CarelessExpert

Just curious, why? Performance reasons? Compatibility? Something else?

Speaking for myself, I run Linux on the desktop and Windows in a VM for office applications and so forth and it works fine. But obviously I'm not running Photoshop or gaming or anything like that (though in the case of the latter, Proton is already great and is poised to get even better)...

Wine? Virtual machines?

Ah, well, in that case what you're getting out of older technology is "externally imposed self-control". Douglas Adams' publisher famously locked him in a hotel room because he was such a chronic procrastinator. I can definitely relate!

On the first point, I agree, the article was very much misleading and I hope they correct it.

As for the rest, frankly, this just adds more fuel to my belief that the first thing we need from these companies is simply transparency. If they're running mass psychology experiments on people, we should know about it.

The idea that Facebook can operate as a black box while literally weighing how much to value individual human emotions is deeply deeply disturbing me.

It could be that the screenwriter used to use that MS-DOS program back in the day, and already knew and liked it, had a well-developed workflow around it, etc. Then running it on DOSBox or an old machine you happen to have lying around makes perfect sense imo.

Absolutely!

But I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the original comment, which stated:

There's something to be said for the focused nature of older technology.

My response and point was that this isn't somehow precluded with newer technology. That is, if what you're getting out of older technology is "focus", you can get that with newer tech without having to sacrifice other capabilities.

If what you're getting out of older technology is "familiarity" or "nostalgia" or "joy" or something similarly aesthetic, then obviously, keep on keeping on. :)

Digging up and using some old piece of technology instead of using an existing, multi-purpose computing device is the definition of "[building] his life around it", as it requires adapting your workflows to the technology instead of adapting the technology to your workflows.

As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s...

That's because encryption is incredibly problematic. And I say that as a huge fan of digital privacy and an avid user of Signal.

I'm not so blind as to think that perfect encryption is an unalloyed good, and in that screenshot (which, I'll point out, excludes any broader context for her remarks) Haugen touches on just one of many very legitimate problems with the technology.

Now, in the end, I think (though I'm not certain) I believe the upsides outweigh the downsides. But don't pretend as though she doesn't raise a valid concern, even if you don't agree with her conclusion.

A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really what’s happening here. She’s very much an activist

All whistleblowers are activists.

Do you really think Snowden didn't have an agenda? Of course he did! His act was specifically and explicitly political.

Hell, Wikileaks has proven itself to be nakedly political.

The only reason I'm betting you don't see it that way is you happen to agree with their politics.

some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all.

Don't deign to speak for me. There is no unified "tech community" on this topic, even if your echo chamber leads to to believe otherwise.

Man, there is a profound lack of self-awareness when you cite 1984 in an article defending Facebook, when Facebook is complicit in the creation of modern surveillance capitalism and the slow but inexorable shift to the digital panopticon...

Eh, you can get that distraction-free experience with modern technology if you want it. When I want to focus on writing, I have a Vim setup that gives me a screen with a cursor. I run that full screen, turn off notifications and whatnot, and get to it. And when I'm done I can go back to using my modern technology to do everything else I want with the content, whether it's formatting/typesetting, sharing, etc.

There's really no reason to sacrifice all those additional capabilities at the alter of focus or productivity. Just find ways to use modern technology more effectively.

I really wish I could see an industry/education level cross tab. Anecdotally, we're seeing a lot of churn in tech where education levels are typically quite high, but in the data in the article, if you don't break down by sector, the numbers would suggest quit rates should be lower than normal...

There's clearly a very complex dynamic going on, here, and I have a very strong suspicion that while the macro numbers say one thing, what's going on at the ground level actually varies significantly from sector to sector, geography to geography, and demographic to demographic.

Again: Your point being what, exactly?

Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article? Does it make the facts less factual? Does it make the numbers less number-y?

Hell, I tried to go back to the top-level comment to figure out what might've triggered you, but your original comment is a non sequitur as far as I can tell.

It just gives people with bad thoughts a thing to look at.

The word "just" is doing a lot of work, here. By your line of reasoning, propaganda isn't anything anyone should worry about.

Not to go full Godwin, but the Nazi regime is an instructive analogy, here. By your reasoning, all the Nazis did was "just" promote a lot of anti-Jewish propaganda. Would you really go on to say "Blaming the Nazis for negative outcomes in the world is just like blaming violent video games. All they did was put the messages out there, then the people with the bad thoughts did the mass murder..."?

And to preempt the objection that Facebook isn't intentionally distributing material that, say, promotes ethnic violence, while Facebook corporate obviously does not have that as an official policy, their algorithm is doing precisely that, by actively promoting these types of materials. Facebook's own internal research has shown that it can and does steer individuals to increasingly extreme content.

