Even more so when they're often reviewed and legislated on by people who don't even have a fraction of the basic technical curiosity--let alone knowledge--required to understand what they are doing.
431 karma · joined April 29, 2018
The effects you talk about definitely exist and I feel like a lot of those are arrogance, or possibly even our fundamental inability to observe without bias unless we take very careful precautions ahead of time. Perhaps doctors otherwise used to proper experimental control and thinking scientifically didn't apply the same precautions ahead of meeting with sales reps, because that appeared to be out of context of practicing medicine at the time, even though it is still part of the process. Apparently they are affected by bias without being aware of it. This is wholly conjecture on my part.
If we let it slide for members of the middle class then it will eventually lead to an ever greater portion of the population unable to earn a dignified quality of life for their work.
Engineers, web developers, etc. are paid very well now, sure, but as more and more people enter that industry and those skills become more commonplace, do you really think things will remain that way? As more of the industry is able to be automated, do you think as many people will be able to stay in the middle class?
And when people in the middle class start accepting things like company housing, contractor jobs over salaried employment with benefits, longer working hours, etc. what do you think that will do for the lower classes of society? I think we're starting to see that now with pseudo-jobs like Favor and Uber, which have even less security than the service industry has traditionally had.
It's not just about facebook engineers or whatever, it's about society as a whole. The problems faced by society are largely the same, different only in degree; we shouldn't separate them up and devolve into infighting because these yuppies or whatever can afford something like the quality of life an average worker a couple generations ago could have, and that's considered fabulously well-off now. If industry starts treating middle-class people badly, they're treating lower-class people worse for the same reason. The whole scale slides.
A strong middle class with strong labor rights helps all of society. We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?
Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours. Publicly traded companies in fact must continuously grow and increase productivity endlessly so as to increase shareholder value. It's almost a tropism. It's not somebody's conscious conspiracy or mustache-twirling evil plan, it's just the nature of these societal mechanisms we're living with.
And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity. I feel like that's a correlation fallacy on your part or something.
I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security. This is happening to steadily more people in more industries, including ones that were thought to be too highly educated to be vulnerable. It's a trend that will continue if nobody does anything about it.
You say there's no evidence those conditions can return, but that's a weird negative proof situation. What kind of evidence am I supposed to provide for that, a crystal ball? Trends are already moving in that direction. The decay of the middle class is already happening. Even with all our increases in productivity, people on average just can't afford the benefits that previous generations had, and are less likely to be upwardly socially mobile. And it's only getting worse.
That, combined with the fact that society often defaults to immense wealth divides in multiple cultures all throughout history--transforming the vast majority of people into paupers and serfs--should be proof enough. The secure, prosperous lives we enjoy in the developed world are not the default state. The privileges we take for granted are the result of blood and toil from labor and civil rights movements over the centuries.
I know it's pretty ridiculous for me to run out in the street and start chanting the end is nigh over a little change in our culture. But it's not just one little change. It's a sum of many changes which have added up over the last few decades and the trend that it represents. It's not about now, it's about where that trend is going in the near future. Believe it or not, things will not remain this good if we are apathetic about it. That is not the default state of society.
If you have read up on the history of what people have been through in this country and the world as a result of the first industrial revolution, you would also be wary of the second which is coming about right now due to automation. It's worth extreme vigilance.
For the record, I don't live in New York or California either. I'm in an industry which was once full of steady salaried jobs, but now it's entirely shifted over to gig-economy contracting. Getting insurance is a nightmare and eats up my margins. What was once a very livable job now hardly pays for an apartment. It's specialized work that requires technical skills. I work very long hours and practically every weekend. I am not proud of that, and I know I need a change of career, but once again--it's not about me, it's about statistics. It's naive to expect that everyone can change their career to whatever the best career is at the moment. You are being obtuse if you think everyone can get your job and be in your living situation, which I am happy for by the way. That's fantastic.
The United States was once a country about building physical things, manufacturing and construction and mining. People made a good, dignified living off that for a while. That time is obviously gone, and contrary to what certain political parties think, it just won't be coming back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say--or rather you could if you had a toothpaste packing machine, but they're on the other side of the world and they're automated now anyway, so it wouldn't matter if we did bring them back. That work is gone.
I think what people don't often consider is that making software, networks, apps, content, websites, etc. is our new labor. A huge portion of our society is now doing this, as everyone here knows. A few decades ago, it was super-specialized, highly educated, protected work. That is changing.
We are the new labor, and our work is the weft and warp of the middle class in several cities and communities in this country. But that shouldn't be taken for granted. We are soon going to be treated as laborers are traditionally treated if we don't take steps to secure a dignified living.
But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.
People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us.
People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't.
Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.
Reddit's chronological weighting is a very big factor in this. If your comment comes a few minutes after a post, such as the time it takes to read the content of the post--or if it takes time to thoughtfully type out a response--it is scored vastly lower by the black box and is less likely to be seen and voted on.
There are certainly exceptions, but unless you already know a lot about the subject at hand it's very hard to pick them out among the deluge of jokes, smark, and people rapidly parroting the misconceptions of others.
I have to build a system to keep me from forgetting, because if I leave it up to my future self alone then he will forget 100% of the time.
I would not have hoped that a high percentage of surgeons have that trait. I wonder if I am guilty of it as well. Something to examine in the mirror in our future endeavors.
The understanding of a lot of things are almost non-existent on reddit, or rather the people who know what they are talking about are buried by an algorithm that vastly prefers populist comments typed as quickly after OP as humanly (or robotically) possible. Of course this makes reading the article (or other posts) and having your comment visible mutually exclusive.
