I wish people were more public
borretti.me
borretti.me
I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp
[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...
I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care.
Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).
I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when:
- people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly,
- Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things,
- Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing
I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it.
But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc.
Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point.
It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.
To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
I've spent (way too much) a lot of time on forums built using xenoforo, though I'm not sure of what's the stack underneath and what was built-in and what had been added by the operators.
Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position.
So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space.
Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.
I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.
Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 (first part)
To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
If you're trying to make a name for yourself and you're social long enough, you'll eventually have a decent sized footprint on the internet. Sites and services get breached all the time.
This is just a failure of the baseline thought that people put into security these days. It's not exactly hard to sign up for a free email service with no tie to your real identity. (Unless you're in the EU, that is)
I've given up on preventing people from connecting the dots. If people want to engage with me, they can do it with my username in situ, or send me an email which uses that same username. If they're being creepy about it, I can block them and ignore them.
This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles.
Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.
E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/
My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy
I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact.
I talked a little bit about the risks in another comment on a similar post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356
If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter. Have you ever thanked anyone for a recommendation, a photo, an article? And how often do you do that, compared to posting to disagree?
A lifetime of small positive outcomes can easily offset that for many people.
This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all.
On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.
They probably do read that message, but they say to themselves, "Well when I did it it was for a good cause."
I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
I agree. I've often advocated for zero anonymity by default. Everyone traceable by anyone. The thinking is that bad behavior (threats and such) could be reported. There was enough pushback to make me rethink that. People will still make threats when you know who they are - less often but they will. Offline (real world) harassment is still possible too without being identified, though thats getting harder every day.
Verified identity online is not the same thing as being held accountable.
You can be a small guy doing your small thing and sharing it online. Unfortunately you never know when and why you gonna become a supervillain in eyes of craze.
in a conflict in the street, if he gives you a brain injury, you might lose your job, mortgage, family, etc. it's just his next stay in prison, he has nothing more than his freedom to lose for the 5th time. if you give him a brain injury, you might lose your job, your mortgage, family, etc. he'll spend some time in hospital and then he'll be back on the street doing the same thing in a year.
online, it's worse, because now you can be matched with the bum with the least to lose within a 50 miles radius.
Nowadays people can just SWAT you anonymously and cheaply. Or pressure your employer to fire you without identifying themselves to you.
Right. My old argument would have been that the authorities should not respond anonymous calls - remove the anonymous factor there and punish false reports. The problem is there will always be more ways to be anonymous when one has malicious intent. Thats why I've dropped the idea.
This fact comes up with Bitcoin a lot. I and everybody else doesn't know who a random hash is but all the activity involving that address is highly traceable. So all you need is an oracle (like a cryptoexchange) that can convert a hash into a person to enforce any penalties against a person.
Same could be true of the internet. You notice illegal activity from a specific IP; that source is responsible for that activity (they did it!). In general that IP is going to be some intermediary (like an ISP) who was relying a packet from a different IP so it'll be on them to provide the next person who is accountable and do you do this chain until you get to an end subscriber. Everybody is anonymous by default but can be traced back to an actual person.
Emphasis indicating the part of the claim I’m addressing. (To be clear, I agree that those who hold such views should be dicarded.)
People who don't care about being stupid or extremists or whatever else aren't going to be stopped by using their real name, since they by definition don't care. If they did care, then them using their real name would have prevented them from posting inane opinions online.
I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't let those opinions prevent you from posting your own freely. Discard them, ignore them, block them, whatever, and then go about with your life as if you never saw them.
For most of my opnions, I don't consider myself to be an extremist, and anyone claiming that I have an extremist in those areas can have their opinion dismissed on the same grounds anyone calling me a literal Hitler or Stalin. A good example I recently saw someone calling people who use adblockers terrorists. The absurdity is obvious and there's no point in considering their opinion on the matter. I don't care about those people calling me an extremist, just as I don't care about them calling me a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin.
There are a select few areas where I probably would be validly called an extremist. I myself don't consider myself that, but I can understand why people would think that. And this is probably a big part of the problem. Most extremists probably don't consider themselves that, at least not without a decent amount of introspection, so the number of people who have at least one asinine opinion, on the same level as some of my own, is probably fairly large.
