As someone who's fairly reclusive outside of work I'm frightened by this prospect. I'd rather be anxious and have to deal with people from time to time than be so utterly alone that I'm forced to treat my cereal box as a surrogate for a friend. That just sounds horrible on so many levels.
I'd move if I knew that the locals wouldn't make my life hard for being transgender and not the typical Christian (I'm a Christian Gnostic, so I'm way out there in terms of my faith). But if anything living in my home state of Kansas has taught me is that no matter how much you reach out and try to show kindness folks will inevitably stay focused on the foreign qualities you bring in their midst.
I hate to be mean but the reason argumentation isn't always about facts is because there's the written (most formal) and the spoken (most informal). Along that spectrum you can be as rigorous as a mathematical proof to being fast and loose with emotive appeals with your arguments. But what's important to take home with this idea is that you construct a logically valid and sound argument that's easy to digest but also emotionally comprehensible. Otherwise, you're going to lose your audience. For example, Vox ran a video on renewable energy from a person who is a conservative (part of the Tea Party movement and supported/advocated-for Donald Trump). She pointed out that to get conservatives on the side of mitigating climate change with adopting renewable energy we have to ditch the climate change rhetoric. We have to go for what drives conservatives: competition, cheaper energy, and energy independence. Oddly enough, this holds true back in my home state with Governor Brownback (who I despise) because he's gone against the Kochs with respect to adopting/advocating wind power. Now the wind farms are growing and making a profit for Westar and other power companies in the state. Basically, when trying to convince to an audience you have to know that audience.
Oh no doubt there's better languages in terms of general purpose programming. I'm biased towards OCaml myself since it has nice syntax but there's plenty of options to choose from. I'm just pointing to C/C++ languages since they're the most mature and widely available in terms of documentation, IDEs, etc.
Hah, I'm in a similar situation. When the business side of the firm isn't giving us new feature requests or there's no new bugs found I'm basically twiddling my fingers reading over the code base (at least parts I'm utterly unfamiliar with) or learning some new library that might be useful in the future.
That doesn't really help you when the platform you run on be it a browser or a virtual machine is written in C/C++ which by implication can be exposed to the same security flaws if/when they utilize unsafe design patterns or idioms. So, all you've done is pass the buck onto Servo/Gecko/Safari. The reality is that you can't make an argument that's ironclad in favor of forcing JS to become the new C. Let JS do it's wonders for the web and let C/C++ and other languages that have great native application tools do their wonders for the desktop?
Because there's existing libraries which solve many of the same problems which they inevitably run into and then re-implement them in JS. The "not invented here" mentality has to stop. Unless there's a significant reason to not utilize a library then it shouldn't be avoided. There's no good reason to replicate that functionality.
I'm just gonna say I oppose this proposal because I'm really tired of seeing developers shy away from utilizing or learning C/C++ only to admit much later in a project's life cycle that those languages and their associated libraries are the best for the job. I'm all ears on utilizing JS for front end to even a desktop application but if the entire thing gets written to be ran on Servo or whatever browser engine they choose then I oppose it categorically. JS might be fine for some things but as a general programming language on a substandard runtime is just asking for trouble. Learn to write in C/C++ for native applications or go home.
It's all about YouTube becoming profitable. It's not about the algorithms or any specific political ideology or any other silly idea. It's cold hard cash that Alphabet wants from YouTube and it's not delivering. So how do they handle that? Especially if the advertisers are the ones funding this? More control over content and more gate keeping are the likely options YouTube's bosses are going to pick. It's just inevitable that Youtube content creators are going to get squeezed harder. I expect YouTube soon to have moderators that will vet any content of channels of a certain size before that channel's owners see a dime. Hell, I expect YouTube to require content creators to fork out a few hundred bucks to be given free license to publish videos on the site eventually. Why? Because showing an ad on a video is a risk and if it doesn't generate enough money or have enough people viewing it then why are they hosting it? We all have to think like this when approaching YouTube and Alphabet with respect to the current and future changes to YouTube.