I didn't realize how little correct information was available on reddit until I became very specialized in a subject, went to that subject's sub, and saw that practically nobody there even knew the basics--yet they happily chat about the subject anyway, pretending they were experts. The rare exceptions were nearly invisible, lost in in-jokes and references.
Be-very-fucking-ware when asking advice about something you are unsure about on reddit, they will channel so much smoke up your ass you'll burp clouds. And once one person makes a confident declaration which is totally false or misunderstood--pretending they're some pro or expert--almost immediately every other guy in the thread is copy-pasting his response to every other instance of that question as quickly as they can to get points or whatever. It's silly.
For the record I try not to be so delusional as to believe I'm the only one who knows anything and everyone else is stupid--I'm totally average, lots of people are brighter than me. This is a systematic thing brought on accidentally by their forum design.
They are steadily paring away all of their target demographics until only users who are seeking a status symbol are left. I wonder how that will work out for them.
It's by no means a proper laptop, but people in video build very strange workstations. I think it's definitely a niche market which is ripe for exploitation. Somebody please, fill this hole!
Once you have to crunch some 4k video or run a dynamics simulation, you switch to PC. The price difference between a mac pro workstation and a similar homebuilt is just completely insane, and four years later the homebuilt will be upgraded with new stuff and the mac pro will be literally worth more as metal recycling. There are practically no apple users in mograph anymore, even though just about all mograph artists started on mac.
Keep in mind that the people on discord and web boards or whatever are amateur hobbyists. I don't say that as a slur, it's a stage we all go through and I remember that stage fondly. In some ways it's the best stage. But they have not had to deal with economics yet. That will make them re-think their hardware elitism.
The only reasons there's an occasional older-generation video editor working on a mac is because of a. inertia and b. proRes. That video format is finally workable on PC thanks to FFmpeg, but it uses terminal tools (or a couple very terrible GUIs written by the community) and it's going to finally nail that coffin shut.
That and the fact that proRes is technically already obsolete. There are already better options that are cross-platform, but "best practices" is often a code-word for tradition. It will change in time.
The whole purpose of a video codec is to share video across platforms. That's what a codec is. ProRes being locked into mac hardware was a real dick move, and a lot of video people back in the day didn't recognize it and got all smug about how capable their mac was. Yeah, it runs anything except proRes because other developers understand that codecs need to be widely compatible. Apple was the only one who didn't get that memo.
Mac's new laptop offerings cap at 16 gigs. There's a rumor about a 32 gig version, but even that is inadequate. Everyone on the design side of the office is still drinking the kool-aid and using their overpriced hardware because that is workable for their job, but on the video and animation side it's just not tenable. At all. All of us started on macs and switched to upgradeable hardware running windows or linux when it was revealed that apple just wasn't taking care of that demographic. There's a hard division down the middle of the room; macs on that side for photoshop and illustrator, PCs on this side for video editing, tracking, 3d effects, and rendering.
There's one exception: a mac pro "wastebasket" gathering dust in the corner of that office. That was a fucking slap in the face of a computer. All form and no function. Instantly obsolete. Not even remotely upgradeable. No resale value. And my god was it expensive. Jesus christ, you just can't rationalize that expense in good faith and of sound mind.
And I swear I'm not a mac hater. I grew up on them, have some great memories. But the math just doesn't add up anymore. They've become computer sculpture, not usable workstations.
I really don't think hardware will plateau. People have claimed since the eighties that new, vastly powerful computers are as much as the average user will ever need. Well, new uses are suddenly made possible which inevitably put that new potential to work, and gradually those applications become mainstream. If a new computer has fulfilled everyone's needs and more, it's only a matter of time before somebody finds a way to use that extra power for the average person.
It's happened before and it will happen again. In the coming years we're going to marvel at all the useful things we can do with terabytes of cheap RAM on a consumer PC, and we are going to wonder how people in the olden days got by with only gigabytes. Just like we do with the days of megabyte-scale RAM. It will happen.
Of course there are occasional exceptions where somebody is successful purely through luck. However, very rarely is somebody successful with no amount of luck at all. It's hard to pin down just how much of an influence random chance has had in this chaotic world.
However there are plenty of very good and hardworking people who have yet to overcome a lack of good circumstances. The world is filled with failed geniuses.
Speaking of, I was halfway expecting to see a couple stick figures banging each other behind a wall somewhere in that video. I really think that would have been the frosting on top; they should consider this for the next video when it's time for another round of funding.
It should work, as long as it all has electrical continuity and is grounded. I think that's where a lot of normal mesh in stucco or plaster falls short; nobody is going to bother to connect it all up with copper strips or whatever if that's not their explicit goal.
Even if it's not, it should attenuate radio waves somewhat. Just not as a full-coverage Faraday cage.
If it does happen and it gets named The Quanternet, I want some credit by the way. Y'all heard it here first.
I guess maybe we could someday find an exception to causality, but it would be a way bigger deal than any other discovery we've made. It would be a back to square one situation.
As they say, you can have FTL, relativity, or causality--pick two. We've really nailed down relativity and causality. It's not looking great for FTL. Trust me, it breaks my heart every time I think about it. But that's the way it is sometimes.
We've gone far beyond reducing regulation to ensure that innovation is possible--we've restructured regulation to ensure that doing business is practical only for the major industry players who now write our legislation.
Life on Earth consists of Von Neumann machines. That's exactly what life is. Yet our life has not converted the entire mass of Earth into itself, and there's still plenty of places where you can't easily find signs of life. And our life has had billions of years. The assumption that Von Neumanns will very cleanly and exponentially increase in number until they are all over the galaxy is too ideal.