ergot_vacation

Precisely. Depends on what you're trying to achieve.

If you want to actually make lasting, positive changes to the world? Absolutely worthless.

If you want to self-promote for the sake of e-fame, real fame, money, power etc, smash hit.

Guess which one most Twitter activists are actually interested in.

Put another way, sloganeering, and the brain-dead adoption of slogans, has always been a thing. Someone less lazy than me could probably dig up examples going back to ancient Rome. "Meme Activism" is just the latest iteration of "I Like Ike" or "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." What has changed to some degree is the speed and intensity with which the slogans can impact public figures.

"Some cutting edge devices have 64 Gb or even 128 Gb, but this is required in very few situations like heavy CAT applications or video editing."

Or running two copies of Chrome at the same time.

Indeed. Imagine what this journalist must be paid to write crap like this. Reams and reams of filler that does nothing but waste people's time. Let me take a crack at this:

"Some people have claimed there isn't any tuna in Subway's sandwiches, so I sent some Subway 'tuna' to a lab for testing. They couldn't find an Tuna DNA, but cooking destroys proteins and there's probably no viable substitute or motivation for Subway to use it, so this entire experiment, and by extension this article, was pointless."

There, I just saved you 15 minutes of reading. Where's my $100k a year?

Turns out the PC was an accident of history. Not an endpoint like some of us saw it, but simply an unfortunate stepping stone to the ultimate goal of making a really smart toaster. The end goal was never really to empower people, it was just to create a new market for rent-seeking via lock-in on a shiny new black box. No repairs allowed. No modding allowed. And you can go fuck yourself if you want the source code for anything. "Micro-computing," as it used to be called, was never intended as way for ordinary people to gain freedom and agency. It was just supposed to be another tool for the rich and powerful to extract wealth from everyone else. And now, thanks to always-online requirements, inescapable updates and aggressive planned obsolescence, that dream is finally a reality. Welcome back to the farm serf. You never really left.

Design is both a linear progression and an infinitely looping circle/pendulum. Things were really free and organic at first. People got frustrated with this, and rising tech companies gave them "clean, modern" design instead. It was embraced because it was easier on the eyes, and faster to use in general. But now I think there's a growing resentment toward the "clean, modern" look, because it's simplified every drop of soul and humanity out of digital interfaces and expression. The pendulum will probably start to swing in the other direction soon.

I'm of mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, it sure is hard to read. On the other hand, in small doses I kind of enjoy it after the super sanitized corporate nothingness most of the web has become now. One glance at this page and there is zero doubt in my mind that it represents the genuine expression of an actual human without layers and layers of forced censorship and editing by some "platform." The web was never supposed to have "platforms" in the first place: Youtube/Facebook/Twitter etc are all fundamentally rent-seeking parasites in a way most people don't even appreciate today.

The web was supposed to just be a place anyone could put up a document with some links to other documents. Cheap, simple, easy, fast. Then some services cropped up to help make some of the frustrating parts easier and quicker, and eventually the "services" ended up eating the web alive.

You're still operating under the notion that the BBC is Real Journalism, a grand institution that can be trusted as a source of well-researched, professionally vetted information. This hasn't been true for a long time, and this article is only a mild example of why. Most mainstream news sources have rotted away to being glorified tabloids at this point, and while the BBC may have rotted less, it's still in poor shape.

Ah yes, Amazon isn't a monopoly. That's why I often use the alternative online shopping site that has nearly every mass-produced item imaginable at low prices and low or free shipping. Same with Facebook: it's good thing there's that competitor of theirs that nearly everyone is on, catching up, organizing local events, buying and selling stuff. And man, I don't know where I would be without that other Internet search engine that rapidly and intelligently indexes almost everything online as soon as it's up and has been so fine-tuned over more than a decade that it has an almost psychic ability to correctly interpret even the most vague, misspelled and deranged search queries. It's truly amazing that humanity managed to make such a wonder of technology not just once, but twice!

Really, I don't know what the lawmakers are thinking. Competition is alive and well on the Internet! Innovation has never been higher! Absolutely nothing has gotten worse since 2008! Boy I can't wait for the next version of Firefox. It totally won't be even more like Chrome this time.

To be fair to Yelp, who could have guessed when any of these services were being made that literally everything would become viciously political in the course of a couple years. You can't even go out to eat now (let alone see a movie or play a game) without it being a referendum on all your social and political beliefs.

You're right though, ultimately this doesn't matter much. Yelp has been garbage for years, so it's not really worth discussion the fun new ways they're garbage.

"Anti-Vaxxer" is a slur. It describes a group of people who believe that NO vaccines should be taken, under ANY circumstances, because they either aren't effective or the risk isn't worth the reward.

People who have skepticism over one particular vaccine, the one for Covid, are not the same as those who refuse ALL vaccines. There is overlap, for obvious reasons, but describing the former as the latter is overly broad, and seems to be an attempt, once again, to paint anyone who disagrees with the manufactured mainstream party line on Covid as a crank.

Vaccines in general are good, and have done a lot of good for humanity. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a vaccine that's harmful, especially when said vaccine is rushed, under incredible political and economic pressure, and using completely new technology. Skepticism may or may not be warranted, but it's certainly reasonable.

