We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.
The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.
Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.
"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no answers for them.
This is why I always tell people: If all we had were technical problems to solve, it would be easy. People problems are much more difficult to solve. As the scale of the project increases, with more people, more personalities, more money -- so does the difficulty of the project. "Space is hard" because the scale of the projects are huge. It is hubris to believe that we are the ones that don't contribute to the problem. It is naive to think that some manager isn't looking at us and thinking, "That asshole programmer is going to sink this project for sure". If we can see the problems, why can we not fix them? Because of assholes? Or because we lack the skills to explain the issue and motive people to fix it? Or because we are wrong? All of those things come into play and if you want to be successful you need to navigate that minefield.
If only it were rocket science, it would be sooooo easy. Alas, it is not.
because then the entire idea of the american economy being based on a meritocratic system where good companies do well and bad companies that make no products fail, and the same goes for workers, is somehow an elaborate lie and a shell game?
lets be clear. rich people do not have to deal with this. denny hastert rapes a bunch of people and is still thought of as a good guy by the powerful and wealthy. how many more like him are protected? catholic church institutionalizes criminal sexual abuse but nobody in management goes to prison. corey feldman knows who raped him but cannot say it because that person has too much money and power in hollywood. hedge fund managers go to thailand and fuck child prostitutes but they come back here and invest in private prisons that make money putting kids in lockup for playing doctor.
some teenager sends a nude pic and get years in prison.
welcome to 'freedom'
i actually support the 'crackdown on sex crimes'... if it went after actual criminals!!!! politicians, CEOs, cops, bankers, all those people who routinely rape kids and get away with it.
but as usual, it just is a way for the rich to enslave the poor, extract money from them, abuse them, and discard them.
The current president is at a minimum guilty of multiple cases of sexual assault. Rich people do not only not have to deal with it, they are next to untouchable.
He pretty much admitted it himself, what else do you want? Or do you feel that because he lies all the time we should not believe him at all, even when he incriminates himself?
I'm fairly confident in declaring Trump guilty of that, this is not a court of law, it's an internet forum and the standards for both are different. In fact, the standards of proof for criminal law are different from those for civil law (see OJ), and I think it's a bit much to require the standard of proof for criminal law to apply to a forum discussion for someone who is on the record as stating the does exactly that which others claim he did to them.
On a similar note, Florida (and I'm sure other states) have laws that prevent government employees and their relatives' mugshots from being public records. [1]
Hastert "cannot be prosecuted for sexual abuse because the statute of limitations has expired for his conduct decades earlier."[0]
This also goes against the ethos of the article. Hastert apologized (although this cannot make up for heinous deeds) for his conduct and showed regret. If we believe for the sake of argument that he is truly sorrowful and wants to turn over a new leaf, who are you to deny him this?
The "rich" and "powerful" and "politicians, CEOs, cops, bankers, all those people who routinely rape kids and get away with it" are not the bogeyman you make them out to be. They are people with problems just like the rest of us. Some of them just have better lawyers.
> If we believe for the sake of argument that he is truly sorrowful and wants to turn over a new leaf, who are you to deny him this?
While personally I am in favor of these types of registries (ideally with quite a few changes), the argument is that if you are placed on a lifetime offender list, you can be as sorrowful as you want, you can never turn over a new leaf. You effectively have a life sentence even if you never had to step foot inside a jail cell.
well fuck me sideways, i thought the purpose of technology was to enoble the human condition, lift up society, and make our civilization better for the future generations. didnt realize that corporations profit margin is the only possible good to come out of technology.
> i thought the purpose of technology was to enoble the human condition, lift up society, and make our civilization better for the future generations
The question is whether that is the purpose of Facebook. I don't think it is; I think the purpose of Facebook is to become a social media giant, as coffeymug said. Technology for Facebook is just a means to that end.
we need to realize that social media experts have basically discovered a new form of addictive drug that is based on ideas instead of on a physical substance. "if it bleeds, it leads", but industrialized and backed by big data, in the way that cocaine was an industrial-revolution optimization of relatively benign coca leaves. there are people who literally cannot take their eyes of this stuff, constantly looking for the next 'high' of outrage. righteous anger in meme form has some kind of addictive force beyond what we have seen before on a scale that can manipulate mass audiences in a way that propagandists of the old times would never have been able to dream of.
we should be worried the last three presidents were all elected by the team with the best data operation.
it has infiltrated the communication you have with your family members - never before in human history was your interaction with your own family and friends mediated through a for profit corporation whose interest it was to make you share memes.
i dont know if i am ahead of things but as someone who was on the internet since 1996... i deleted my facebook account years ago. i deleted my twitter this past year. i am close to deleting google.
