HN user
Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist political notions of the bourgeoisie)-such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of "enlightened self-interest" as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events -have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually replaces political action.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Apart from my tech criticism, what I notice about reading those links is the very detached, indifferent, irresponsible, even COLD attitude from everybody involved in cheering on this experimental AI algorithm -- from the Google research authors, the Tubefilter authors and commenters there and in the Y Combinator discussion. While a few people complain about their music choices or political videos, or how they can make money from the new algorithm -- most of them don’t think ahead about consequences, or about other people at all. They should have just kept their experiment in the laboratory.
Nobody discussed how the gimmicky algorithm would affect real people or ruin cultures around the world. Nobody there, in all seriousness, “thought of the children”. Now we, here, are discussing and solving THEIR industrial fallout, like factory pollution spread over a community. This is why James Bridle’s timely article was so essential to identify “infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects”.
In my opinion, the negligent people who gave the green light to this untested algorithm or cheered it on are, in fact, responsible accomplices to infrastructural violence. And the violence is real. Their "Frankenstein AI" foolishly recommended toxic movies that harmed millions of children (and adults). The AI cheerleaders felt no hesitation to exert control over what billions of people watch and think, in a very sneaky way -- while allowing greedy marketers to manipulate their choices to make ad money, and allowing sinister pervs to groom the children watching those badly recommended movies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7ebw14/reverse_engineering_the_youtube_algorithm/dq3v7jp/
It can be fixed in CSS. Add scrollbars to <pre> on small viewports, or have it wrap on small viewports.
Opera Mini could do magic with forcing text to wrap on small displays, why are mobile browsers shit today? If you don't want this to be usable on an actual computer, why not make HN an app and be done with it? Comments could become even shorter and more inane than they generally are already.
Society is not a person, it doesn't have a definition. It's just an abstract excuse used by actual individuals. If you want to propose, as a person, a particular notion of privacy, do so.
Maybe that would make it okay to do it to you, but even then it doesn't justify it being done to anyone but you.
Ugh.
There is a catch, though: the Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G technology, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialled scientists in the radiation research field”, according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like mobiles, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14R6QNkmaXuelFrNWRQcThNV0U...
Just out of curiosity, how would one go about locating the direction of 5G antennas? At the very least, I'd gleefully shit-talk anyone involved I come across. Just out of principle. It doesn't even matter how safe it turns out to be -- just how needy and dumb people are adopting anything thrown into their through, how reckless not just with their own lives, but with their effects on others and the environment, calls for some serious fucking wrath. And this is as good a starting point as any.
Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's a million times worse than even what we have now.
The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, exactly, are you arguing for?
The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
I never caved in, and encourage others to resist, what more are you asking? Anything you're actually giving yourself? You won't get to action without thought and words, and this textbox literally doesn't allow any other input than words, so what's the point of complaining about that?
In your case, not egging it on would be a start even.
There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability.
Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed.
"A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force.
What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
-- The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) [ http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU ]
If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.
Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.
I would replace "orchestrate" with "influence". It's obvious it can be influenced negatively, to make the situation worse in context of this discussion -- otherwise the concept of bearing responsibility to influence it positively, which you acknowledge, would make no sense.
As for "force of nature", that just sounds like what someone living under monarchy might say about monarchy, etc. Yes, trading things is very old and very useful, but from that doesn't follow that the whole package including "obfuscating ethical implications" is a "force of nature" (which to me doesn't really read differently than "the will of God" btw)
But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person.
We're first and foremost talking about personal responsibility. To speak about "the system" we should "improve" while kinda skipping about that is like talking about a beach while ignoring the concept of a grain of sand. The system is the people, the beliefs they have about the world, the other people, and so on. If you take away the people, there is no system. With different people, there is a different system.
Yes, I cannot easily just change the behavior of others. However, I can change mine, and there are a lot of things I declined to do because I value being able to look at myself in the mirror more than temporary material profit. What force of nature? I only saw and see a bunch of mediocre, insecure people who failed to drag me into their games.
When a group of hooligans steals money from a beggar just to be cruel I may not be able or dare to do anything about it. But it's very easy for me to refrain from stealing from a beggar. It's actually way easier for me to refrain from it than to do it. Other people developed differently, probably had different childhoods and so on -- but we still live in the same "system", and "just" behave very differently in it. That matters.
