101–110 of 185 posts
Some people point to Richard Stallman having a mattress in his office at MIT as some sort of sinister sign. This, I should think, proves otherwise.
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Also see: every "smart lock" startup around.
I have a great smart lock. The secret is, it's dumb. It has a keypad and a keyhole and a 9V battery that lasts about five years. About three months before the battery wears out, it starts beeping and blinking every time you open it, so you know it's time to replace the battery. You have to look in the manual to add or remove a code, but it remembers at least a dozen codes. It doesn't talk to a smartphone. It doesn't…
But I wonder how it’d fare if someone like the lockpicking lawyer reviewed it’s mechanical lock design? Is it actually a good lock?
It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…
I've been in several campus facilities like this. When they make ridiculous decisions, the person with the power to override is three ticketing systems away. In one case we even managed to get the right person on the phone, but it was a weekend and her VPN client wasn't working. Something to be said for a window you can open by putting your hands on it.
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Yup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leav…
The building my wife was living in in Chicago when we first met had this sort of garbage chute (it was a 1920s-era building). Sorting recycling is not an issue: Chicago found a low-tech way to deal with the sorting: blue plastic bags are reserved for recycling only.
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You know I'll be actually surprised if that isn't a product, because that seems "As seen on TV" level amount of effort. Have some hopper with 7 compartments, put a disk with a hole underneath it, and hook it to some 3 cent digital clock module such that spins it around 50 degrees or so everytime it rolls over. Build the whole thing out of plastic, throw it at some factory in China, and before you know it you'll be se…
Plenty of devices have little bins you fill, some then automatically open those bins on the correct days. However, pills are of wildly different shapes and sizes, which invalidates most of the seemingly obvious sorting solutions. Prescriptions can also call for multiple pills in the same day.
I've been thinking about some of these guys a lot lately. When are we going to collectively unpack the fact the Media Lab/Berkman Center project has been a complete failure? I worked at these places and mingled on the outskirts, and for a long time really believed all the bullshit they were spouting at the time - that the internet was a positive force, if we just connected enough people, surely their "stories" and "e…
I don’t know, if you’re basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it’s negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?
I've been thinking about some of these guys a lot lately. When are we going to collectively unpack the fact the Media Lab/Berkman Center project has been a complete failure? I worked at these places and mingled on the outskirts, and for a long time really believed all the bullshit they were spouting at the time - that the internet was a positive force, if we just connected enough people, surely their "stories" and "e…
> into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams. I don’t know, if you’re basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it’s negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?
The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote.
Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" economics they were promoting - gig economies, crowdfunding, "conversational" marketing - have only resulted in a new form of serfdom, upward movement of capital from the poor to the rich, and a completely collapse of dignity in public life.
In fact, I'll even go a step further and suggest that what we needed was _more_ negativity. Techno-positivity and lack of critical thought is exactly how we got in this mess.
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> into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams. I don’t know, if you’re basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it’s negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?
I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying very specifically: The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote. Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" econo…
All the things you mentioned were serious problems before just in a different way. Advertising was horrible when I watched broadcast TV. I spent probably 2 hours each day looking at commercials. Propoganda was ubiquitous and there wasn't even a place you could point out it was happening. The gig economy jobs back then were just different jobs with fewer options, like pumping gas or minimum wage at McDonald's or greeting people at Walmart. And now online discussion allows people to be more open about mental health and the anonymity let's you talk about relationship or depression problems with others.
It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what life was like before. And one thing I agree with you on, is that it isn't because of the Media Lab or Berkman. It's because of a lot of people making slow incremental progress throughout the entire tech stack.
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The building my wife was living in in Chicago when we first met had this sort of garbage chute (it was a 1920s-era building). Sorting recycling is not an issue: Chicago found a low-tech way to deal with the sorting: blue plastic bags are reserved for recycling only.
That didn't work so well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_bag#United_States
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You realize the author of the linked article resigned over Epstein and frequently fought to improve things? Why try to link him to some trash that he vehemently opposed? And Swartz’s death was caused by JSTOR not the Media Lab FYI
And MIT threw Adam to the wolves.