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Comment by QuadmasterXLII | Hacker News Reader

Look. I'm the target audience- a bleeding heart liberal with a long history of wokeness to the point of annoying others on this site, and a deep mistrust of surveilance. Even _I_ an exhausted with arguments like

    "Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with the notion of control through slavery. "

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No kidding. I got to the same paragraph and closed the tab. The author seriously buried the lede. What exactly is a “smart streetlight” and why is it of concern? I have no idea.

The same paragraph resulted in immediate closing of the article for me as well. lol I figured if the author was going to be reaching that hard, nothing of value was lost by not reading it.

Haha, me too, I read that sentence and closed the tab.

The wikipedia article has no references for that Greek/Roman thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History

OTOH 'Link boys' make sense; article explains "In thieves' cant, a linkboy was known as a "Glym Jack" ("glym" meant "light")"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy

Same for me, this article is just poorly written, and also author's argument is poorly constructed: instead of making one point clearly and tersely, author is attempting to make many bombastic ones. It's unbalanced and hyperbolic and I can't take it seriously.

Also, this unnecessarily long and hyperbolic style of writing is exactly what undergrads have been trained to produce in college in the humanities for many years imo.

So no discussion about the substance of the article.. just a bunch of people who don't read the conclusions first and scroll backwards up a text like a sensible person .. .. and is it so distasteful or irrelevant when talking about contemporary problems of power and society, to compare to other moments in history?.. isn't this kind of comments a text book example of derailing the online conversation with some tangential point

The use of "enslaved person" here is pretty laughable given the origin of "slave" as "Slav," because people liked to capture and sell Slavs hundreds of years ago (https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave). Also interesting that the Slavic word for "slave" is the origin of the word "robot."

Huh?

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