There's a store in Berlin selling food without packaging: https://original-unverpackt.de/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness
Even animals react to it. A live and let live attitude (if not one of protectiveness) towards harmless/cute living things is perfectly healthy it seems.
Smelly air is "coming", so prepare for it by eating lots of onions? Nah.
I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit.
We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities.
So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for.
-- Jacob Appelbaum
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.
-- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"
That people like something doesn't mean it's good for them, or even makes them happy: anything that some people really like and that is undoubtedly harmful can serve to prove that point. It doesn't put social media and heroin "in the same ballpark", it doesn't even say social media is harmful, it just says the fact that some people like it isn't saying a lot in itself. (I might add, especially not when it comes in the form of "you don't love it but people love it".)
Permant != self-sustaining, just extending to moon or Mars isn't "getting off" Earth anymore than you putting your fingertip on a bookshelf doesn't mean you're now "on the bookshelf". Whatever we build there, will be a lot more fragile than what we have here. If we can't keep from destroying a rich ecosystem, what would keep us from destroying any ecosystems we build on much less solid ground?
That said, I don't disagree that it matters, just not in quite the way you put it, that's a fantasy to me, a way to avoid the responsibility we actually do have, the responsiblity that is actually real. At the very least, mining asteroids beats scouring for ever more elusive resources on Earth. But humans living in hollowed asteroids isn't a solution to overpopulation and pollution. We can't build housing on Earth, but it's going to be so different once "we're in space". Yeah, right. Prove you can do it here or I don't believe it for a sec.
If anyone wants to dismiss a movement because a few of its adherents are violent, that's obviously unjustified
Nevertheless, that's what the comment referred to. For you it's an obvious non-issue, but not objectively so, and they were referring to that issue.
If you find something else more interesting, make that point without twisting what someone else said. Otherwise that whole stuff about rejecting violence sounds kind of hollow.
A bland expression isn't respectful, it's bland. Apart from the really fake stuff, which I agree is goofy and just as much an expression of weakness, I also think to some a smile is "goofy" because they can't possibly imagine having good reason to smile even as an intelligent, responsible person. That might make sense in Russia, for gangsta rap, African child soldiers, and so on -- in scenarios where the average person doesn't have the resources and the firm grounding to be open towards the unknown and the stranger, where kindness can only be some kind of plea for mercy or patronizing, instead of the simple friendliness of someone at peace with themselves and their surroundings.
Maybe I'll stop smiling briefly when I pass by someone who will just misunderstand it; but when I'm with myself and the world, or with people or animals who are content, I smile a lot. Why not? Not doing so would be the mental equivalent of not just smoking, but lighting cigarettes with hundred dollar bills.
In order to band together, we need a common enemy
Yes, to band together, sure. But is that friendship?
Friends are predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. But comradeship — that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime — is within our reach. We can all have comrades. The danger of the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship; it creates comradeship. And those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into despair.
In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self. We become, through the friend, more aware of who we are and what we are about; we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend. Friends probe and question and challenge each other to make each of us more complete; with comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause — a common purpose.
-- Chris Hedges
Of course, disliking the same thing or person can also be a result of intellectual or emotional affinity. I can meet someone in the wilderness and think they're an okay person because of how they are to me, but if we then go back to the city and they steal from a blind beggar, I'll no longer think they're okay. Likewise, if I walk around with a supposed friend and we see someone do that, and they react with a shrug or even a smile, that will similarly lower my opinion of them.
But that's because of what I am for, which is primary and a cause if you will -- not because of the need to be against anything, which is secondary and a symptom.
I care because I love Berlin and many of the Turks in it. That's derpy and selfish but it's also true. And I care because when I was a kid, I had a good Turkish friend whose family treated me like family, and I still have to smile when I recall those times. I care because it really is a disgrace that what Atatürk started ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atatürk ) was trampled by fundamentalism.
But Erdogan and his brownshirts don't get to define the whole spectrum of Turkey, of its culture and individuals, for me. I know kinda nothing of it, but already know too much to accept that. And I know intellectually that I should feel about every country as I do when I actually do love people that have a connection to a specific one. It's a failure of imagination, that's all. Why should we care about this and other things? Because we should be better than we are, and then we would care.
Just generally stop with the personality cult bullshit, both positive and negative.
