Anti-Personnel Computing (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)

erratique.ch

122 pointstranspute64 comments

Keep Control of Your Computing, So It Doesn't Control You!

from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...

Gold point! But, the real world is so far gone by now that fully GPLed computing isnt realistic right now. I would first try to push for more users of non corporate OSes for the beginning, let's say more /e/ more lineage more graphene OS users. And maybe cool alternatives to Maps applications like OSMand

For all his idiosyncratic traits, Stallman was remarkably prescient about many things.

Absolutely, though I think sadly his idiosyncratic traits played against his message (and I say this as a big rms fan).

I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war is over isn't going to be very effective.

It seems like most of those traits stem from an overall consistency in ethical perspective.

I think Stallman figured out early on how much he valued collaboration over competition, and liberty over authority; and moved on naturally from there.

There’s enough stories about Stallman’s “eccentricities” that aren’t the result of ethical choices. The man’s hygiene is sort of legendary at this point. None of this is to say he’s wrong or argue against his ethical consistency or the admirable fidelity to which he holds to his ethics, but the dude is odd for reasons beyond his choice of email client.

Choosing not to manage hygiene is a pretty common anti-authoritarian move.

Sure, I would argue that good hygiene is a useful tool for liberal collaboration, but that doesn't make his behavior ideologically inconsistent.

Not OP but I think it is good to balance a healthy respect for disregarding cultural norms with a perceived understanding of your outsider perspective and the given cost. I'm a big fan of Stallman and have worked people of similar dispositions. while they provide very clear insight and intermittent productivity spurts, it comes at a huge social cost that in some cases can make or break a team. In the long-term they could be right, but in the short-term it becomes an all-or-nothing crusade. I've been there myself and I've reassembled the pieces of a team after others did the same. Anti-authoritarianism is noble and justified, but it is no rational excuse for poor hygiene if you want to connect with other people and have a non-imaginary impact on the world.

> can make or break a team

I don't think Stallman cares about that nearly as much as you do. He already resolved that problem by making his work about collaboration instead of competition. That's really the whole point of free software in the first place.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm here to encourage idiosyncrasies. My entire point is that you aren't going to win such a person over with an appeal to authority, because that was their point already.

Prophets are often more than a bit idiosyncratic. It’s a lot easier to really see society from the outside.

And this is why geeks don’t understand why the “Year of the Linux desktop” doesn’t happen - most people don’t care (and neither do I on my phone).

I want the least friction possible when using my computer. As a user, the biggest complaints I have about the App Store were not being able to buy an ebook directly from the Kindle app and other restrictions on buying digital content from the app because of Apple’s rules. That’s a least temporarily been fixed in the US because of the judge contempt order.

As far as the 30%? It came out in the trial that 90% of in app revenue is coming from pay to win games. Why should I care about them?

The small Indy developers are paying 15% - the very few who exist and are successful

I think the difference with geeks is that they're/we're willing to put up with up front one-off friction to avoid ongoing friction.

I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out every possible penny so they could show revenue for their overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all imploded.

The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.

It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine.

Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism.

It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast.

Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine.

It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.

> The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy

Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history

I'm not talking about the maturity or quality of the software but the zeitgeist of the ecosystem. Vendors mostly made software for the user, who was the customer, not for themselves or advertisers to sell the user as a product.

I forgot about that. I feel like everybody had an uncle or parent that would have so many toolbars that there was barely any space left for the page. That was mainly the results of using software that had those installers where you had to actively refuse the toolbars (and of course they just accepted everything)

Why are you even seeing ads on web pages? Don’t you use an ad blocker?

Not GP, but some of us have family members who refuse to even consider using uBlock Origin, for reasons they're never quite able to articulate.

It might help them to know that both my employer and my kids' schools install it by default.

I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time this topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's become offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs to install 3rd party software to (sometimes) avoid being barraged by advertisements and data miners. It also doesn't work as well or at all for mobile applications with ads built into them, like facebook, or even sometimes my OS these days. This type of comment is often used to dismiss complaints about ads in general, and is a really weak soft-defense of it in my opinion. Ad blockers existed in the 90's/00's too. This is a critique of the entire ecosystem, not one person being like "aw i hate seeing all these ads and don't know how to fix it." That's an overly simplistic view of my comment.

Regardless, this is a commentary on the state of the web, not my personal usage of it. The vast majority of people do not block ads, otherwise they would not make money. If everyone did this, these sites wouldn't even work in the first place at least in the way the web is currently designed, which is part of the entire problem.

