131–140 of 157 posts
Later, he talks to someone else about it, who points out that Paulie has nothing in his life now, and that Tony should just accept it if he wants to dwell in times that were more meaningful for him.
Culture is dead. Nothing is new anymore, everything is now just a variation or an amalgam of recent culture. Software and hardware history have an element of the new about them if you didn’t experience them yourself, hence their enduring popularity as topics and objects of fetishization. ( Why culture is dead is another topic…)
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If someone is saying something you don't like on those platforms, just unfollow them / mute them / block them. Nothing is said on those platforms, by the way, that hasn't been said a thousand different times in a thousand different forums, chat rooms, or blogs that preceded them. But I digress, I both support the liberty of people to speak freely on the internet and wish the centralized apps would die off.
As a hyperbolic example, I've created a support group called "the summary execution of people with the username chrisco255 group", you're free to block the group and ignore us, but all 255,000 of us are very angry people looking for vengeance...
By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
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Sounds like you need to learn to avoid the hype, mon ami. They sucker you in, every time, and you don't learn.
I don't think so. I think its because everything has become commoditized now. iPhone have gotten more and more like glass art objects than functional phones. Apple knows people want their products, and their whole model made to extract as much money out of people as possible (apple care) obviously shows they are masters of capitalism and creating tons of shareholder value. It sucks, but hey at least I'll use the gain…
Um....maybe there's another takeaway here. Maybe Apple created something people love, are delighted by and find useful in their lives.
Maybe people want their most personal computers to be beautiful glass art objects. Intimate, daily-carry items have ALWAYS become fashion at some level (wallets, handbags, belts, etc). Phones were fashion and art long before the iPhone. Cases are perfectly great solutions for those who want more protection.
It's much tougher to look yourself in the mirror and admit that maybe they're not tricking anyone, you just don't understand the market.
While the technician was manipulating the thing I was surprised how badly its designed. How fragile its whole "state" and memory and how easily you can get it to reset itself or to lock yourself. This is, supposedly, an important thing and it can be critical (no technician that night? You'd be locked out of your apartment until morning. Good luck figuring it out.) What if it happened when you took the garbage out and your wallet/phone are not with you? Well, you are in a weird situation. I take my wallet and phone now to throw the garbage out. This is a regression of living standards.
And I'm a techie and I'd love that everything become IoT or "smart" but it has to be done right. The developers have to consider the criticality of the tool they are building and designing. Unfortunately, today, this is not taken into consideration. There is a blatant disregard of any of that and instead you have a focus on aesthetic, advertising, marketing, short-term profit, scale, reach, data collection, etc... But real, reliable functionality is thrown out of the window.
The system got to be breaking at some point. I think we are at that point and a big re-structuring of the tech sector will eventually happen.
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About how true what is? What has happened on the internet in the past few years that is comparable to Nazi radio control and propaganda? Maybe the censurious social media apps booting off people with opposing opinions to liberal mainstream in collusion with intelligence agencies actively embedded in their organizations? But that just underscores the dangers of centralization. I suspect, based on your posturing in the…
Sorry, this part: > it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without. I have grown very doubtful about the notion that just having a diversity of viewpoints being expressed serves as a check to those in power, or that it serves to meaningfully inform people. It increasingly appears to me that the sheer quantity of dif…
What you're describing is a balkanization of viewpoints by both consumers and producers rather than a real exposure to a diversity of them. To some extent that has occurred in modern society. It is certainly possible to fully live within your bubble and never be exposed to earnest criticism of your worldview. This trend, of course, pre-dates social media by many centuries.
Prior to the printing press and mass literacy, people would only ever be exposed to opinions within their immediate vicinity (and you would almost certainly never hear the opinions of ancient dead people such as Socrates or Locke). Even still, after those proliferated, there was quite a bit of friction and most people have always defaulted to adoption of local norms or customs without a second thought about correctness.
Mass communications such as TV and radio (along with nationally syndicated newspapers) enabled a handful of companies to gather an immense amount of control over the national conversation. They could almost mold an outcome in a presidential election on the basis of what questions they posed at a debate and how they made the candidates look on camera and what headlines they ran. From a certain perspective, it may have appeared as if the media was rather neutral. But the mass media itself became an embedded fixture of Washington and all the other major power structures that exist within the country. How could the media both act as an agent of common people and maintain a tight relationship with powerful insiders to get exclusive scoops and invitations to social functions? The internet enabled a critique of the media at the same scale as the media itself, in addition to those in power. A viral critique of ABC, NBC, Fox or CNN will often exceed the peak viewership of either of those outlets.
I think it's an important value worth protecting, even if there is a large bubble on both sides. There is some limited penetration and cross-pollination between the groups and it does filter through sometimes.
I honestly believe that freedom of speech and the willingness to engage in earnest debate of opposing ideas is as much a cultural value as it is a legal one. Without the cultural respect of such an idea, the legal value is not much use. If your university is filled with a student body that will loudly shoutdown and protest and cancel anyone with an opposite opinion from speaking there, it's a sign of a decline in that cultural value. I don't know what the solution to that is, it's certainly not an easy one, but there is no regulatory solution, and the internet isn't the source of the problem.
Maybe the only real defense is just the sum noise of a bunch of loud cranks like me desperately shouting into the ether that it's a value worth protecting.
> Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place.
I jumped the gun based on past conversations I've had or read.
> Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
That may be true to some extent (although I suspect they're waning as people tune it out), but those mechanisms are inherent in all forms of mass media as well. Maybe the triopoly that existed between CBS, NBC, and ABC was comfortable enough and stable enough for those decades they had it, that they seemed to not be desperate for income and eyeballs in the same way that they are in today's cutthroat battle for attention. The modern situation is more of a throwback to the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer's day, which itself dates back to the founding of the country. Check the emotional noise of the political cartoons from the Civil War era, for example: https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-political-carto... https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandor...
I guess my main argument is there is nothing new under the sun, although it feels different than whatever we had in the nostalgic era prior to this.
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I used to think as you on this point, but the past couple of years have filled me with great doubt about how true this actually is.
About how true what is? What has happened on the internet in the past few years that is comparable to Nazi radio control and propaganda? Maybe the censurious social media apps booting off people with opposing opinions to liberal mainstream in collusion with intelligence agencies actively embedded in their organizations? But that just underscores the dangers of centralization. I suspect, based on your posturing in the…
Granted, for things like Breitbart, one has to affirmatively opt-in.
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As a hyperbolic example, I've created a support group called "the summary execution of people with the username chrisco255 group", you're free to block the group and ignore us, but all 255,000 of us are very angry people looking for vengeance...
Cool, I carry, so make my day. By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
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Cool, I carry, so make my day. By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
You completely missed his point.
How much more important is it then, to protect free speech on the internet, when so much power and threats are wielded in far more subtle and insidious ways?
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I agree that generative AI doesn't have any direct parallels, but > but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do. That's not new. Steam power, the first computers, _especially_ electricity did things no previous technology could.
>Steam power, the first computers, _especially_ electricity did things no previous technology could. And it massively changed the world.... so, um, buckle up, I guess.