I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek.
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
"“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi, a professor and chair of biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the study’s principal investigator."
I really don't think I would put eggs all over my body to graze for breakfast, but that's an interesting image.
This is why I think the study of logic and having fields where the culture generally agrees on "what counts" as good argumentation is really important. Does it solve these problems entirely? Certainly not. But look at, for example, the culture in the scientific community. From my outsider's perspective, it seems the scientific community has adopted a series of guardrails that generally prevent "bad" research from getting published.
Famously, it doesn't always work, and I'm not ignorant to the latest series of scandals involving illegitmate journals, p-hacking, etc. But I think these tend to be the attention grabbing headlines, rather than the "norm." Glad to be challenged on that point.
But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking. Simply being aware of "confirmation bias" and other psychological pitfalls might make us more capable of figuring out where we're going wrong. As the article notes, people are famously blind to their own errors, but quite good at pointing out others'. So it's not like it's impossible for us to become better and stronger thinkers.
It just takes effort and some "meta-thinking" and I think some personal virtue and character to become better!
My Zune HD from 2005/2006 still works. I think it's the oldest piece of functional tech I own. No, I don't use it on a daily basis. But I love booting it up every now and again.
It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
It seems the company had some procedures in place, particularly the documentation of "removals," but the line employees didn't follow that process in this case. One reason appears to be the tremendous pressure they were under to get planes out of the factories.
The article also mentions a possible lack of experience, since some of the workers could be very new to the company...though they could also have been quite experienced as well.
It is so, so very hard to evaluate risk and causation.
I agree with everything you said here. I mean this guy chose to be a movie critic -- probably the dyingest corner of a dying industry. And of course they can pay people nothing for this, because there are a billion people who would love to do that job, making it hyper competitive.
Your comment about automation also made me reflect on the nature of job competition in the future. Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat. What's the value add for a human?
This has been the case already in some sectors, like manufacturing...but it seems we white collar guys are going to be facing the music soon ourselves.
Also it makes me wonder what kind of job kids these days should target. Trades? Manual labor? Areas where regulatory structures will soon work as welfare-esque gatekeeping (medicine and law come to mind)?
That last line really resonated with me: "It's the only thing I really know how to do," or something about like that.
One of the most terrifying realizations I've had over the past few years is that I've worked myself into a pretty narrow niche, one that I can't probably market outside of a few specialized companies if the need arose. Thankfully I have a law degree, though I let my bar license lapse.
But this is one thing I guess I'd say in favor of the modern job-switching economy: your resume doesn't get stale, it shows new things over and over again. There's only so much people like me, who've stayed / plan to stay with one employer over the long-term, can do about things like layoffs.
What happens if I lose my job? It is very hard to say. I guess I'd either try and pass my resume around, but at this point it's almost as if changing careers entirely (for a second time! Yikes!) would be just as easy...
Amen. What I found so interesting about Girard's perspective on Christ is that Jesus represents the end of the "scapegoat," because he is the "holy and perfect Sacrifice." In Girard's interpretation, Jesus ultimately broke the cycle of imitation because He is the ultimate scapegoat, upon whom all the sins of humanity were placed, and yet He is also God, whom we should love above all other things.
Definitely -- but the problem isn't really "content" moderation. What it seems like you actually want is personality / tone / user moderation -- which Bluesky isn't really doing.
To analogize to real life, I have friends with whom I agree 100% on politics, but I never talk to them about it, because they're annoying when they do it. But I also have friends who disagree with me on political and other issues, but we have wonderful conversations because of the manner in which we disagree.
I don't what Bluesky is doing will actually help with this problem. For one thing, I think it's design as a "feed" basically precludes any solid sort of discussion (compared to an Internet forum). The medium kind of encourages the "one-off potshots" you mentioned, and moderation won't do much to cure it.
Seems like a really, really good way to create a really, really boring website.
ETA: Rereading this, that is probably not a very helpful HNy comment, so let me elaborate.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but one of the things that the internet is most useful for is exploring places and ideas you would otherwise never encounter or consider. And just like taking a wooden ship to reach the North Pole, browsing around the internet comes with significant risk. But given the opportunity for personal growth and development, for change, and so on, those risks might well be worth it.