It’s not useless. It’s like complaining about why am I having trouble breathing while I’m holding my head underwater. The commercial web has always been a cesspool of ads since the “punch the monkey” banner ads and the X11 pop under ads.

I don't go on the web to have ads lobbed at my head; whereas high-speed baseballs are very much a part of the game Baseball.

If that’s the case, you would have stopped using the internet in 2000 with the punch the monkey banners ads and pop under X11 windows.

I don't go to the ballpark to have baseballs thrown at my head or balls, but that's something that can be reasonably expected to happen at some point while playing baseball (not often but certainly something that happens several times a year, intentional or not), so taking precautions (batting helmet and cup) beforehand makes sense.

If you're not going on the web to have ads lobbed at your head, and you can reasonably expect there to be a ton of ads, so taking precautions and installing an ad blocker makes sense.

> and you can reasonably expect there to be a ton of ads

Expect? Yes. Reasonably expect? I'd dispute that: ads aren't inherent to much of the web (advertisement archives and classifieds sites being exceptions).

You can run an ad blocker that completely removes ads, so you don't have to interact with them at all, and it's an improvement. Try to run a baseball blocker, and you've ruined the game of baseball. The risk of injury from a baseball is a consequence of the presence of baseballs, thanks to physics; and the harm from advertisements is likewise a consequence of their presence, yet there is no reason for the latter to be there to begin with!

> Expect? Yes. Reasonably expect? I'd dispute that: ads aren't inherent to much of the web

Getting hit with is a baseball isn't inherent to much of the game of baseball (aside from enforcing unwritten rules, apparently), but it's still a thing that one can reasonably expect to happen from time to time.

While I agree, yes, ads aren't necessarily inherent to much of the web, that's not the world we currently live in. We could live in that world, eventually, with either legislation or some tech advance that completely destroys the ad industry's ability to target ads, but right now one can reasonable expect that they will encounter ads on the web. Knowing that, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to use an adblocker if they're complaining about ads on the web.

(I think we're using "reasonably" in different ways - I mean it as "something that someone involved with an activity knows can happen" (something that's reasonably foreseeable), like being hit with a baseball while playing baseball, as opposed to "it is a logical and good thing that something is happening", such as web advertising.)

The only way to make this analogy work is if the entire premise of the game of baseball was predicated on the fact that not only do 99% of players not wear cups, but them getting hit in the nuts is required for the game to even continue at all.

> just quite old enough

What does this mean? "Quite" does not fit in there for me.

It's pretty obvious that it narrows the statement of "old enough" to be a fine-grained distinctions fitting, in this case, to a short timespan, possibly a few years, that some readers may consider to be old and others not old at all.

Is there some other meaning you had in mind when asking this, or was this a pedantic question?

Maybe an usual and non-native wording, but I take it to mean "not that old but a little more than the sufficient level of oldness to qualify".

Not a good term. Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants (otherwise why would the user even get them?).

Perhaps "Faustian computing"?

Anti-personnel computers also do exactly what they're intended to do. The interests of the subject are not considered a priority, just like with mines.

> otherwise why would the user even get them?

Why does a moth fly into a flame?

Moths (and other insects) evolved to use transverse orientation to fly level at night by using distant bodies of light (stars, moon), essentially trying to fly perpendicular to light above.

Sources of light which are physically close disrupt this instinct.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3

An apt metaphor as humans evolved to orient themselves based on information (in the strict sense of novel data) and so all it takes to trap a human in a continuous cycle of hitting themselves against a wall is to create a wall of continuously novel information

Where in this do you see the connection to worldly, scientific, knowledge?

As in "Faustian bargain"

Yeah, that ought to be when you trade your supposedly immortal soul for scientific knowledge and pleasure.

"Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,

Juristerei und Medizin,

Und leider auch Theologie

Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.

Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!

Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar

Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr

Herauf, herab und quer und krumm

Meine Schüler an der Nase herum—

Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!

[...]

Drum hab ich mich der Magie ergeben,

Ob mir durch Geistes Kraft und Mund

Nicht manch Geheimnis würde kund;

Daß ich nicht mehr mit saurem Schweiß

Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß;

Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt

Im Innersten zusammenhält,

Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,

Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen."

At the contrary, to me the term evoked exactly what the author meant. And after the series of detonations of the communication devices in Lebanon some time ago, the analogy with anti-personnel mines takes an even more concrete and sinister meaning.

> Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants

Actually, I think you got it backwards: Anti-personnel mines are highly problematic especially when they are not needed anymore. They often linger in the ground for extended times after a conflict and are a cause of death and injuries in civilians, who just want to live their lives. Contrary to this, anti-personnel computing is problematic in the times when civilians are incentivized to use it.