Furthermore, if a business chooses to turn down customers for a given reason, that policy is public information. It's not abusive to report this information on a service designed to report information about businesses. It's not abusive to share one's opinion of a business on a service designed specifically for that. Time and time again services are built out to solicit public opinion, and then panic ensues when the opinion isn't in keeping with what it's "supposed" to be. This is why Netflix no longer has a star rating system. Too many important people's egos got bruised.

Do people abuse rating systems? Absolutely (just look at the hellish wasteland that is Amazon). But disagreement is not abuse. Having a different opinion is not abuse. And that seems to be the situation here.

Edit: I also note some of the complaints were...overly enthusiastic. Threats of violence, although almost certainly hyperbole, are a bit much. At the same time, people don't like being told to show their papers. Anyone with a basic understanding of human psychology should be able to recognize this. Covid was unfortunate, but it wasn't devastating. We're not talking about the Black Plague here. Requiring Authoritarian State levels of paperwork to go about your daily life is going to piss people off, and rightly so. If things are really that bad, the restaurants shouldn't be open at all. If they aren't, there's no justification for "Papers please!"

That game box art is amazing. Lot of the concept art too. I was ready to laugh, but this seems like might have genuinely been a fun little game. Too bad Sega had no idea what they were doing around that time.

Seems pretty straightforward too. Could probably be mocked up with modern graphics in Unreal or Unity pretty easily. Though it might be worth keeping some of the 90s aesthetic.

Not only CAN it be interpreted in bad faith, but users are ENCOURAGED to do so, because that makes people angry, and people stay on the site and keep clicking longer if they're angry.

IE the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory (https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19). The bitter irony is that originally, mods and admins on forums did what they could to contain this kind of behavior. Now it's actively encouraged because rage means engagement, and engagement means more ad revenue.

It is. I mean don't get me wrong, I got a sensible chuckle out of it. But this isn't really technology related in any way, unless the dog has a startup we don't know about.

If you want sense of what real AI warfare will look like, look at Cambridge Analytica. Extremely primitive, but still highly effective. The key concept is the ability to sift through vast piles of data, find previously unknown patterns, and then exploit them. Humans have to make one ad for the whole nation. AI can micro-target hundreds or thousands of communities with custom propaganda, often even contradicting itself, achieving a much more powerful result. Now apply this approach to broader conflicts.

The interesting (and sinister) thing to consider is how wild this will look if fully built out. We're not just talking about some machine intelligence shuffling troops around in lieu of a general. The advantage of a computer is its vision: it can see the "playing field," the reality it's fighting in, much more broadly and deeply than a human can. It can hold more things in its mind at once. AI warfare isn't computers flying some drones or robotic tanks. AI warfare probably looks like a bunch of small, odd occurrences as both sides probe each other's weaknesses in economics, infrastructure and politics, circling each other like two knife fighters. A bunch of weird, disjointed bursts of propaganda crop up across various media channels, fragmented and often seemingly incoherent, but perfectly targeted. Small, isolated incidents of problems at important institutions start cropping up, shutting them down for weeks or months: Hospitals, minor government agencies, oil pipelines, food processing. Never enough to look like a coherent attack. Knife jabs and dodges, the fighters probing, learning, a/b testing.

And then one day it isn't a test anymore. The real strike comes. It isn't a nuke or an invasion. There's no need. Those things are as outdated as tying sharp stones to sticks. The AI knows just where to hit, in just the right way, and like a Vulcan death grip one pinch sets the whole system collapsing on itself. It will take humans a decade to even fully understand what happened. If they have that luxury.

The atom bomb changed warfare via incomprehensible destruction. AI will change warfare via incomprehensible strategy.

IN EVERY WAY.

This has been markedly worse since the '08 crash, and even more so once Covid hit, but to some degree this hollowing out of trusted products and brands seems to reach back to the late 90s.

Just look at stereo and AV equipment and the absolute plague of "rebadging." Brands that spend decades building customer loyalty went under, sold out their name and logo to some random asshole in China (or sometimes Europe), and that asshole then turns around and slaps the name on some generic Chinese crap which, if you dig a little, can also be bought with any number of other fake names plastered on it (or name-free, on Aliexpress.)

I know it's naive to immediately cry "there oughta be a law!" but in this case, specifically and more broadly, maybe there really oughta. If a company is wearing the peeled skin of another company Silence of the Lambs style, isn't that fundamentally deceitful (and thus fraudulent) advertising? If the bread or the peanut butter you've always bought is suddenly juuust a little smaller, shouldn't there be big, bright labeling required to make that clear, rather than a tiny weight or volume number no one is going to notice? If the clothes you always re-buy have suddenly changed materials and manufacturiing process, maybe they should be required to tell you that (and if you think figuring out what something is ACTUALLY made of before you buy it is easy, you've never tried to buy t-shirts on Amazon).

The reality is inflation is a thing, along with greed and a number of other supply chain issues hitting consumer products now. But I'd rather face the problem head-on instead of having to figure out what subtle con I'm being targeted for every time I try to buy toilet paper.