That model of the internet, as I said, is somewhat old-fashioned. Now, the internet is mostly about entertainment. Bluesky exists to keep eyeballs on phones, just like Tiktok or Instagram or whatever. Sure, Bluesky is slightly more cerebral -- but only slightly.
People are generally not entertained by things that frustrate them (generally -- notable exceptions exist), so I can understand an entertainment company like Bluesky focusing on eliminating frustrations via obsessive focus on content moderation to ensure only entertaining content reaches the user. In that sense, this labeling thing seems really useful, just like movie ratings give consumers a general idea of whether the movie is something appropriate for them.
So in that sense, wonderful for Bluesky! But I think I'll politely decline joining and stick with other platforms with different aims.
Super interesting, thank you for posting. Agreed with a lot of it, except for one thing:
"No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7."
That's one of the things I miss most about IRC. There was something very temporal about it -- you were logged in, or you weren't. You were present, or you weren't. More modern tools of communication like Slack or Discord basically don't have this; it's more like a long private "feed" than a "chat" as I think of it, anyway.
I miss that temporality. I miss logging in and asking the chat, "Hey, is so and so online?" "yeah, he was here about half an hour ago, went afk but should be back." It gives me the same warm rosy feeling the thought of having to use a pay phone does.
Obviously, you're right, in the commercial sense, this is unacceptable. But I personally kind of miss the days when chat / email / forum were separate things. Now we have these mutants in Slack and Discord that mish mash both. Maybe I'm old but I find it sort of difficult conceptually.
I thought this article was going to be somehow less intuitive, but in reality, it simply says something most people inherently understand: that you have to grease the skids a bit to make things work. Dressing it up in academic sloganeering doesn't make the insight all that much more powerful.
I think most people understand that a risk-free society is a poor society. Take driving: the safest way to drive is to not get in the car at all. Similarly, the best way to save yourself from credit card fraud is not to have a credit card. But does this justify driving like a maniac, or being careless with your personal information? Of course not.
In other words, the article simply points out that categorical thinking (1 or 0) is useless in this context (as it is in most contexts, to be honest). The meaningful question is what degree of fraud we should be willing to accept, and in what contexts.
"Dr. Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, expressed concern about how the report describes people who accessed MAID whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable. According to the report, 3.5 per cent of all MAID recipients — 463 people — did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths."
A small percentage, true, but it will grow absent efforts to limit these situations.
Less disturbing than the raw percentage is the context in which some of these suicides have reportedly been carried out. People who are simply lonely, who have addictions, who don't have money, who feel they simply don't have options. In sum, not the kind of people who have a truly terminal illness and will pass away in a few weeks or months, but people who could potentially live well and flourish if resources existed to support them.
IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
I'm not sure your post, while true, is responsive.
Rules are naturally infringements on individual liberty. The question is, which rules can one justify? Put differently, when can the state limit individual liberty? And that naturally raises the question: why is it appropriate in some cases, and not in others?
Your justification points to the consequences to the state in terms of economic cost and I suppose the psychological trauma suffered by emergency personnel.
Let's push your logic further. I understand you're posting from NZ, and I'm posting from America, but we face a drastic obesity crisis here. For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that the main cause of obesity is overeating, and if we restricted the number of calories available to people we'd see a drastic decrease in healthcare costs and so forth. Should the state be allowed to control the food you eat, the number of calories you consume, etc.? If not, why not? Could the state make obese citizens go exercise at state run gyms?
Or consider the effects of social media use on children. There is at this point pretty good evidence that social media use by teenagers, especially girls, leads to negative mental health outcomes (mood disorders like depression, etc.). Can the state limit the amount of time teenagers spend on tiktok or instagram?
My point is, individual choices always have effects on society, insofar as any individual person is a member of a society. The fact that individual choices have negative effects on society broadly cannot itself justify regulating those choices. The justification for state power must be found elsewhere, imo.
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.