vertexFarm

Whether for good or bad, the existence of phones has changed the human condition. Perhaps irreversibly. It's not just how we consume news or work. It's a very personal change. Remember in the nineties how we'd all have to plan ahead of time to meet up with friends or family or go on a date or whatever? You had to wait until evening, call when they would be home or leave a message, set up a time and place, and stick to it because once you left the house you couldn't coordinate further.

So whether or not that's good or bad is beside the point. It is a profoundly different method of socializing. Communication was sparse and delayed and you couldn't change plans or cancel 30 minutes ahead of time without looking like a dick. We are different for this. In some ways good, in some ways bad, but we have such a poor understanding of how it's working for us in the greater scheme of things that this fact alone should be somewhat alarming. And no, you can't just choose not to participate. Not having a smartphone on your person at all times and being always connected, always reachable, and always able to be obliged to work or respond or go do something at another's command is now tantamount to not participating in society.

Before this existed, we did a lot of the same activities in other ways as you said, but the restrictions of the medium we had available truly did change how it all worked in a tangible way. Yes, a similar thing happened with radio and land lines and other forms of technology before, but the extent of the change was lesser. The developments of the past ten or twenty years are so much more efficient and powerful and difficult to evade that they deserve unique consideration.

The fact that you can't decentralize legislation and physical governance is not insignificant. You can't block the influence of preexisting powerful actors. Those factors do have the power to destroy the decentralization movement, and most likely will.

What this all really does in the end is create a technical caste system and obfuscation of ownership. People fortunate enough to have access and be up to speed on the latest technology (or hire people who are) will reap the rewards of decentralized systems which still belong to authoritarian actors, yet it will be extremely difficult to prove that ownership--especially to laymen. It will always have a nice hazy deniability, and it will be almost impossible to hold anyone accountable for their actions, or prevent or even identify exploitation.

This is absolutely the future of the web. Perpetual and stealthy non-neutral manipulation by the technically advanced and financially powerful is here to stay. I think that as engineers our tunnel vision and intellectual hubris have given us a false sense of security as we developed this hideous system, because we thought it was some kind of purely digital realm where we have real control and real comprehension of what we are doing. But nothing is purely digital. Everything is built on top of the real, analogue world where strong actors have already divvied up and taken ownership of everything.

How did Slack figure out this guy's ethnicity / citizenship / status? Why are they allowed to access that information and unilaterally act on it? Sounds like there's a valid question being asked here to me.

And our food squeamishness also exists on a sliding scale: we will always accumulate more and more layers of plastic around our food, even though it's already packaged in a way that's totally safe and durable and sanitary. Remember when cereal just came in the cardboard box? This process is cumulative and will never end. We will never say no to another layer of plastic around our products at some point in the journey from factory to consumption.

I'd like to know exactly how recyclable those Nestle pods are. I suppose they refill and reuse them? What about if you toss them into a standard recycling system instead of mailing them to Nestle, which will never be a commitment that a significant number of consumers make. Sorry, it's just not going to happen at scale and they know it. The program is likely just PR. I doubt they are recyclable in a single-stream system because they're full of coffee grounds / whatever else.

It's astounding how much of the stuff we think we're sending to be recycled is just rejected and tossed anyway. It's an enormous percentage.

Sometimes things take that long. That kind of cognitive bias is making it difficult for our species to do any sort of proper long-term planning or even observation of slow problems.

I don't think this can be overstated enough. Yearly budgets and disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are important, sure, but they're on an entirely different tier from what we're about to wreak on ourselves. We're evaluating the risk of these technologies all wrong. Accidents and sacrifices would have been worth it. Even nuclear proliferation leading to all-out nuclear war would have been preferable to what we're about to experience. And that is truly harrowing.

They "believe" their ideology is threatened--so it's okay to clamp down on their own citizens, representing over a billion human beings, censor and intercept all communications, edit out government atrocities and historical facts like Tienanmen square, and spy on every citizen on a profound and constant panopticon level? This isn't about western or eastern perspective. This kind of philosophy justifies the actions of any dictator or autocratic fascist. This whole obsession with a perceived national threat is the prod that pushes through all sorts of oppressive policies.

We in the west also have severe problems with this. The whole post-9/11 mentality has been all about yielding personal dignity and rights and basic privacy for the sake of assuaging some vague (and mostly imaginary) threat. We also are building a massive panopticon, we just aren't as far along as China is at the moment, and our machinations of totalitarianism are privatized instead of powered by the state. We should pay very close attention to what's going on in that culture, because we may need those lessons sooner than we think in our own future--even if they come in a slightly different form.

