeling increasingly paranoid, especially when reminded that my actions are available to faceless people and how they help to train systems that then exploit my 'humanness'. In fact, I imagine they will get so good that they not only exploit me, but use that very humanness to veil the fact they are exploiting me!
Now, back to re-watching Silicon Valley before the season premier.
It's illegal for a video rental company to share your watch list. I'm not sure that covers Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Youtube, etc.. I suspect they don't share the list though, they just put you in categories and sell marketing to those categories. That still bugs me since I'm being judged.
OSes and stores spying on app usage is the same. I've never checked out any of the more risque games or VR apps because I'll be tracked.
It's still attributed to you.
> When you're signed out, we associate that data with a cookie or other similar unique identifier.
Other identifiers include your ip address, operating system, browser and browser settings.
I also never notice the videos I'm watching logged out affecting my recommendations when logged in. That doesn't mean I'm not being tracked but without actual proof I'll continue to consider it mostly a conspiracy theory.
Edit: https://privacyinternational.org/case-study/2997/betrayed-ap...
> The internet is increasingly a low-trust society—one where an assumption of pervasive fraud is simply built into the way many things function.
Not only does expertise and apprenticeship for many trades and crafts still exist almost exclusively offline, but also the documentation of accomplishments and the state of the art for so many fields.
Google Books, the greatest library in the history of mankind is collecting dust behind a locked door due to copyright. The failure of Google Books (an ambitious, incredible attempt) is imo one of the biggest tragedies of the information age.
Why would you allow anyone to do that? :O
I haven't done it yet and wouldn't be proud of myself, but it would feel good.
https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode-donatio...
Restaurants usually have a "tip screen". But now I'm unsure where the tip goes (after the whole Doordash expose)
Life has become nothing but a series of google searches and finding the best tech for the job, while finding the most efficient way to pay bills.
Meanwhile, we are centralizing these institutions and therefore power brokers are being more disparate from the powerless, using the technologies that were supposed to give voices to the masses. Now the masses can enforce you to only speak in lock step with them.
That effect has broadened to new areas and increased in degree, with the rise of ubiquitous mobile Internet.
Product placement goes back to the 19th century. Remember the candy brand in E.T.? It was chosen because the company paid $1M to get them eaten by the short green man. Then there was payola, wherein the music you heard was actually a commercial paid by the record company.
I think that kind of loss of meaningful interaction is a pretty small thing, but it can add up over time and have a greater impact with high usage of services like Google that automate things that previously generally involved more human interaction. And sure, no one's forcing anyone to use Google or Amazon instead of talking to people, but it's a fairly subtle opportunity cost that comes with using those services. And those kinds of services are convenient and useful enough that it's quite easy to make a habit of using them, and habits aren't easy to change.
I think many easily turned to the web for recommendations because as wholesome these kind & knowledgeable book and movie human recommenders are, they simply weren't available to a lot of us.
Amazon book recommendations and keyword search are garbage. Sometimes even a direct search for title and author name will put the result halfway down the list. The two good things Amazon has going for it are the huge catalog (great for finding the right ISBN), and reviews dating back to the 1990s. Makes it easier to decide whether or not to purchase the book from a more ethical retailer.
Out of all the online bookstores, Thriftbooks has the best recommendations in my experience.
The best ways to find good books are still bibliographies and large public and university libraries - browse the shelves, ask the librarians. Online library catalogues usually beat online retailer catalogs for keyword searches.
Examples:
... uh, what was I doing again?
Being miserable because "there's no point in doing anything" is definitely a sign of depression if it's persistent and starts interfering with your life.
Not saying technology does or doesn't factor in here.
Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.
And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access... mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.
There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an album from sale, for whatever reason.
One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.
The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere, which also takes it away from the people who bought it.
While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be arbitrarily taken away from me.
It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp, without contacting them first. It should not be an option directly in the artist/label control panel.
That is a paperclip maximiser. I don't think we, collectively, have fully come to terms with how damaging it is.
I don't have much to contribite of the top of my head, but I did stumble across this blog a while back (it might have actually been from here on HN, don't remember) that explores this very topic.
It's even named after it :) maybe other will enjoy it. I like the author's writing style, usually a pleasure to read.
Does it matter what one is extreme about? Shouldn’t we be extreme on certain issues, like the difference between food and cyanide?
The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking, something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way... so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing" would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat earth", if that makes sense...
Today everything is written down, much if not most of the information we receive is via written documents, especially online. There is a level of bias and intentional misleading that is often hard to believe. Hearing something from a well informed friend seems far more credible than a news story now, since you can't depend on journalists to research and relate the available information without intentionally withholding, minimizing, or amplifying to create a narrative that is in line with what they want people to believe.