So both I and some random on the internet, even if both of us are out there with our full names, can post asinine opnions and get in arguments, and see each other as the idiot who isn't prevented by their full name being out there from posting stupid shit on the internet, and we'll thus see each other as the extremist, but ourselves as the sane party of any discussion.
Have you heard of Kiwi Farms? They are bullies who would immediately benefit from real-name policies.
I stand behind my words and that’s part of my social identity and there’s an imperfect record.
It’s social ledger that has an incredible memory tied to my mortal label. Good bad ugly and just plain wrong.
Additionally I’d say this to your face. Pseudonymity isn’t about disowning word and actions.
Then I think you've been very fortunate (or sheltered). It's really not about accountability in any rational sense: it's not that I want to be a secret Nazi. It's that when you interact with enough people on the internet, you will probably encounter at least one person who isn't nice. Someone who gets upset not because of what you say, but maybe simply because you're "not worthy" of the attention of others. Who feels humiliated because you politely corrected them about some minor detail. Or maybe who just flat out misinterprets what you're trying to say.
Again, in a circle of real-life friends, this is rare. But in a sampling of 10,000 random strangers, even the nicest person will probably have one sworn enemy.
And yeah, I get it: anonymity shields the bad guys too. But on balance, I think there's a lot more good than bad when you look at pseudonymous content on the internet.
Agreed. Equal rights for all people regardless of race wouldn't have happened if individuals starting the first discussions were held accountable for their words.
Today, people online are “held accountable” via harassment, threats, SWATting, and such directed towards their friends/family/employer, by internet lunatics who exist across the political spectrum. If you’re popular enough, it doesn’t matter if you’re a leftist, rightist, or literally Mr. Rogers; you’ll get haters who go out of their way to hurt you using whatever PII and vulnerability you expose. Or if you’re not popular, but unlucky and post something mildly controversial from either the mainstream left or right; or if you’re very unlucky. Or if you’re publicly a woman, you’ll face sexual harassment and potentially stalking.
And some of these haters and sex pests have nothing to lose, so holding them accountable doesn’t solve the issue.
I do think a solution involves holding people accountable, but carefully. Perhaps to start, people form overlapping social groups, so a system where a group can only punish people within that group (e.g. banning them from posting), but can’t outside (e.g. harassing them or people close to them, especially in-person, or threatening their job).
What does this mean? What sort of accountability do you have in mind?
Dumb example: gender. As early as twenty years ago it wasn’t controversial to say that women don’t have a penis. Today it is (i know I’m getting downvoted just for making this example).
So yeah, being public is a dangerous game with huge margins for losing.
I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.
Flock ALPR mass surveillance is at least controversial in the US, yet I haven't heard any controversy over the apparent(?) roll-out of ALPR mass surveillance in Switzerland.
I have not spent the effort to dig into what exactly those things are, who owns them, and what their claimed purpose is, but given their recent installation, density, clear view of the roads, and strategic locations (intersections, roadway exits, etc.) an ALPR mass surveillance network is, to me, the most plausible explanation.
I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.
There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
I'm also very much a person who enjoys other people; especially the ones that are hard to get along with.
I've learned that being open, on my end, can encourage others to be more open to me. I don't have any nefarious motives, and am quite trustworthy, so I like to think I'm a "low-risk" person. I'm quite aware that the same can't be said for many others, and understand it, when that is cast onto me.
I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people".
On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.
I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding
You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny
Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.
I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.
~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread
It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.
So if people enjoy writing , they should do it. But also be less judgmental about other people.
As well as nefarious government actors.
I wish people kept to themselves more.
Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?
Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).
I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.
Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.
Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly.
For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.
Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.
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Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.
We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.
Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.
Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?
My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.
That doesn't sound impossible. Perhaps LLMs can already do this.
Why give them more stuff to steal for free?
(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)
* I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D
* But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes.
I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me.
I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect.
If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this.
I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice.
I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.
There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice.
We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure.
So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly.
There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.
I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share.
Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.