As much as I think the best thing that could happen to FB is to just vanish, I can't "hate" this guy I never met who never ever seemed happy and now just looks tired. I doubt the author does, either. So why lie about it? That's both kinda pathetic and predictably unhelpful. It's not like the article doesn't contain information, but that framing sucks.
There's a lot to be said about the actions and words of Facebook as a whole, and of Mark Zuckerberg, but it does more harm than good if it's with the intent to make it about Facebook and Zuckerberg, instead of those things no matter who happens to do or say them, and our responsibilities not just in response, but in action rather than just reaction.
We choose as a society about the trade offs
I’ll tell you the commercial they’d like to do, if they could, and I guarantee you, if they could, they’d do this, right here. Here’s the woman’s face, beautiful. Camera pulls back, naked breasts. Camera pulls back, she’s totally naked. Legs apart. Two fingers, right here and it just says, “Drink Coke.” Now I don’t know the connection here, but goddamn if Coke isn’t on my shopping list that week.
-- Bill Hicks
Oh yeah, it's always "us as society" when things get pushed by actual individuals working at specific companies with whatever means they can grab, to whomever they can push it on, side-effects and consequences down the road be damned. "We as a society" decided Colin Powell should lie his butt off in his presentation about Iraq before the UN.
Never mind car crashes, if the people who get killed in wars of aggression saw more than the raw fact of them having being tortured and/or murdered, if they just saw the profits for select individuals, and the way faceless masses cheer "liberty and convenience!", they'd be more than cool with it, that's obvious.
A society is made up of acting and thinking individuals, and referring to decisions made "as a society" is not really from that realm. Start with your own position, or with why you don't have one in favor of such abstractions that hold no water.
What you say about "your country" kinda legitimates anyone saying that about "their" country, too. There's plenty of arms dealer selling to all sorts of sides, are there not? And generally speaking, at best soldiers defend against invading soldiers, at worst they are invading or "just" murdering some or a lot of civilians.
Remember when the cold war ended, for a while, but military budgets didn't exactly collapse? Isn't that "funny" how that works, and how we have no problem realizing that in other contexts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
You make war profitable, you will have more war. The details are trickier, sure. Slogans aren't enough. But if you don't even have the will, don't worry about finding a way.
I doubt they would be happy to live in a world where the U.S. has a weaker military than countries like China or Russia.
Yeah, nevermind the big nations all having their go at weaker nations, and the US wars of aggression, under exactly that pretense. No, it's really that the every last person in that huuuuuge industry -- shoveling tax dollars into gadgets that can be used to defend, to destroy, to enforce resource extraction as well as for domestic control -- wants to look out for you, because you have the same nationality in the passport. It's the children on non-Americans that get labels like "fun-sized terroris", American children have names. Those lines could not ever blur.
Yes, you can't just unilaterally disarm. But you also can't keep hitting others (and yourself) while gearing up even more, at increasing rate, while subverting self-determination of others and intellectual honesty of self at every corner, and then say "it just happens to be a dangerous world, I'm just reacting". The people you're just reacting to say the same thing, and the people who sell you and them that lie laugh all the way to the bank, and should there be need for it, they won't share their bunker with you. They'd sooner share it with Russian and Chinese war profiteers, so to speak.
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
-- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
-- Fred Rogers
You're most welcome. I found this too late to edit the comment, but here's the full interview and a transcript:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
I'll need to read that book, thanks. In the meantime, I was also reminded of things Erich Fromm wrote, or said, in this case:
Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
-- Erich Fromm in an interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s
IBM has always served as a medium between mankind and machine.
Between the natural and the engineered.
The emotional and rational.
The classic and the cutting-edge.
Our most important job is to help humanity and technology move forward together.
IBM Plex™ brings these relationships to life through letterforms.
these things are less dangerous than smartphones
They're also orthogonal to smartphones.
why do you think they aren't lying about what their mobile OSes or apps are doing?
Why do you think everybody thinks that? And why frame it that way from the get go, to what the companies themselves are doing today, and/or to what the widgets do in isolation? It's another vector of attack for all sorts of actors, present and future, including the companies themselves.
All that said, I believe Apple, Amazon, and Google all have worlds more trust in this area than Facebook.
They're not the baseline, the baseline is none of these devices. And for me, those all have worlds less trust than entities I trust, and the difference between them and Facebook is pretty much irrelevant in the big picture.
That reminded me of two quotes:
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
-- C. S. Lewis
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
-- Isaac Newton