The point is, there needs to be some law and order in place so that when people abuse this tech to harm people and society and get caught, there's some precedent to stop them and punish them. It doesn't matter if the technology is passive. The intent and action to use it to harm people are not passive and are not analogous to thought crime at all.

There is dire need for regulation with a lot of emerging technologies right now. We're building systems with enormous power which can break human society if misused. I think the intangibility and "passivity" of this tech (or at least how it is perceived) gives us a very false sense of security. Like how a few decades ago very few average people could understand how the internet might have a great impact on society. Obviously they aren't thinking that way anymore.

Check out Charles Stross's speech at C3 about regulatory lag relative to the the accelerated nature of tech growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4

It's not just their own problem. They won't simply die and get out of the way of the more fortunate.

Well all of us in the US, anyway. For some reason it doesn't work that way in most places on earth.

Medical job-lock is a real thing that happens, and most of us just discount the possibility completely until an unexpected problem crops up. AMHIK. Everyone be grateful for your health while you can, and plan for the future.

I've read about apps that switched from light to dark and saw a drop in engagement, but the same thing has happened for apps that go from dark to light, so perhaps it's just poor experimental control and the dip is just what happens to the user base whenever you change up the UI at all. There's always a backlash against that.

The studies are never very rigorous, either. There's also lots of persistent myths and misconceptions left over from yesteryear, such as the myth that being close to a CRT will actually damage your eyesight. I think that's conflated with dark-vs-light because of the typical retro image of a CRT displaying a green-on-black CLI. Seems that some people think reading strain means real eye damage, perhaps even permanent damage, instead of what it really means--quicker exhaustion and perhaps a headache.

The light UI has really won out completely in the wider world of consumer UI, while the dark UI is almost ubiquitous in certain niches and communities. People are always asking for or writing blog posts about the ultimate answer. I think it should just be up to the individual: what do you prefer? And UI design should move towards standards to support this user-based decision, offering both a light and dark mode that is easily toggled based on personal preferences and the ambient lighting where the UI currently exists.

Pragmatists should vote for the realistic option that benefits us the most, but that's not how most people work. People aren't really rational actors. If you continuously prove to the public that real reform is a stupid dream and that they must play the game and take the shitty carrot instead of the incredibly shitty stick, they rebel--even if it's not in their best interest. It's not reasonable to point out that they shouldn't do this. Of course they shouldn't, but they always will.

For authoritarians, they see options 1: and 2: from the first paragraph switched around relative to progressives. They aren't the same at all--not even a little--yet still there isn't really any meaningful choice to be made. There is only a vicious, cynical threat. Vote for what your region's culture considers least evil or watch as Armageddon devours you and your loved ones.

The constant near-perfect tie races are suspicious as hell. Haven't you ever noticed that? It's always 51-49 or somewhere thereabouts after the electoral college, gerrymandering and all the other forms of sophistry obfuscate the direct vote tallies--which always differ far more. Always. Also notice the incumbency rate compared to approval ratings. Incumbency is nearly perfect, even though approval is always sub-20%. Often it's far lower than 20%. This should obviously be impossible in pure democracy, but it should also be incredibly rare in our representative republic. But it's the rule, not the exception. In my opinion this is a smoking gun that just can't be dismissed.

This is rigged. Not the same way that crude authoritarian regimes fake their elections, with blatant but effective mafia tactics. This is structurally rigged. This is a hateful ploy that is designed to make real reform impossible, or at least slow enough for existing power structures to readjust and maintain full ownership of new trends, and furthermore to make us grateful for the barest minimum of political functioning: simply that we aren't living under a violent totalitarian state.

Both sides are certainly not the same. But the structure within which both sides operate is not designed with the best interests of the American people or the world in mind. I don't think it's some shadowy conspiracy that was masterminded by a single agent, it's just a ludicrously shitty system that naturally evolved out of our country and was taken advantage of by various opportunists. Our market style makes that very easy and very rewarding. Or at least it was at the outset, before power structures ossified and became strongly entrenched.

I guess a way to tamp it down might be to avoid appointing big, singular celebrity personalities as officers in the company, to carefully plan press releases, and try to describe concepts precisely and plainly instead of with trendy terms. But it's still so hard to predict what kind of terminology will have that buzz factor before it hits the public, so it might all be pissing up a rope.

Once more, it might actually be a bad idea to try and combat the over-hyping phenomenon when all is said and done. Sure, there's a trough of disillusionment, but there's also a lot of skilled individuals who get swept up in the gravity well of that concept anyway and add talent and funding despite the fact that expectations overshoot reality at first. It might not be so destructive or wasteful, but instead we place too much psychological weight on disappointment and let it blind us to the more modest and slow (but realistic) benefits. I think we as a culture are terribly phobic of disappointment.