> Anti-personnel mines are highly problematic especially when they are not needed anymore

When immediate survival is at stake, the future is heavily discounted. Slow and channel the attacker now, and consider the demining cost later - if you survived the war.

This is because you got the "user" part slightly wrong. The real users of your smartphone are countless ads companies, media giants or even some government services.

Yep. Big tech is the user, you are the product. The smartphone is just the interface.

Thinking of the complex systems terms of "coarse-graining" (moving up into higher level systems/astronomical/above scale) and "fine-graining" (moving down into human/biological/below levels).

Utility of anti-personnel mines is at system level of state war (no human-level participant meaningfully "wants" its effect on another human).

Utility of anti-personnel computing is the same -- compute resources used to benefit of system, but to detriment of human actor below.

The difference is we don't equally understand the battle damage we take to our minds the way we understand battle damage to our biology. This might change though

EDIT: but yes, there are some differences thru this lens that make the metaphor a bit strained

I was discussing this with my son the other day. We have a Faustian bargain with technology in general, not just computing.

Well, anti-personnel mines should function as expected for the primary user. The classic "Front Toward Enemy" is the basic UI that illustrates who the primary user is. The secondary users may want to file a ticket about the user experience.

That said, I think more lovecraftian horrors that have taken on their own life, aided by the human creation of corporations...

I don't recall where I first saw it, but this is fairly apt :P

---

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?

Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.

Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.

Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.

That one's from asterCrash (via Tumblr). Canonical URL: https://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-n.... Full text below.

---

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?

All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.

The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.

Thanks for that! I had a clip of it saved, and hadn't bothered looking for the original, and didn't realize there was more!

"Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?"

You'd probably enjoy reading Charlie Stross' "The Laundry Files" series of novels, then.

Yep, great books.

I'm just ... dumbfounded at why it isn't "anti-personal computing". Like, as a riff on "personal computer/computing".

Related: the scene in Bojack Horseman:

"And this time, it's personnel!"

'Uh, shouldn't the line be, "It's personal"?'

"No, because it's like, he's saying it's an inside job, so, personnel."

I prefer "antifeatures" as more precise.

https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/

The word antifeature can describe a feature that the designer doesn't want. That's usually the scenario I experience it in, and it's a good fit for it.

Anti-personnel describes more precisely, the perverse prioritization of a 3rd party's goals over the end user's goals.

It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters.

An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough?

¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

> Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters.

I had this discussion with other people who deleted their account at some website that can be considered "social media" in a broader sense. They told me that the reason why they deleted their accounts was that they realized that these bursts of dopamine rush that they got from the respective site was not good for them.

I, on the other hand, have never felt this kind of dopamine rush, even though I was a likely even more active user on the respective site. My reason for really wanting to delete my whole account was "purely logical" (I hated a lot of decisions that the respective company made).

What I want to tell with this story is that I thus see strong evidence that the "sensitivity" of people for dopamine rushes from websites/games varies a lot between people (and I am very likely one who is at least "mostly" immune to them).

Really: if I had to name one thing that gives me dopamine rushes that are so much more intense (I would say: "multiple magnitudes more intense") than any dopamine rush that I got from any social media site that I visited, then I would say "understanding deep mathematical proofs and strongly simplifying them" (but I agree that these dopamine rushes are earned much more toughly :-) ).

Self-control is a factor too. Some people might get a big rush but have strong frontal lobes, other people might get a smaller rush but have low self-control and still end up consuming a lot / having their behavior reinforced.

I think susceptibility to negative emotion is relevant too. Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.

> the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering

A literal translation (the pressure of suffering) sounds more meaningful to me.

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)

>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.

Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!

And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!

Eh. I think "user hostile" or "hostile architecture" (like unsleepable benches) is a better analogy, reserving anti-personnel for those cases where computers are used in genuinely dangerous ways. Like the Chinese ethnicity-recognizing security cameras.

Or certain pagers.

anti-personal computing: data collection, closed ecosystem, dark patterns, opaque programs, central control

anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to target, harm, control or neutralize individuals

I love term how it plays on the words and the negative association we have with anti-personell mines

If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers…

I hear part of the Chinese miracle of central planning is that they have almost full knowledge of everything everyone is doing in the economy. In contrast, in the west, where we optimize for personal gain, you can get a lot done by throwing up barriers and creating friction. We also pretend/believe our governments use all data against us.

My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and location can be used to use public data for specific purposes alone.

You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number.

It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers not from people living there or even similar faces and devices seen around similar crimes.

I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to purchase shoes.

Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications for job offers that fit our resume.

I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.

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