I'm not screaming 'fake news' here. An example would be an NPR story that claimed a certain person, previously employed in a professional field, was 'unable to find work' for 6 years. Clearly the person had struggled with substance abuse, but that was never mentioned, and the narrative was 'In This Economy' despite the fact that if you show up drunk to job interviews that is an essential fact in a human interest story about a person being unable to find work. The journalist and/or their editors wanted to write a story about how hard it is to find a job 'in this economy', so they hid facts that didn't reinforce that narrative.
And I'm still bored.
One should primarily be concerned with laser powers that unintentionally exceed design power, or if they're ultra-fast lasers, with the peak power.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-las...
I wonder what I would be doing without it. Creating art? Going out? I'd have to do something. It's something I want to explore more. Maybe I'll schedule just an hour each day where every device is turned off.
> The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as stimulating but in different, more "vibrant, outdoorsy" ways, but they are wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of life's greatest pleasures.
https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the...
I'm not sure I'm convinced but it was an interesting very short essay.
Humans evolved in environments where both calories and information were very sparse. Natural selection encouraged a continious psychological drive to seek those resources whenever and wherever possible. Over-consuming food or stimulus was such a rare condition that we have very few naturally in-built mental mechanisms to avoid it.
And then all of a sudden our environment drastically changed. Sometime in the 20th century the central risk related to food went from starvation to obesity. In the 21st century the central risk of stimulation has gone from mind-atrophying boredom to compulsive zombie-like wire-heading.
To resist obesity we had to re-evaluate our relationship with the feeling of hunger. Always giving into our base impulse would mean that we gorge on calorically dense, hyper-palatable, nutritionally poor food from morning to night. Modern people had to learn that feeling a little hungry sometimes is okay. It's necessary for a baseline level of healthy physiology, and actually not that unpleasant when you get used to it.
I think we have to re-learn the same lesson with boredom. The skeptics are right. The average level of moment-to-moment boredom in 1980 was extremely high, and well past the point of necessity or even marginal benefit. But virtually no one with a smartphone ever experiences anything like 1980 boredom on a daily basis. While a lot of boredom is bad, we have to learn that a little bit of boredom is necessary for healthy cognitive and emotional functioning.
I only, only have Internet service because it lets me work from home and keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for 9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now (Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.
[EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant Internet? I'm a skeptic.
Hike, play sports, build stuff with your hands, make art, write, go swimming, and a bunch of other things.
I don't recall being particularly bored growing up before the internet became a big deal. It's just that now I'm used to having online access to so many things, it's easier to be bored without access to that.
I don't think it would be SO bad if the news wasn't so depressing and horrible.
There are at least 2 incredibly sad stories on the front page of Reddit at all times it seems.
I wish there was something positive to fill the gaps.
Procrastinators gonna procrastinate. And time-wasters gonna waste time.
But if it's social/multiplayer and your group feels a personal connection while playing (maybe w/people you know IRL), you might get a greater benefit from the game.
The only major downside is when I think of something I want to write down or look up.
1) choose to focus on the sensory input you’re receiving. The view of the scenery around you, the noise around you, the wind on your skin. Cars and their passengers can be interesting in their own right- people watching still exists.
2) meditate or think about something.
Those are substantially better than refreshing HN, Instagram, etc for the hundredth time that day.
Being bored is a choice. It takes work to not reflexively pull open Reddit. I still struggle with this from time to time.
Set up Anki, lichess, etc. anything that is better than brain junk food.
It's really easy to break the social media habit by replacing it with something semi-useful.
I’d like to set up a service to which you send in a book, and it texts you one page at a time (you can ask it for the next page), and nags you if it’s been a few days without using it.
Too often the information junk food turns into an hour-long binge. I could have made real progress towards my goals in that time.
In general, a service which can slice up your goals into very small units of work or very small exercises, and harasses you for constant engagement could be a huge win. Don’t get rid of the anti-patterns, harness them for your own ends!!!
What if you could add these to all of your info junk-food outlets, but instead of “subscribe to our newsletter”, it would be “are you sure you wouldn’t rather work towards accomplishing your goals?”
This has made land prices track productivity, leaving most on the breadline forever.
They use iOS and Android. They don't use a file manager, and certainly don't use a command line.
Chromebooks are now common in education. Stuff goes on the Google drive.
This is causing trouble when these people end up needing to use traditional desktop software in college or in the workplace. They have trouble with saving files, moving files, and making backups.
./a.outLeading to Powering and Display in the same port ( aka Thunderbolt ) which is great in theory and idea, in practice there are much higher failure rate of frying the CPU or display controller for all sort of reasons.
USB-C could have worked if we have much more stringent spec, and force only two types of cable, Thin for anything below 25W, and Thick for heavy duty with 100W. Unfortunately USB4 doesn't want to be a better spec.
There are two things I hope Apple will never adopt at its current form, that is AV1 and USB-C. And it looks like Apple is making great decisions on the two so far.
While the Industrial Revolution is the accepted era as the real beginning of progress before people, I feel the new age of technology will make the Industrial Revolution look like an humanitarian endeavor without a PR team, in comparison. In 2 or 3 decades, we'll look back and at the Industrial Revolution as good old times, even with all its utter failures.