The obsession Apple and other companies have with the post-PC concept reminds me of Thomas Edison's own obsession with the Nickelodeon. Edison thought no one would ever sit down to watch any length of film beyond five minutes. The idea just baffled Edison to no end and he tried hard to promote the Nickelodeon parlor concept. Obviously, it flopped hard but it didn't stop Edison from trying his damnedest. It seems to me that Apple and company have to have their own Nickelodeon moment where their prized cloud services crater outside of the enterprise markets. In a way, I have a bit of hope that day may be coming sooner rather than later (note: I don't see streaming services as cloud services, these are more about on-demand consumption and not about where or what device the consumption is done).
It's easy to say wealth redistribution is a solution in search of a problem if you never lived in a city or town that's been slowly rotting away due to the negligence of the economic elites. I come from Wichita, Kansas and I can tell you that the last decade back home has been hell on everyone. I had to leave my home town for another state just to find work that wasn't just $12/hr (that's about as high as you can get without any college education back home) even for software development. You might think "oh but the standard of living in Kansas is cheap" for which I can prove that's not the case, especially for Wichita. In the long run, either the economic elites actually start investing in the consumers that made them wealthy or the consumers who can't pay for their services or goods will (not might) take their wealth from them by force.
I have to wonder if in some part what happened during the Bronze Age is destined to happen again? I can see the US here going belly up if someone was inclined to test the US resolve to defend the likes of Saudi Arabia (considering its contribution to the world oil markets is non-trivial and probably not easily replaced). What I'm getting at with that hypothetical situation is that we're probably too interconnected now just like we were in the Bronze Age and with sustained disruptions to vital resources I can imagine things getting bad in a hurry. I just wish more folks would take this possibility more seriously and build redundancy and independence where it can minimize the inevitable disruptions of the future.
I remember sending in the mail the money and verification info for my SDF account. God I wish I remembered my account's password, it might still be there.
In a way, I think social networks as currently designed as a mistake since it requires a centralized authority to share the content and verify our identities. Compare that to hosting your own content on a VPS where you're in charge of what you do and share on it. The problem comes from how do you connect people to together? How do you build a social search that links people based on what they share? In a way, I've always hoped Google would've been the one to get clued in and realize that they didn't need to make a social network but a social search index which would connect people based on that active sharing on websites. Obviously, there's no money to be had in such a search index so I have to wonder if it has to be something done on a voluntary basis like Debian or any other FOSS project.
I barely use Facebook and honestly I can't imagine how anyone uses it. At this point, I think the only social network I use is Twitter and mostly because I follow quite a few synthwave artists and just content creators in general. The news side of Twitter isn't much better than what Facebook offers IMO, it's 99% opinion dressed up as news.
>My Facebook feed is nothing but ads, low effort clickbait, and liberal anti-Trump news pieces.
Hah, thanks to my cousin I get the conservative clickbait pages. It's just weird how people just share that sort of junk. I prefer sharing the Babylon 5 memes and jokes (that mostly no one gets) which I have to wonder if I'm confusing her and the rest of the family yet (No one remembers Zathras...).
"Even the furthest of the alt-right take their goal as the exact opposite: to break the control of the "cathedral" of left-globalist interests, who are embodied in the now-unified elites of academia, entertainment, high finance, big tech, wealthy industrialists, Democrats, journalists and media, and the unelected deep state."
Yet the alt-right and pretty much all right wing political ideologies require all to conform to its social values or else; especially on matters of bodily autonomy (LGBT issues, abortion, contraceptive use, plastic surgery, drug use, etc) the right wing of politics fears any freedom to choose. So, I'm not buying your thesis that the right wing wants to leave folks like me (transgender for example) alone.
"On the other hand, leftists - like the people who laud Atwood's book in your way - always want concentration of power because they're utopians who think that all you need to make a great society is more control given to the correct, enlightened technocrats (who always happen to be people resembling themselves in values, outlook, and opinions)."
I think you're confusing what passes for left wing politics in the US and Europe as historically left wing politics. For example, I don't think any legitimate leftist would support concentrations of power in the hands of managers considering the failure of the USSR and even several conglomerates in the West (GM comes to mind here). Tyranny of the managers is still tyranny even to a democratic socialist or to a mutualist (such as myself). So, I don't see where your POV even holds water when there's a plethora of contrary theories by leftist philosophers and political commentators on these matters. I think you need to expand your analysis beyond DailyKos vs National Review when it comes to politics.