So if we agree that a) Facebook's systems steer individuals to violent or extremist content (as proven by their own research), b) propaganda is a tool that works to steer public opinion and drive human behaviour (as proven by historical precedents like Nazi regime), c) extremist content serves as effective propaganda (which is well trod ground in research on extremism), and d) that Facebook knew all these things and failed to curtail what was going on (as now revealed in these internal documents), then I don't see how you can possibly defend Facebook, here.

Honestly, as a pedestrian and cyclist myself, wearing closed-backed, ear-obstructing, or noise cancelling headphones as a pedestrian, cyclist, or driver, is pure insanity as far as I'm concerned.

And yes, I'm looking at you, oblivious jogger who can't hear my bell as I pass on a dual-use path.

Get yourself a set of bone conducting headphones if you want to be out and active and listening to music or whatever. The technology is amazing and it's infinitely safer.

There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN

And there's a significant population of folks who are bike-hostile here on HN.

In fact, there's probably a significant population of folks who are X-hostile, for any value of X you can conceive of, given the size of the HN userbase.

What's your point?

And that's ignoring the fact that code is a terrible spec. Trying to reverse engineer a file format from a software implementation is a godawful nightmare, and I say that from personal experience.

Given the choice between that and having to figure out how 8-bit ASCII works, it's pretty clear which is the easier problem to solve.

This was actually a pretty even handed article compared to others I've seen on this topic.

It's fascinating because it sheds light on internal work Facebook is doing; work that, if they were more transparent, might have actually helped their public image.

Personally, if we're going to look at regulating big tech, the first thing I'd like to see done is plain and simple transparency. Just give researchers and policy experts access to aggregate, anonymized data, as well as visibility into policy decisions so we can understand how these massively influential companies operate.

If they're truly working to do better, as Zuck claims, then I can't see why that would be a problem. And given their enormous power, we as individuals have the right to understand how they work.

They're absolutely related. In fact, a lot of discussions around the Right to Repair specifically center on the issue of e-waste. For example, you'll find that all over Framework's website. From https://frame.work/ca/en/about :

Consumer electronics is broken. We’ve all had the experience of a busted screen, button, or connector that can’t be fixed, battery life degrading without a path for replacement, or being unable to add more storage when full. Individually, this is irritating and requires us to make unnecessary and expensive purchases of new products to get around what should be easy problems to solve. Globally though, it’s much worse. We create over fifty million tons of e-waste each year. That’s 6 kg or 13 lb per person on earth per year, made up of our former devices. We need to improve recyclability, but the biggest impact we can make is generating less waste to begin with by making our products last longer.

Certainly, for myself, the right to repair is very much about ending the cycle of disposable products so we can create a more sustainable future.

So having a platform deny access when it values such spirit is somewhat disagreeable.

If Android required a platform for software distribution, I might agree, but Gab can (and does) post their APK right on their website. So Gab is experiencing no curtailment of their speech rights by FDroid refusing to traffick in their speech, nor are the users experiencing any curtailment in their right to use their device, or the software, as they see fit.

You'd have more of a leg to stand on if this was about iOS and the Apple store, which doesn't allow for any kind of sideloading.

But Android? Sorry, I have no sympathy and I see no hypocrisy in FDroid's actions.

I don't use my lawn to distribute other people's apps/signs, it's not its purpose, and I don't advertise it as such.

And I suppose somewhere FDroid advertises itself as an open, censorship-free site for app distribution with no caveats or restrictions?

If so, please, point me to your evidence.

If it's just because "but they claim to value free software", see my reply (which included ninja edits): free software != free speech. No, they are not in fact related in any way. One can be supportive of free software without being an absolutist regarding freedom of expression.

Of course, that's understandable confusion. Free (as in no cost), free (as in I can control my own systems and products), and free (as in I can speak without government censorship) are all very different uses of the word "free", and I can see how folks might get them mixed up.

But my lawn is not a platform.

Sure it is. It's a platform of one.

Or are you now saying these rights kinda depend? If so, what's the threshold? What makes your lawn special? Does it need to be a particularly big lawn? Do you need to have control of a lot of different lawns? I'm really confused. You seemed so certain that free speech was an absolute right, and that I can force others to amplify my speech, but now here you are suggesting there may be caveats...

Free software is not really about free speech, but usually both philosophies are held together since they are somewhat related.

According to you. I certainly don't see them as being connected whatsoever.

Maybe your real problem is you and FDroid see the purpose of open source and free software differently.