i pay money to certain sites that i value, and patreon creators. my money goes to people who make stuff, and they make stuff i like without trying to manipulate me with some kind of weaponized big data political campaign. the free internet is almost become an unusable pile of shit.
i feel like there is this nugget of people leaving behind the 'standard internet' for these new little bubble enclaves where we cannot be assaulted with never ending streams of .... garbage. i dont know the name for it...
we need a name for it. its something like a drug, but crossed with a meme. it is a virus but one that you voluntarily re-infect yourself with every time you log on to some platform like facebook.
its like addiction but without the physical component.
its a dysfunctional manipulative relationship but one side
is a data center and a bunch of algorithms.
its like a toxic person but that person is a platform that
you log in to every day to try to connect with people
who are not toxic. its like you cannot get away from the toxicity anymore
its like if there was ubiquitous angry talk radio that you could never escape. its there in your pocket all the time
waiting to get you angry about something or other.
its almost like the internet is turning people into psychotics... except they really do hear little voices in their heads all day long telling them how terrible the world is. because that is what is really actually happening.
its like renting your brain out to a corporation, for free, so that you can plug into some pseudo community that exists only to generate profit.
these things all come through some kind of 'feed', which is designed to trigger the release of brain chemicals that in a feedback loop cause you to consume more of the feed.
the feed is designed by an algorithm and big data. you are like the squirrel in the psychology experiment, except of pushing the lever to get more nuts, you push the lever to get another hit of the chemicals that are released when you have a nother righteous anger story in your feed.
they used to call blackberry 'crackberry'.
maybe they are more like drug dealers. anger dealers.
or virus spreaders. they spread the viruses and re-infect people even as they try to get away.
maybe they are the reservoirs of the virus....
their only purpose is to grow.
using your brain. your mind that is.
Have you ever watched CGP Grey's "This Video Will Make You Angry"[1]? I feel it touches on most of the issues you raised with the spread of 'garbage' ideas.
I liked your comment. Social media capitalizes on perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of being human: the need for validation. In the physical world, we build relationships with each other by validating and appreciating each other. I liked your comment. What do you think of mine?
Legacy media is a one-way street: they talk to you. In social media, it's a conversation. Even by clicking 'like' or 'dislike' you feel like you are part of the conversation, even if it is in some small, non-zero way. You get to be heard. This is what makes it so addictive.
On the net a bit before you. Effectively left the net around 2003-2004 due to a dangerous rise in vigilante-ism specific to a community I was involved in. Saw the darkness coming, a prelude to the Twitterite-Trumpian shit. Net was no longer about amazing technologies connecting people. Became a power that could be used against people.
Never had any social media accounts. Surprises me people could not see where it was going. People who never touched HTML didn't see what they were giving up by raising their flag on corporate PHP. The ecosystem of private web has almost entirely disappeared. Today you're either corporate or silenced.
Don't have any permanent accounts anywhere. Imo, accounts are surveillance / advertising delivery mechanisms. The longer you ride an account, the more info "they" have on you. And one day somebody is going to want to f__k with you. And it'll all be there, on a plate.
(This is not a theory. I saw it happen, more than once. Including to myself.)
Gave up email around 2005 as the worst offender. All your account information, all your personal business, all your draft-grade ideas, all in one place, waiting for some a__h__e to hack in or get a warrant? No thanks. And nobody has any discretion in email. Nobody has figured out how to use PGP in 25 years. Hopeless.
People who use social media, imo, are like Neanderthals waiting for their extinction event. Intelligent people, engineers, and evil corporate and political people are basically cooking up crack and handing it out so they can get rich and grab power. Zuckerberg sitting beside world leaders at the G8 a decade ago kind of cemented this perception imo. And the Neanderthals keep signing up as if all of this was neutral, like clean air or fresh water.
(My favorite Neanderthals are the political activists claiming the high ground of human rights to conduct their political campaigns via Facebook without the threat of surveillance!)
And, yes, I live in a cave. I'm almost not joking.
Tried recently to get an email to register for a throwaway account somewhere. Could not figure it out via Tor. Tor services permanently or temporarily out of service. Or require non-anonymous bitcoin. No way to get emails without leaving trail. No way to be anonymous. Internet = surveillance. No more privacy. Everybody is a social media idiot. America is crumbling. Not a coincidence, imo.
When I get nostalgic for the good old days of cyber revolutionaries and tech manifestos, I think of the failure of the front page of Reddit to provide any solutions to the very serious long term problems we are facing as a species. It's all astroturfed joke gifs and one or two rage-news story of the moment. The comments have gone from bad to impenetrably terrible in the past 5 years. There's no wisdom in this crowd.
