Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

I know what you mean about how best to share your work. I am sitting on a bunch of AI research that others might be interested in and I am not sure how best to document and share, especially while not working in academia. A book, video, or web site maybe? I have no good ideas on that, only sympathy.

I think your experimental data is fantastic, but I have different hypotheses on the mechanism and motivation of the players.

We are creatures of reason which is great, but we still are susceptible to errors in judgement. These are small and mostly manifest as solidifying a conclusion prematurely.

But we are also social animals that have an inherent drive to find and defend our place in the pecking order. We display dominance to those beneath us and submission to those above.

The strategies of online conflict are varied and mirror those of offline conflict, but the core social desire is the same: to win the favor of our masters and weaken our lessers, unless we are forced to think for ourselves and become aware of the folly of it all.

I too used to use Gentoo, though it was far from my first Linux OS, and Linux was not my first Unix-like OS. I'll spare you the recounting of my entire computer-use history, except to say that I've used a wide variety of operating system over a period of decades, both as a user, sysadmin, and a developer.

I've hated Windows since it was invented, and hated Microsoft before even then, back in the DOS days, when it was a grabage OS that undeservedly dominated the 8-bit market. In some ways it's gotten better (particularly on the stability front), but in others its gotten worse (its dominance on the desktop market is complete).

Apple is like Microsoft with a smile on its face. Everybody's switching to it because it's cool, sleek, and trendy and even Linux is trying to emulate it. But its walled gardens, dumbed down, crippled and bastardized OS'es and "fuck you", "my way or the highway" attitude towards technical users, developers, and sysadmins make me want to puke.

Most users don't know any better, but I really don't get all the technical people who've switched to it from Linux and still sing its praises. They should know better. The most common attitude I hear from them is that they'd rather their OS "just work", and that they're too busy to spend a lot of time tweaking or making it work.

To that I say that they're really not as technical as they think. Someone who loves technology would pick the technically superior solution, the solution that gave them more choice and power, even if it required more of them as users, rather than picking the dumbed-down, technically crippled solution that may be easier to use by non-technical users (or users who don't care about technoogy, or are too busy to care). They would pick the three-button mouse over the one-button mouse.

Some examples of crippled and dumbed-down aspects of OS X off the top of my head (I should really keep a list, as I run in to something nearly every day):

  - massive and pervasive lack of choice
  - no focuse-follows mouse
  - no tiling window managers
  - X is not integrated with OS X's crappy windowing system,
    so you can't use X and still effectively interact with non-X gui apps
  - the Finder is a horrendous piece of shit
  - mouse-centric interface, forcing clicking through everything to
    configure the machine
  - no standard package manager (no, homebrew/macports, etc are not a
    good substitute until they can install everything and do it
    without conflict with the rest of the OS
  - no standard way to uninstall software
  - no more server-level hardware, forcing the use of Mac minis in
    racks because of:
  - license limits to running OSX only on Apple hardware, so you can't
    run it on standard server-level intel/amd hardware
  - tons of closed, proprietary, non-standard garbage like mDNSResponder, mds, etc
  - a feeble culture of open-source compared to Linux/BSD
  - default installs stuck with ancient versions of *nix utilities like bash
  - etc, etc, etc
  - and don't even get me started on the Apple Store or iDevices
  

I guess I should be grateful that it's a *nix underneath, even if it is crippled and bastardized. But the world would be far better off if Microsoft and Apple never existed.

I really like the idea that models are often formed prematurely and the reference to pokemon cards. One metaphor I use allot is that our values are like a deck of cards, some values are ranked higher then others. The ranking is determined in part by a recursive function (shuffling or playing a game of go fish) but also by functional requirements to justify the current mode of survival. A person tends to perceive their values in a way that justifies their actions (and vice versa). When modelling different Christian denominations you could consider each verse and interpretation as a card. The card game in play ensures that a church group ends up with a large chunks of each hand looking similar. The attraction of individuals to a particular church has allot to due with how well those cards advocate that person's life.