The whole point of free speech is to allow for speech you find reprehensible

No one is stopping Gab from speaking.

FDroid is just refusing to amplify their speech.

Since when did "free speech" == "freedom to force other people to publish my speech"?

But you know what, here's an idea: I have a sign I want to put on your lawn. I'm afraid it's an incredibly offensive sign and you and your neighbours might not like it. But I wanna put it on your lawn anyway.

Judging by your comments here, I assume you're totally cool with that, right? I mean, according to you, denying my request to put my incredibly offensive lawn sign in front of your house would be an abridgement of my freedom of speech, right?

Yeah. If people don't have a problem with gab being blocked on fdroid for essentially dressed-up political reasons, then they also shouldn't have a problem with the play store or apple's app store blocking stuff for political reasons.

I actually don't. They're private businesses and it's clearly true that they already do whatever the heck they want.

My problem is that they make it hard for people to opt in to alternative marketplaces. That is what should be fixed.

If I (today) said I had a word document and needed "an old version of Microsoft Word", I'm sure most people would know what I mean, and that I'd find someone with a Windows XP machine and a copy of Office 97'. Meanwhile, there are tons of people who are just going to stare at you blankly if you tell them about EBCDIC, never mind help you find a decoder.

Funny, I suspect the precise reverse is true.

EBCDIC is a well-documented encoding. Worst case, find you a reference book and you can figure out how to deal with it, because that knowledge is open and available.

The same is true of ASCII. If you can understand binary encodings with 8-bit groupings--a fairly fundamental concept in digital computing--you can probably find your way to an ASCII table in a library somewhere.

But good luck finding a working Windows XP machine with Office '97 fifty or one hundred years from now, let alone a spec for the format.

TBH, IMO this is all a non sequitur

My point is that the nature of digital technologies is such that information is far more ephemeral and closed off than it's ever been, not just for historians but for we, the people who are creating that information. We produce a lot more information, but control and long-term preservation is infinitely harder.

Your observations regarding the challenge of historians is absolutely true. But the effects of technology are entirely orthogonal to that problem.

After all, even if we had perfect digital preservation, what you say is still true, if only because subjugated groups are less represented in the digital discourse for many reasons, including socioeconomics, direct censorship/interference from power groups, etc.

This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized.

Not at all. This is precisely on point, and directly intersects with the Right to Repair as well. It's about damn time we, as a society, put a stop to black box devices over which we have no ability to inspect, repair, or repurpose after the vendor decides to end support.

Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine.

Welcome to the world of digital archiving. It's an enormously complicated space, and even for just my own personal projects and content, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure things are future proof and can be archived easily.

As a simple example, building my personal website atop Markdown ensures that, even if the formatting can't be preserved, the core content will be since it's simple ASCII (yes, that's ignoring issues of long-term digital storage and access and so forth, but at least it's not also a bunch of binary blobs or database formats or whatnot).

Equally alarming is that fact that so much of our digital lives aren't even in our control. A historian used to be able to rely on family archives, public libraries, etc, to understand our past. A hundred years from now they'll be looking back and hoping someone somewhere preserved the contents of an S3 bucket before Amazon decided to delete it on a whim...

And 33 comments and counting on HN, most of which can be broadly categorized as "Twitter sucks too, here's why".

Flame on!

Also interesting - it's being touted as proprietary code, but View Source (which as we all know is a clever hacker tool only) revealed that it's a fork/instance of Mastodon. Complete with not changing the error page's sad cartoon. The theme was slightly different, and the "toot" button has been renamed to "truth"... This is probably a violation of Masto's license, to not say you're using it.

Mastodon is AGPL. If they really did just rip it off, at a bare minimum they have to provide the source upon request. From the AGPL:

It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.

Once I saw a father who was separated from his kids by an ocean get down on the floor with them and draw together in VR

Man, that family must be doing very well for themselves to afford at least two full VR rigs.

Look, if VR kit becomes reasonably priced for average consumers (which also means GPU prices have to come down), maybe I could buy into your touching vision, here.

But we've got a long way to go before this kind of gear is remotely affordable enough to result in the kind of mass adoption required to realize these purported benefits.

As for Zuck, if he sees opportunity here, all the more reason for me to hope it never succeeds...

No, that's just a different kind of blindness: not recognizing your own experiences might not extrapolate to others.

I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone realized how very meh the experience was in practice. Smart watches were similarly going to change the world and have since largely pivoted to being niche products for health nuts.

BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't think there's any reason to believe you're right, either, and a lot of reasons you might not be, including sky-high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see: Google Glass), etc.