(Hackernews is an interesting exception, but the narrowness that keeps it sane is also its shortfall. Not every problem can be solved from the command prompt by start-up engineering visionaries. The principle virtue here is respect for craft, and it shows everyday in the careful comments.)
The internet has turned into something worse than television. The people are more passive as ever in their hyper-personalized info-holes, zoned into whatever gives them that dopamine hit, as you put it.
Reading used to be an alternative to television. We used to leave the boob tube and go read a newspaper, or a book. Reading was good. The internet has transformed reading into the problem. Where is the escape? The people who wrote, who called themselves intellectuals, used to occupy a social and technological space separate from television. They had their own world. Now writers, um, bloggers, newspapermen, scholars, and the rest, are all shoulder to shoulder in a disorderly cue, all mobbed together trying to get a golden ticket on the train to success. And the train station is called Facebook, or Twitter. Writers have always been poor, but never until today have they been beggars.
(My favorite omen is Twitter, where all the formerly important pillars of the political aristocracy, like Bill Kristol for example, go to flash their underwear. Trump is just the best example. Hardly the worst. Imagine Hemmingway ruined by Twitter.)
The internet destroyed the BBS scene. First came the information superhighway through that hometown feel. Then came the skyscraper social media conglomerates. Now we're getting the double tap psychological bombing campaigns that shake the ruins we are huddling in. And we are supposed to be amused.
I don't know how people manage all this disaster. Maybe like most people they buy junk cookies and pies and forget that grandma used to make this stuff at home much better, and that's why we used to love her. Life in America has become worse and worse. Emptier and emptier. More abstractly equal, more invasively political. And in the past 20 years, America has been transformed by surveillance properties of the internet.
Nobody has a handle on this. Including the great political parties, including the technologists, including the intelligence services. Great winds are sweeping through.
I think America is reaching its late Soviet period. The machine is creaking. Everybody is looking at each other wondering what part of the machine is breaking. The ship is full of leaks (and not only Wikileaks).
The plan is to rearrange the deck chairs. Just a little more Uber. A few more sprinkles of Netflix. Just one more cloud service. Fix Facebook. If we can get one more round of funding. If I can cash this pay check (with no healthcare no dental no retirement fund). One more Walmart shopping binge. One more lid of meth. One more line of code.
The internet revolution has become nothing other than the digital exploitation of the masses. Every attempt to right the ship has failed. There is no decentralized post-surveillance internet coming. Trump is the past present and future.
Have you considered that you're just old and the new generation will be able to instinctively pick out which bloggers are credible and which are just full of shit? I mean, your rant reads like something Bradbury would write approx. 50 years ago regarding TV.
ironically, the unwashed masses that data science has 'targeted' for 'optimization' go through the exact same process and feel the exact same emotions.
apply for 100 jobs, get zero response, and zero reason why.
be told illogical things.
be told out right lies.
welcome to capitalism. welcome to the workplace that is run entirely by data. (or by people who only care about data).
welcome to the future of humanity.
You'd think. The culture in the US just seems to tolerate too much of this "Show me your papers!" attitude imho.
Source: I grew up in the UK where you (still) don't need to carry a drivers license. Meanwhile in the USA where I'm now a citizen I get a cold sweat if I forget my wallet when I take a 10 minute drive to buy some milk in case I'm pulled over by the cops..
For clarity, what you say is not true (see section 164(7) in the reference cited above). You only have to produce your license upon request within 7 days at a police station. Nothing bad can happen to you (e.g. you can't be detained) for driving without your license on your person.
Section 164(7) requires the driver to either immediately produce a receipt (option a) or produce within 7 days a receipt (option b). But that receipt is for surrendered licences under the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988.
By not immediately producing the document you've committed the offence. (Section 164(1-6), unless section 164(7) applies (it almost never does)) It's a defence to produce them not more than 7 days later, this is in section 164(8).
Strictly speaking: you need to carry your licence and produce when asked. You commit the offence if you do not immediately produce the licence, but it's a defence if you produce the licence within 7 days to a named police station.
> Nothing bad can happen to you (e.g. you can't be detained) for driving without your license on your person.
That's not correct. If officers need to identify you and they can't from the information you give you're going to have a bad time. They most certainly can detain you until they identify you. (If you're the driver.)
I've been pulled over without my license in the US. Nothing happened. I've also had no proof of insurance. I just had to provide within a specified time period. No big deal.
Lots of US law enforcement experts from overseas on the Interwebs these days.
We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.
The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.
Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.
"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no answers for them.