We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine. Algorithms that know you better than your family members do.
I think in the near future we’re gonna be looking at the modern social medias similar to how we see smoking cigarettes today. Addictive and bad for you.
yeah i just try not to think about it. I’m glad I was in the myspace generation during my teenage years. so I was actually able to just delete my myspace later on as an adult
i feel worse for the kids growing up today. they don’t fully understand the implications of what they are posting online. anything and everything is being recorded forever. my generation got a chance to be a stupid kid and have it be forgotten. today’s kids don’t get that opportunity
the best you can do, though, is just stop posting potentially damaging things online. you can’t change what you already posted. and 999 times out of a thousand, it’s not gonna hurt you.
i understand the overwhelmed feeling though
the safest perspective to have is this -
every single thing you send online is going to be there forever. “the cloud” is someone’s server and constitutes online. even end to end encryption isn’t necessarily going to save you.
for example iCloud backup is encrypted. but Apple in the past has kept a copy of your encryption key on your iCloud. why? because consumers who choose to encrypt and lose their passwords are gonna freak out when all their data is effectively gone forever.
so when FBI comes a’knocking to Apple with a subpoena… once they get access to that encryption key it doesn’t matter if you have the strongest encryption in the world
my advice
never ever ever write something online that you do not want everybody in the world seeing.
to put on my tin foil hat, i believe government probably has access to methods that break modern encryptions. in theory with quantum computers it shouldn’t be difficult
sad story. it’s emblematic of a mentality that is all too common in “ivory tower” positions
whether you work for a university or a news agency or a government organizations, etc. everyone ends up self censoring because they realize that rocking the boat is bad for your personal interests. after working so hard to get into this little elite club, you don’t want to jeopardize your position. your identity and sense of self worth is tied up with it
the few that end up trying get quickly chewed up and spit out by the whole.
it’s essentially group think and self censorship. too bad this guy killed himself instead of trying to move forward in his life with another avenue.
i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything
you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.
if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.
i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly
so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed
but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?
that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.
but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.
most democratic countries cosplay as democracies. just like most communist countries cosplayed as communist.
ideology in its purest form. After the death of God, you need something to fill that unapproachable void. So you inject ideals- civil service, egalitarianism, tolerance, justice, etc – values that are virtuous and aspirational, but ultimately are just shiny veneers over a darker truth. it functions as scaffolding for systems that serve the interests of raw power. it is theater. performance. spectacle. underneath, the mechanisms of control, inequality, and corruption remain unchanged.
don’t make the mistake of believing that India is somehow unique here
I really need to figure out how to get a single work app to work on Linux reliably
what work app?
I use it for like 99% of my work, so a virtual machine is kind of useless
i mean, it depends on your computer (like if your cpu & motherboard supports virtualization) but you can in theory get a VM with pretty decent performance
on my m1 macbook i have a windows VM that runs very smoothly and i can effortlessly use a gesture on the touchpad to switch between them. it’s pretty cool
on linux it’s a little harder to set up (i had to pay like $100 for the software on the mac) but it’s doable
there was a vulernability on the iphone a while back where someone would send you a specific hindu character and it would crash the OS. it can get you no matter what you do really, use or business. the difference is a business has a lot more to lose.
as for the OS talk…
I use MacOS on my macbook & Linux on my desktop at home. I don’t think Mac is intolerably locked down. I have virtually the same experience on both. Mac is a very smooth experience once you set it up how you like. I have the same command line applications, the same config files, the same firefox profile that gets synced in between them, same unix utilities that share folders/files as if they were native, can ssh from one to the other, etc
including windows in that would be a PITA
windows is clunky and the company pushing it is becoming progressively more hostile to its users. apple is greedy but at least with their OS it’s not pushy. it’s the hardware where they stick the knife and twist in terms of price
it’s pretty dangerous not to be getting security updates. probably for regular users won’t be a big deal. i have a feeling really bad vulnerabilities will be patched even if you don’t pay for it just out of a potential PR issue. but i would almost definitely pay this if I were a business who didn’t plan on switching to Win 11 soon
on a personal level i don’t understand why anyone continues to use windows these days
i guess it’s just puppeteer + ai prompting
unless AI gets significantly better in the next year or so I doubt it’s gonna be any better than someone spending an hour writing a puppeteer scraping script
Kids are disadvantaged in a number of ways compared to adults
What do you mean “install as app”?
Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.
At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.