I'm sad to see that people don't see beyond modern PR. Even with the recent Silicon Valley scandals and failures... people say they don't believe in religion... but they traded one religion for another. They all pray and tithe to the silicon valley titans and think that's okay.
Of course, when it's developers on the receiving end of such tracking they will complain loudly (as they did recently about GitLab). A reflection of the sheer hypocrisy that runs right through programming profession.
Probably accurate for some tiny portion, which is astounding no matter how small of a group that is.
- Apps that spam your contacts list and notifications that keep coming even when you closed the app. In the name of dumbproofing everything we ve made it hard to keep secrets secret
- Probably not getting out of the house as much
- An anxiety with people's public image, e.g. not being seen in any picture breaking out of your curated public character. This is something that young people obsess over, while previous generations wouldn't give a toss really.
- An extension of this and porn is public nudity / the end of nudism as culture
my short and random list of less important things:
a) annoyingly difficult to leave a window slightly open on an otherwise locked vehicle (live in desert).
b) lack of control over raw data on instrumentation due to gui and locked code. impacts science...wherein people are not field and not CS.
c) wanton disregard for self-image due to perceived shield of teh webs. vast majority of us do not know how exposed we are.
d) total collapse of previously accepted informational authority.
e) we need societal help, but we dont know why or how.
From a professional one, an absolute uncontrollable addiction to unprecedented amounts of data.
I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, so forgive me if my analogy is a little off, but here it goes... It's like the Force. Everyone wants it but few can handle it. Of the few who can, the ones who use it for good are constantly fighting a battle against those who wield it recklessly or with malice.
And with modern infrastructure, that data can captured and leveraged in astonishingly quick ways that make it very hard to stop.
One of my other gripes is the dumbing down of software, where everything is so simplified that doing your own backups, or finding any kind of backups of a kind is just incredible inconvenient or impossible.
I grew up in the 90s (born mid 80s) and I long for that era of computing in terms of my relationship to it. While I absolutely know that I am looking at this with heavy, rose-tinted goggles, but life without the Internet was better. This is in the context of distraction, because the Internet has become the distraction-enabler through mobile phones, iPads etc. While it has enabled communication, it also enabled distraction. I'd wager that the personal productivity and/or happiness is severely reduced for a large amount of people and companies, due to "abusing the web".
Oh, I also never use my smartphone. I can talk with my friends for hours on it, but other than a few things here and there, I barely use it. But what I hate is the expectation that one should be available and accessible basically all the time. Friends and family have gotten used to my quirks, but I still feel the pressure of being available when the phone is close by.
Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.
I guess this would not happen if people were to use the above technologies with stateless services only, but they don't because the majority of articles, blogs and documentation on the subject leads people to believe that using network based storage for your io intensive state full services is good practice.
This is something both my male and female associates complain about.
How could a computer game historian play 2009's Farmville in 2109?
Anyway, probably time for me to let this one go, I don’t even remember the original issue without backtracking up thread. :-)
I got an EV recently and quickly noted how annoying to near impossible finding chargers would be without an app.
(Also a full replacement of gas cars to EV will require 96% of all known Nickel Earth deposit so it is definitely not "the solution" to the energy/resource/transportation problem--buses are)
You end up being more productive and finishing things faster; but most of the time, that ends up in no decrease in the time you spend on working stuff since the system quickly adapts to your new productivity level and you still spend all your time working.
Unless you are the one taking the majority of the surplus of your actions, which is rarely the case in a capitalist society, it is a dreadful feeling.
The end feeling is alienation followed by depression.
Waze and GPS has ruined local neighborhoods and the sense of direction.
New kinds of addictions due to instant gratification.
Lack of social skills and engagement.
I think you've shifted context from general sidewalks to red lights though. I think 99 percent of red light running cyclists would agree you have to do that carefully and assume people will step out at that point. The bad apples are the ones who aren't careful about it.
Bycicles are very light, narrow and slow so it's odd that as a society we expect them to follow rules designed for fast, heavy and wide vehicles.
Two words: Air Zound. It can get the attention of even the most oblivious jogger. ;)
I can't stand to wear headphones when walking or biking. I want to hear what's around me.
That assumes they are not playing anything though.
I recently started to notice how many people - young and old - nowadays are walking on the wrong side of the road, i.e. in the same lane with other traffic in the same direction.
As a kid I always learned you should be in the opposite lane, so you can monitor oncoming traffic coming towards you, jump out of the way if needed. A safety measure (4 watchful eyes instead of 2).
I guess more than half of people no longer do that, and I wondered if that was also an effect of our self-centered, smartphone society: 'I can't be bothered to take note of you, but I expect you to take notice of me'.
Accidents are more dangerous in frontal collisions and the reaction window is shorter.
I bike daily and I've been surprised a few times by other bikers coming against the traffic, especially in turns.
edit: I think I misread you. You're talking about pedestrians. Oops.