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crsmithdev

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Another breathless, gasping story about the evils of FB / technology / capitalism / <insert boogeyman here> from the Guardian, which has established itself as the nexus for alarmist 'journalism'. The footer: "in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times..." Doesn't sound much like a news outlet to me.

...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content, just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.

Yes, that was the start of it for me, seeing that going on while understanding exactly how much BS it was at the time. Then the 2016 elections (and constant fumbling to get any story right since) and this finished the job.

Shocked that a normal and healthy practice that should be done more by more and different kinds of people is big news to the NYT, because tech.

Watching the NYT (and others) from within tech over the past few years has done more to destroy any trust in mass media than anything else in my lifetime.

How hot will this thing be with 8 cores? Unless they've cut some ventilation holes in the bottom of the laptop. MBPs aren't exactly known for good thermal regulation (my previous one I had to actually undervolt the CPU so it wouldn't overheat while playing games for even < 30m).

Don't see anything re: keyboard so guessing that there aren't any changes there, unfortunately.

1. If you're an alcoholic and think you can handle a single drink, you're lying to yourself. 2. It's honestly not worth it. Life is better than being stuck in a multi day binger. The physically effects are taxing on the body. 3. You'll always have those urges and that feeling of wanting to drink isn't as bad as the act of actually drinking and the damage the follows.

Worth noting that #1 is AA dogma and is certainly not a medically proven thing. About 5% of people who go through AA eventually get sober, roughly the same as other treatment approaches (many of which skip the disease model of alcoholism entirely).

IMO, the AA notion that you are diseased for life unless you turn your life over to a higher power (which looks suspiciously like the personal god of Western Protestant Christianity) is poison.

Has it ever been the place to have an interview or 1:1 conversation? That it didn't work well seems like something that would be known in advance, and so the choice of doing it this way feels more like grandstanding on the part of KS.

Not saying Twitter doesn't have problems, just that this seems to be an interview constructed to support a narrative right from the start.

You can achieve pretty much the same isolation as Wayland on X11 with cgroups and Xephyr.

Wait, you mean I could get something almost as good just by adding in two additional technologies to the mix? Amazing!

I wonder if at some point it will just make good business sense not to offer your service / product in the EU? I imagine the cost of developing and running software to comply (plus the fines for anything but perfect compliance) would exceed potential revenue from EU customers in many cases.

Perhaps eventually they'll invent and patent their way back to a usable laptop keyboard :)

IMO, declaring bankruptcy on the current design and reverting to the previous chiclet keys would be welcomed by most users, but it seems unlikely that Apple will actually admit a mistake for a few more years (e.g. what happened with the Mac Pro).

Lewis-Kraus’s critiques are based on incomplete facts and largely anonymous sources whose motivations are impossible to assess. Curiously, he did not ask me about the great majority of his concerns. Had he done so, the evidence underlying his thesis that my work is “indistinguishable from the racialized notions of the swashbuckling imperial era” would have fallen apart.

Well, yes. For those wondering why the author did do the simplest possible due diligence — asking the subject of the article about the thinking used to frame it — it's because it likely would have resulted in a less-interesting, less-trafficked story. Accuracy isn't the objective, reach and audience is. Corrections can be packaged up and slipped in later.

"My flippant tweet began to pick up traction. My intent wasn't to claim that the meme is inherently dangerous."

He spun an offhand comment into full-on opinion manipulation, because we're now reading his article on the topic that not only has a clickbait headline, it seems to imply there's something more to the story, when in fact there isn't.

So now we've got all this digital ink spilled on the (entirely hypothetical) topic, and plenty of eyeballs buying it with their attention. But all of it is vapor, even at the admission of the authors.

So, the author read a book and then awkwardly tried to graft its theme onto the narrative his employer is pushing. Went about as well as you'd expect.

And media outlets like the NYT manipulate our opinions. An endless parade of articles written by non-experts with no incentives to get anything right, but plenty to keep the story going and traffic coming in.

I had a similar experience: I went to a very good, Catholic college prep school and I wrote a lot of papers well before setting foot in college. In some ways, it was more challenging than any subsequent education.

However, this is not the normal educational experience of many in America. Outside of private and (good) public schools, what's described here is probably the rule, not the exception.

iPhone X 9 years ago

So...wait, wasn't one of the biggest selling points of the (awful) Touch Bar on the latest MBP that it could use Touch ID? And a few months later they are moving away from that entirely?

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.

How do you know it didn't work, unless you think the only way it could be evaluated as having "worked" is if there were zero extra-marital sex and children born out of wedlock? My sense is that this was at least partially effective in discouraging the behaviors you describe.

What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

We don't have the necessary magical science. We cannot continue behaving the way we are and expect to reach a point where we can realistically develop it, we will die or decline significantly as a species well before then. Yes, we can feed more people now, but a big part of what's driving climate change is emissions and other side effects from that. Our current behaviors are killing us.

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong.

This is a non-sequitur. If you are injured or ill and taken to an emergency room, most effective treatments will not automatically make you worse if the diagnosis is incorrect. In some extreme cases this is true, but taking your line of reasoning would mean that only in such cases would the situation be considered an emergency. We have many, many tools available to us to slow the problem at least and allow ourselves additional time to prepare and react, the problem is that we are not doing them.

My sense is that we will not really be able to address this as a species until we hit some of the disaster points described in the article. When 50k+ people in the US die several summers in a row simply from heat (expect that within a decade), then perhaps we'll take it more seriously. Unfortunately, it might legitimately be too late at that point to even adjust quickly enough.

Urbit in 2017 9 years ago

An interesting idea confounded by inexplicably strange design choices, and the regressive, odious politics of its creator.

Would love to see a similar idea done by a different team.