I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.
if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups
Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.
They could still remove it if they wanted to.
For example push an update so your console can’t read certain games when they lose license. Or simply break backwards compatibility in specific ways.
I guess the games I really like are all digital. Games like Slay the Spire, Rimworld, Balatro, etc. I know that the data is sitting there in my hard drive. I can copy it, move it, delete it, etc whenever I want.
I honestly haven’t included a disc reader in my PC builds for over a decade. I guess on Xbox it’s different because Microsoft has more control. But again, if they wanted to take away the games they could do it either way.
If that’s main reason, I don’t see the point of continuing disc use
I understand if you don’t have the CD they can remove your access to it arbritarily like when they lose the license but
Nobody ever complains about Steam and they have a similar policy of no physical media going back decades. I have hundreds of gamed accumulated on Steam and no game of mine has ever been removed.
I bought the cheaper Xbox last year to play Overcooked with my girlfriend and it has no physical media. I just download and play games no problem. I actually find it more convenient not to have any physical games.
So I guess the question is- what is the reason for the strong rejection of the digital version? It is the natural evolution of these things.
People believe just because someone interacts with some sort of digital device, it makes you an expert on computers. The thing is, it depends on the type of operating system you are interacting with.
For example when I was young, my father would buy those big old gray computers from yard sales. I would mix and match the pieces inside to build my own PC. I broke a lot of shit but learned a lot.
The operating system was one where you more or less had total control over the computer. By 12~13 I was using CD-Roms to load different Linux distros and play around with all sorts of different things.
This experience basically taught me how operating systems work at a fundamental level. How it needs a kernel, how it loads and maintains services, packages, etc. How file systems work and learning how terminals are useful. Scripting languages, and eventually coding applications.
Compare and contrast that to the young kids of today. What do they get? A phone and a tablet. You can’t open it up. You can’t tinker with it. The OS is closed off and is deliberately made as difficult as possible to modify. No mouse, no keyboard. Streamlined UIs with guard rails.
You get what you get and you don’t get upset. That doesn’t leave nearly as much room for exploration and curiosity. It’s a symptom of our computers becoming more and more railroaded. More and more control by large companies.
It’s really sad, I think. Fairly soon I believe every device will be a “thin device” or essentially a chrome book. Very little local processing power and instead it’ll essentially stream from a server.
Personally I prefer subscription model over ad-based data tracking model. When you get something for free, you are the product being sold. For example Facebook or Reddit. Your content (comments, media) is used to populate the site and your data is sold to advertisers.
When you pay a subscription, you are the customer. There’s more incentive to create a proper service with the actual users in mind when it’s a subscription model.
When advertisers are the primary customer, they will always be a priority in determining policy. So for example YouTube- longer ads and more of them.
Of course, I think Google is guilty of double dipping. We pay for premium but I’m certain they still sell our data to advertisers. For example you watch a lot of carpentry videos, they will sell a list with your name that says “likely tool buyer” or something along those lines.
But generally speaking, I never mind paying a subscription for a service. It’s more honest, more clear what’s going on.
I just pay for premium. I’d rather pay the $25 a month to never have to see an ad.
I understand this phenomenon and it goes all the way back to Socrates. There’s that famous quote.
And he even used to complain about the new invention of writing. Said it would weaken people’s memory because they wouldn’t have to remember everything.
So I get it. I understand what you mean.
But I think this is different. Because let me posit this.
Cigarettes existed for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s that they started being produced en masse. Very quickly, the majority of the country was smoking and smoking a lot. Much more than before.
That eventually caused a dramatic increase in lung diseases because a lot more people were smoking. You could say “Tobacco has been around forever. Every generation has fads”
But in reality, it was different. It was a new thing. Cigarettes were hand-rolled before. Now you could buy a pack and smoke your 20 a day much more easily.
I think this is more similar to what we are seeing with social media today. I consciously make an effort not to judge the youth. And I’m not judging the youth. The social media “epidemic” does not only concern the youth, but all generations. Smartphones in general but modern social media specifically operate in manners we don’t fully understand.
Look at the brains of gambling addicts. Your brain literally gets rewired when you play slots all day. Social media operates in a similar manner as slots. We are all rewiring our brains in a way that has never happened in human history.
It could cause permanent damage for all we know. We just haven’t had the time or studies to confirm this. And if we look at research that exists right now, social media does increase rate of anxiety, depression, etc. It’s not so simple.