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To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

ethanzuckerman.com

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Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#111

Post by theptip »

mrgordon wrote: post #70
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #4

There's something so beautiful about a place so dysfunctional that you can't even replace standard office equipment; I know it was alluded to in the article, but in case anyone forgot, the MIT Media Lab played a part in Jeffery Epstein and he often leveraged it for good PR https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-je...

People do a lot of creative experiments around that building so it’s not surprising you would want to ask before disassembling someone’s thesis project. To call the place “dysfunctional” because some brilliant grad students constantly try new things is to miss the point (and the spirit of the place) entirely.

I think they were referring to the bit where facilities was unable to fix it after the author had removed the original work.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#112

Post by mrgordon »

tzs wrote: post #98
mrgordon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Swartz’s death was caused by JSTOR Huh? What in JSTOR's behavior [1] do you think caused Swartz's death? [1] https://docs.jstor.org/summary.html

By their own account, “We also reiterated our desire that MIT identify the individual(s) responsible”

They pushed for aggressive chasing down of an individual for stealing some articles that were largely publicly funded as I recall. This escalated to the FBI and led to a laundry list of charges that scared him into suicide. Not great for some research we should have just had available for free after already paying to fund it once

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#113

Post by roamingryan »

jeffrallen wrote: post #6

Paradoxically, publishing this blog post will no doubt result in the window knob being fixed and a new "no unauthorized modifications to HVAC" policy being out in place.

I'd be surprised if that is the outcome. MIT facilities tends to be quite tolerant of stuff like this.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#114

Post by WWWWH »

Retric wrote: post #95
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This and how stable are the active ingredients to oxygen? Are they stored under inert gas in the blister pack?

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#115

Post by jkestner »

smichel17 wrote: post #82
reaperducer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in a place that put me in contact with a lot of architects who worked on skyscrapers. I asked one why new apartment buildings don't have trash chutes as often as they used to. He said a lot of developers don't want the expense that goes into building them. And a lot of owners don't want the maintenance expense. They get clogged up more often than most people realize. That said, when I lived in Seattle…

The house I grew up in had a laundry chute, from the hallway outside the bedrooms to a bin in the room/clothset with the washer and dryer. It's kind of superfluous (how hard is carrying a bin of laundry down the stairs, really?) but also kind of nice/fun.

For kids, fairly hard. I grew up in a single story house and a laundry chute was one of the romantic ideals. So I gave my kids the childhood I was denied — our house has a trapdoor in the kids' bedroom that drops straight down to the laundry room. It is fun! And more useful to me than a smart faucet or whatever.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#116

Post by an_opabinia »

Mizza wrote: post #107
an_opabinia wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The Media Lab’s arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the “collapse of dignity?”

What about Guitar Hero? Are those guys, Media Lab grad students who spent a decade after graduation until they found hard earned success... did they create a “new serfdom?”

The Berkman Center houses the historic DoJ tech antitrust lawyers. Do you think antitrust won’t play a role in reversing “the movement of capital from the poor to the rich?”

Anyway, there are a lot of people who rail on the academy or whatever. I suppose your opinion, however stylized, is as good as anyone else’s.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#117

Post by eitland »

rsynnott wrote: post #71
anonymfus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In typical Russian apartment washing machine is installed in bathroom.

I think this is common in Europe, too. Except in the UK and Ireland, where electrical regulations don’t allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

> where electrical regulations don’t allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

That explains! I've wondered why people in movies/series would keep washing machines in the kitchen.

Around here in medium size houses like mine the washing machine is typically placed in the same room as one of the toilets and the room is referred to as the washing room (vaskerom).

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#118

Post by eitland »

reaperducer wrote: post #74
mymacbook wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing NeXT is supposed to be Nest (given IoT and HVAC).

Changing "Nest" to "NeXT" — That guy's phone must have the world's most awesome autocorrect learning database. I can't even get my phone to stop correcting "duck."

On Android all keyboards can be set to stop autocorrecting. On iOS I use SwiftKey.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#119

Post by Mizza »

an_opabinia wrote: post #116
Mizza wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Media Lab’s arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the “collapse of dignity?” What about Guitar Hero? Are those guys, Media Lab grad students who spent a decade after graduation until they found hard earned success... did they create a “new serfdom?” The Berkman Center houses the historic DoJ tech antitrust lawyers. Do you think antitrust won’t play a role in…

I think the Media Lab's most widely known project was probably the failed One Laptop Per Child initiative, which I think perfectly illustrates my point.

Turns out what people in the third world need isn't donated laptops, it's liberation from an economic system which keeps them deliberately impoverished. They need food, vaccines, unions, debt jubilees and nationalization of natural resources.

The MML/Berkman ideology is literally that laptops bring wealth. In reality, wealth brings laptops.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#120

Post by gambiting »

rsynnott wrote: post #71
anonymfus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In typical Russian apartment washing machine is installed in bathroom.

I think this is common in Europe, too. Except in the UK and Ireland, where electrical regulations don’t allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

Which is something I always hated in British houses, because nowadays it's quite common to have an open plan kitchen connected with the living room....which in a normal European house would be fine, but in a British house it means that every time you run a washing machine it's a source of noise for whatever you're doing in the living room. Enjoy watching a movie over a 1400rpm spin cycle, good luck!

The only good solution which works is moving it to the garage, but it's not possible in every house unfortunately.

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