I've long believed "open source" is for suckers for exactly this reason. Literally being open source, having the code open for review, isn't a problem. But usually "Open Source" also ends up meaning free as in beer, for EVERYONE, whether you're some college student or a billion dollar company.

The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small businesses) can use it for free. Everyone else needs to pony up. It's absurd that a ton of the software allowing giant corporations to run day-to-day is not only created but ACTIVELY MAINTAINED by an individual or groups of individuals for free, as if they were running a soup kitchen. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are not homeless. They can, and should, pay the people that make the software that keeps them going.

"But if it's open source, couldn't they just fork it and keep using that for free?" Yes, but a. not legally, if the terms forbid it and b. They would now have to find a new group of people to maintain the code, after just creating a bunch of ill-will in everyone in that space. In the end nothing is absolute: you can always just pirate closed-source commercial software too. But doing so has serious negative consequences.

This is the level of detail I appreciate. It was a fascinating culture, just not a very warm and friendly one.

People call anything and everything "Nazi" in this day and age, but in this case it might be somewhat of a relevant comparison. We're not talking about the Na'vi here: the Aztec were some brutally cruel people.

How much does constructing giant skull walls and pillars from the remains of your human sacrifices(https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...) contribute to happiness and the good life? Asking for a friend.

This article is baffling. "The rich are unfairly rich-" it says "Because their parents were rich and bought them good schooling no one else can afford! But schooling hasn't been able to lift those who aren't already rich out of poverty very well! But if we just fix education the right way, surely THIS time it will work, and everyone can be rich(er)!"

People love to believe comfortable myths. For a certain group of people, their comfortable myth is that wealth inequality can be solved by education. It cannot. People become wealthy because of luck. Who your parents are is luck. Where you were born is luck. Your intelligence and physical and mental health are luck. It's all luck. The best schooling in the world can't move this needle much, and its power grows ever weaker as technology and automation eat more and more of the economy.

"Growth" can't save us either. We cannot escape by giving the economy more gas, because the faster the economy goes, the more things get automated, the more jobs vanish, and more wealth gets concentrated. We are rapidly approaching a point where a tiny fraction of the population controls almost all economic activity, and in that future, the only way to fix wealth inequality is to tax that group and spread the money around. Most of that group do not want this to happen of course, and they get to make the decisions. But sooner or later, this will become an untenable position.

What you're describing is a real type of person, and one that should be avoided, but that's probably not what's fueling this statistic. Large portions of the population did not suddenly become lazy and lose all ambition. They're not engaged with the economy because they're losing the ability to engage. This is a global phenomenon, and it's getting worse and worse as tech makes most of the population increasingly irrelevant in the job market. We are rapidly approaching a situation with only two end states: Some kind of intense wellfare state, or riots and brutal chaos. Forget South Africa, the US is full of 30-and-unders who are perfectly capable and willing to engage, but can't because there's no place for them. No good jobs, rent and home prices are through the roof, college prices are through the roof and don't buy a good career anymore anyway. And on and on.

The problem isn't that young people are lazy. It's that they're being left behind. And if something isn't done about it soon, society is going to start to crumble. In some ways, it already has.

This has been repeatedly discussed for several years now. There's some reality to both "sides."

On the one hand, it does seem clear that, as is often the case, initial research and observation was flawed and incomplete, and parts of it got taken up into the general cultural consciousness where it was then hard to correct or modify them.

On the other hand, many of the people eager to remind everyone of this seem to have ulterior motives. It is either stated or heavily implied that this correction to the original research means instinctive hierarchies aren't a thing, in either animals or humans, which is absurd.

Humans need, intuit, and automatically fall into social hierarchies based on power. Power comes from a complex variety of sources: looks, money, family, physical fitness, intelligence and so on. People respond to power, on an instinctive level. This response can (and should) be tempered to some degree, as should all instincts, but it can't be engineered away.

Thus, the concept of "The Alpha" is true in the sense that people understand and respond to power. They also understand and respond to compassion, duty, and a number of other factors, but social hierarchies based on power are a core part of human psychology, and always will be.

Now, does all this justify people being "jerks?" Depends on what you mean by "jerk." On the one hand, the cultural zeitgeist of the moment is almost certainly too far on the side of allowing and accepting people to be soft and weak. On the other hand, you have to be careful how you define "Power." Being overly egotistical, narcissistic and violent, not having control of yourself, not having proper patience etc are also forms of weakness. As with most things in life, excellence is a matter of finding the perfect point of balance.

We're only dopes in the version of reality they're trying to create.

Gotta re-arrange those deck chairs!

This. Your overlords do not care what you think. Your overlords know what is best for you. There will be no feedback. There will be only compliance.

I don't want things modern and clean. Please stop making things modern and clean. I want things that are human and have some kind of soul left in them instead of being antiseptically scoured of anything resembling personality.

I also want programs made for adults who know how computers work, and are capable of leveraging complex but functional UI to actually do stuff with some degree of sophistication. Making programs more and more like a Playskool toy with every update is, by definition, regression, not progress.

There's not much use in complaining though. Firefox has been a lost cause for years now.