91–100 of 443 posts
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But what? The problem with the constant doom is that we get exhausted. At least in the US all we truly care about is war and old people (looking at where the money goes; http://whatwepayfor.com/ ). The problem with the doom sayers is they have no solutions or actionable items that we can say yes or no to. Its just lions and tigers and bears 24/7.
I'll give you an example. I live in Ithaca, NY, not far from some of the richest shale gas deposits in the United States. This town is also ground zero for fracking hatred. Post something awful about fracking, and people will eat that shit up whether it's true or not. I know, because I was one of them. Then I started dating a hydrogeologist. As luck would have it, her very MS thesis was on fracking. She dispelled rum…
But your fact is just another one's opinion. We have had ample examples in the last fifty years where "science" has been abused with a for-profit motive (tobacco and nutrition are useful examples, as is this article).
It's not fair to blame "hippies" for ignoring "science", unless you're also willing to blame media, politics and business alike for overstating the "certainty" of scientific knowledge.
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If I find an app is pulling me in too often, I delete it. If I find a website is distracting me too much, I throw it on my hosts file (and redirect it to 127.0.0.1). If I find myself drinking too much beer, I stop. If I find myself craving anything in a way that feels intuitively bad, it's a good sign that I need to change something. I feel like a lot of people respond to those impulses by going out of their way to m…
As a personal prescription, this is great, but as a societal one it's like saying "just don't smoke, it's as easy as that!" On a national or international scale, we don't get to deal with what ought to be, only what is. And it increasingly looks - Facebook averages 50 minutes of use per day - like the average person either doesn't know or doesn't manage to limit their consumption of these things. Super-satiation is a…
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George Orwell felt similarly. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Really good essay, thanks for reminding me of that one. I believe it's been posted to HN before (I read it from a link here), but it may have been another comment suggesting it. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. (about 3/4 down)
Apparently google has an Ethicist. Ctrl-F: Ad Huh. Zero mentions of the thing that manipulates people by design. I guess I don't blame him, because even with a blind spot to ads it would seem Google still doesn't give two shits about his input. He explicitly calls out a problem YouTube feature, which he certainly would have voiced internally before externally. And he doesn't work at Google anymore. Google must want r…
Well, had. From his bio snippet at the bottom: "Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher @ Google"
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I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad. After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will f…
Actually, the Roman pipe store is a bit of an urban legend. According to this PNAS [0] paper: "Lead pollution of “tap water” in Roman times is clearly measurable, but unlikely to have been truly harmful." [0] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594.full
In that context, every lead source ends up becoming increasingly important.
Apparently google has an Ethicist. Ctrl-F: Ad Huh. Zero mentions of the thing that manipulates people by design. I guess I don't blame him, because even with a blind spot to ads it would seem Google still doesn't give two shits about his input. He explicitly calls out a problem YouTube feature, which he certainly would have voiced internally before externally. And he doesn't work at Google anymore. Google must want r…
I'm not sure if I should rejoice that Google has one, or be worried that Google has just one.
Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…
On the bright side, the profit from hijacking your brain goes to sending their kids to "low-tech" schools[0] Hurray for computer human symbiosis after all[1]
[0]http://www.educationnews.org/technology/silicon-valley-tech-...
[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
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> Meanwhile the choice of buying less was never presented as an option. What do you mean here? There were always multiple sizes of soda. Bloomberg was the one who was introducing the restriction, requiring someone who wanted more than a particular size to buy it in two separate cups. I must be parsing this incorrectly.
In NYC, most soda drinkers are stopping by their corner bodega/deli and buying a bottle, then walking/taking the subway somewhere. I feel like in this particular case, the goal was to force soda manufacturers to sell 16oz bottles rather than 20oz bottles, thus reducing the amount most people consume in a single purchase. EDIT: I'm wrong, a reply below clarified the intent and also that bottles were exempt. Back when…
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Could you let us know which open source Linux based tools you use, and what mobile/web app you let go loose.
Not OP, but a good example would be the various PDF conversion apps around. The freemium/shareware ones all suck in one way or another unless you pay (arbitrary page limits, watermarks etc), the web-based ones make batch processing very hard and have privacy issues. Meanwhile ghostscript, pdftk, imagemagick and co. just work and will continue to work for a long time. On mobile I can use these over SSH on a remote Lin…