I don't get why so many folks thought Google was going to give them a free pass forever when it comes to various touchy subjects. Google depends on advertisers to pay its bills and make profit for its shareholders. If that means Youtube becomes more vanilla than vanilla then that's what will happen. It's not an issue of left/right political spectrum as it is more to do with the fear of alienating their clients (the advertisers) who aren't the consumers or people who make videos on Youtube. So if content creators want to take this an opportunity to find a better distribution and payment scheme I think that would be wise rather than trying to change the beast that is Google because when it comes down to your content Google can easily replace it with the generic PBS channel videos or even hire their own content creators to replace you at a discount.
Same. It's rare to find a site that I can use when I read my data limit on T-Mobile that doesn't turn into a mess. If only I could just tell Safari to turn off all JS and image loading at will.
It's probably why Tesla wants to sell people the power wall despite its own shortcomings. Why give that power back to the grid operators who are going to screw you over? Just get a battery storage solution that also charges your car and maybe covers some of the power consumption in the home? I think in the long term this is the only viable option or until the grid operators and other concerns outlaw usage of battery tech that stores power in advance of daily usage.
So if I say I'm James Mattis and I think Trump is a dork I'm violating the law? Come on, no judge is gonna buy that nonsense. It's a far different to talk smack on twitter under an alt account (an UNVERIFIED account even) than it is to actually say things under the color of law like ordering a contingent of military to fire upon civilians while I'm saying I am James Mattis Sec of Defense. See the difference?
Yet emulators have been a niche before virtual consoles for better on two decades. Only a handful of people I knew ever used them (myself included). Most folks that play games today rarely knew of the older consoles nor are they even that curious. So to blame a few dorks like myself for not abstaining from ripping our ROMs to play on our crappy college laptops back in the early 2000s is nonsensical. It's up to the firm to find out if a market is viable, not the consumer.
It's security theater for those Americans who have been lied to that the world outside their town is significantly more violent or dangerous by the media at large (the whole if it bleeds it leads thing has finally become its own reality for the US newscast watcher). And it garners votes to a significant degree which bothers me. I'm thinking of leaving entirely since I can't imagine the domestic front being any more friendly if this cements a permanent trend. I don't want to pay for or be party to a government that sees enemies around every corner. I thought the cold war was fought and won on the basis that such ideologies don't work. I guess I was wrong.
I was thinking the same thing at least from the point of view of someone who came from a state where the job market has been shrinking or at least not growing in pace with the population. I don't think I knew anyone around my age or a little older who were married where only one spouse was working. It seemed back home almost everyone worked full time if they could and possibly an additional part-time job to cover costs especially if they had children.
Yeah so you know that I like telescopes, talking smack on Twitter, and watching Let's Plays of Dwarf Fortress. Now, how do you monetize that? What meaningful marketing information does that give you? You see where I'm going with my skepticism? I'm skeptical that the data itself is useful by any measure because in itself it does not give a marketer nor a business an insight that they couldn't infer by more low tech means (my age, income bracket, how often I buy things, etc all which is already in their records in the majority of cases). None of this "big data" stuff is really that novel and it's an attempt at modern alchemy of turning crap data into "valuable information." Knowing the minutia of your customers or users in general won't help you serve them nor will it help you get more of them. At some point the supposed tacit information of the market devolves into the random noise of the universe.
In regards to the question of ISPs selling browsing history, how much of that data outside of law enforcement has ever led to profitable sales from consumers? Like honestly, I've never ever been swayed by a web advert. If anything, they've made me disgusted with the advertiser and made me delay any purchases. Plus, most of the web ads as they are now are just boring repeats of the same product I've searched on Amazon or Google. No related products, no accessories (I bought a telescope recently so I find it odd that no one is trying to hawk eye pieces or filters for the coming solar eclipse). Just the same dumb product I've ALREADY BOUGHT! Like I can't imagine the profit margins on data mining are all that significant if my intuition holds true.