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Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
71–80 of 387 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#72Interest-driven communities online paired with censorship lead people to increasingly radical points of view. Before social media, people were forced to interact and get along with people with varying points of view. Now, we choose to isolate ourselves into groups of like-minded individuals where dissent is silenced, leading people to believe that extremism is normal.
So the world was free of bigotry prior to social media? Does it matter what one is extreme about? Shouldn’t we be extreme on certain issues, like the difference between food and cyanide?
It's a matter of scale; before social media, small groups would be isolated due to difficulty in "finding" each other. Now it's just a quick google search away.
The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking, something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way... so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing" would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat earth", if that makes sense...
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#73The internet has enabled developers to track user behaviour in apps and on websites on an industrial scale. And they've done it so successfully and implemented it so widely that the idea of tracking user behaviour in your app or on your website is now considered an expected and completely normal practice.
Of course, when it's developers on the receiving end of such tracking they will complain loudly (as they did recently about GitLab). A reflection of the sheer hypocrisy that runs right through programming profession.
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an example of where books are powerful. A (good) book on a subject is far superior than pages of different articles that anyone could write. With a book you know that time and effort has gone into it. If you want to learn about something, invest in the right book.
So how do you find "the right book" these days?
I've found one good tactic to be the 'reading lists' that some of the arts/science subreddits have in their wikis/sidebars. It's a good way to find solid entry points to a given topic that are at least respected by a good number of people who know what they're talking about.
Examples:
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#75Internet usage starts with users querying information they want, and services learning/adapting to deliver information in a format/context based on their activity. This has created some stellar search tools, a personalized network of services and communities available to people, and made the internet a paradise for new content from all over the world. Despite that all the information in the world is available to us,…
It's almost as if... shiny new technology can't solve the human condition. Have you tried turning it off, and on again?
blockchain is the obvious solution there
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about the charity people with clipboards in SF? They're seriously the most aggressive people I've ever seen. I'm surprised they have card readers now. I think they used to just write your credit card details on a piece of paper.
I'm try to respectfully decline them, but if they try to passive aggressively guilt me, I teeter on the cusp of countering by attacking back and trying to crack their self esteem. I haven't done it yet and wouldn't be proud of myself, but it would feel good.
I've seen the ones here do shit like yelling these animals are starving and abused while you go home to your luxury apartment, keep on ignoring their cries-esque stuff
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#77When you're about to get a message on your cellphone and it interferes with nearby speakers and makes weird chirping noises.
I've never understood why this happens. Is it my phone sort of ACKing the call back to the tower? Because it has to be my phone sending something back, right? Random cell signals are hitting the speakers all the time.
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#78I'm miserable and all the tech that has "enabled me to do anything" has made everything seem arbitrary. If you can do anything, why do anything?
I used to own music. Now I have all the music, but also none of it.
Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
#79As tech gets more and more advanced and we get higher and higher levels of abstraction, I've noticed more and more programmers just don't understand _what_ their code is doing. There can be a lack of understanding of how calls translate to system calls and machine instruction. The abstraction is good, it allows you to do more and do it quickly. But when you don't understand what the abstraction is, then you are programming by coincidence and errors are more confusing than they should be.