Of course some hype cycles don't end in a plateau which gradually progresses upwards--some ideas just die. Who knows how to really spot one of those in time to do any good, though. Hindsight is a benefit we don't get until it's too late, and we must simply try to apply what we learned to the next thing. The next thing is always a little different, though, so it's never a perfect prediction.

For reference if anybody hasn't seen it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Fascinating. I'm going to avoid going off-topic any further, though.

Think of it this way--any life-critical machine should have at least some consideration payed to security during design. Even non life-critical machines need security, so is it acceptable when we entirely ignore it in the whole field of medicine? If we leave it that that way, then yes, be utterly certain that it will be exploited somewhere by somebody. All information security paranoia is proven correct on a long enough timeline.

Ask any infosec professional--does _____ system really need security? The answer is going to be yes, regardless of what's in the blank. We've learned this many times with many devices which we used to think nobody would ever bother to tamper with or that couldn't be made to do anyone harm. Every time our hubris brightly illustrated and we finally realize that yes, every networked device has the potential to be crucial to somebody and it all needs at least some consideration toward security.

There are pacemakers out there using NFC or some similar tech to talk to an external processor and battery pack. I bet the security on those is utterly tragic. The relevant regulatory bodies are absolutely not going to do a damn thing about it until there's a body count--of that much I am 100% certain.

Murder via medical device malware sounds like the plot of a rejected Gibsonian short story, but stuff like that will happen in our world. Somebody is eventually going to think that might be just the way to off grandpa so they can hurry up and get that inheritance.

https://hackaday.com/2018/10/09/hacking-the-zh03b-laser-part...

This one only goes down to one micron though, so it might not be usable for many allergens.

Not to say there isn't a way to make some form of satisfying gameplay out of a randomized sandbox, but it certainly won't be the same as an FPS map designed with experienced intent. That aside, it would probably produce a spot with excellent gameplay every so often out of pure serendipity, which would be fun to hunt for! I'd try it.

If we extrapolate this, there will be a point where humans have designed such an effective persuasion engine that certain concepts of society simply don't work the same anymore, such as democracy or the free market. It will be a permanent change. We won't be able to close pandora's box, and we will simply have to adapt as a society without these features. There will be parts of us that we aren't prepared to lose, losses that we never even considered the possibility of.

It will be a loss of innocence that I don't think a lot of people are expecting at all. Most people don't think that something like advertising can significantly change what it is to be human, but technology has fundamentally changed us before. We should be more mindful of it before we allow it to happen.

Bear in mind that it doesn't require perfect persuasion of 100% of people in order to break a system such as democracy. All we would have to do is some slight statistical hacking or nudging, and we could make it so that certain outcomes are functionally impossible. It is probably already happening to some degree.

I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire.

It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth.

Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology.

To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here.

We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway.

So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction.

Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.

In any case, the likelihood that our democracy is intact and working as intended is virtually zero. There's obviously social engineering in play, if you count that as hacking. I think it counts; it's a way for a small minority to steer democracy in a way contrary to the legitimate wishes of the populace. Combined with other shady techniques, no single cause is enough to say for sure our elections are stolen. But all together I think it qualifies as rigged.

Go vote anyway, though. At least make it more difficult to spoof by increasing legit turnout. I really hope we have good participation this year.

I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.

What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?

This advertising model hasn't been around for very long. It's baffling how suddenly nobody can even conceive of how the world would work without malicious advertising and culture-wide psyops digging into everyone's brains. The advertising model is one of the worst inventions in history.

Most people in the world have it far worse off than the US. We tend to easily fly into a panic and start drinking bottled water instead, which only pumps ever more plastic and carbon into the biosphere. That exact phenomenon happened in Austin recently. People went into a prepper panic and raided the grocery stores anyway, completely cleaning out all the bottled water in the city. Again. The water was perfectly fine, it turns out.

My travels through the third world have made me more aware of how much we take our highly reliable infrastructure for granted. Of course we still have some problems to work out, but acting like most tap water is unsafe is hyperbolic and just not helpful.

Still irrelevant to the subject. It doesn't prove or disprove anything.

Even with such extraordinary amplitude, the correlation was very slight. Trust me, everyone has much bigger health risks to worry about than radio. If you've ever had a drink in your life you've done worse.

And the sleep experiment is even worse. How do you quantify "better deeper sleep?" Please don't spread this kind of anecdotal pseudoscience, it just makes the rest of the world more uninformed. The more confidence you have in your objectivity and expertise on the subject, the worse your bias gets. People who work with tech have to be doubly sure to control for bias.