I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of Bulverism - diagnose a bunch of people without presenting evidence, then start psychoanalysing them (also without evidence).
Based on the chat transcript Demz seems like either another bot or someone who just doesn't give a shit. Can't be bothered helping someone? Just spam the "I'm sorry you're frustrated" macro then cut them off. Easy job.
When Git was taking over from SVN, the main benefit I remember reading about was the much faster/lighter-weight branching. IIRC in SVN making a branch makes a complete copy of all the files. Since then it's benefited from being the standard everyone (kinda) knows despite its sharp edges.
>When I described this to Amy, she responded with a magnificent rant that was something like “this is a romanticized utopian ideal about a thing that was inhabited by socially inhibited, white male nerds who consider themselves too smart to be misogynistic but, well, often are.”
This kind of thinking is itself a major cause and component of the Miasma.
The miasma works by provoking the human minds it contacts to produce more miasma. It's self-replicating, and its most potent constituents operate on the human need to chant their own team's fight chant whenever an opportunity arises, and especially when someone else's chant is heard. The guy who writes Slate Star Codex would call that an example of the blue tribe, and you can bet that every other tribe that hears it will spread a little of their own color of miasma back to get even. In the end, you get the brown miasma, that is toxic to everybody, and provokes its own production.
I'd argue it's not naturally self-replicating. It just seems that way because of how platforms promote content with algorithms that have been optimized for user engagement. Go read the book Zucked, if you haven't already.
Memes on the internet are already self-replicating in a way that mirrors evolution fairly well. Who's to say there aren't other mind parasites that can jump from host to host and evolve to be even more infectious? In Germany there is a current problem of Copy-Paste texts being shared on whatsapp that behaves almost like a virus. One host can infect dozens of others.
Those copy-paste texts are memes in the original sense. Oddly enough, I first read the term in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" before I was aware of the origin.
The concept of a meme is a unit of information or idea, akin to a gene in living organisms. Successful memes are good at spreading and being replicated. Much like with genes, they alter over time and can become better at being picked up and spread further.
It's more a way of looking at the spread of ideas than an actual "thing" but it encompasses everything from lolcats to recipes to economic theories to religions. A successful idea is one that inherently makes people want to share it.
>In Germany there is a current problem of Copy-Paste texts being shared on whatsapp that behaves almost like a virus. One host can infect dozens of others.
People have been forwarding those funny emails for decades.
... as is its doppelgänger, the "red pill" or "manosphere" or "alt-right" or whatever it's called this week crowd. Other side, same coin.
The other day I came up with a dorky acronym for social media and what it does: the CRASER. CRASER stands for Craziness Amplification through Stimulation of Engagement with Reactivity.
The idea is that primitive emotions like fear, hate, anger, outrage, etc. are the things that drive engagement. In other words: emotional reactivity. We've programmed computers to moderate our discourse with the goal function of driving engagement, so they selectively amplify signals that push those buttons. The result is a craziness laser that is causing everyone to adopt increasingly extreme, irrational, and provocative belief systems and styles of expression. Like in a laser all the various forms of madness feed on each other and intensify each other.
In the end there will only be Nazis advocating a new holocaust, Neo-Leninists advocating new gulags, and people who just hate everyone equally and want to destroy the world for the lulz.
For what it's worth I remember the early Internet too and in my memory it all really started to go to hell when gasified social media appeared: algorithmic timelines, up/down votes, likes, etc. That's when the CRASER fired up.
I don't read her as saying that the nerds were invalid.
I think what she's saying is that if you were part of this group, the early Internet seemed welcoming and inclusive, but if you weren't, it was the opposite. From within a community it's easy to feel inclusive!
For whatever it's worth, even though I am a white male nerd myself, I never really felt welcome in "hacker spaces" and such. It must be a lot worse for people who are not white or male. And I'll believe her when she says that that was her experience with the early Internet. (Or, well, today's Internet.)
> I think what she's saying is that if you were part of this group, the early Internet seemed welcoming and inclusive, but if you weren't, it was the opposite. From within a community it's easy to feel inclusive!
Arguably, the people who weren't "in the group" at that time were people who weren't interested or didn't have access. Internet was neither global nor cheap nor popular back then.
As for the misogyny angle, I feel either she fixated herself on a problem and is projecting, or this remark was included to signal allegiance with the social justice crowd. As it is now, the comment reeks of antiintellectualism.
> It must be a lot worse for people who are not white or male.
I don't think it was back then, because back then people didn't care much about it, and a lot of communities of post-university Internet were text-only pseudonymous communication anyway. As for what's today, increasingly it's being white or male that makes you out of place in a hacker space.
> a lot of communities of post-university Internet were text-only pseudonymous communication anyway
So is this. Which is enough for you to spread the old, tired, harmful, and incorrect trope that "people who are not in tech are just not interested". A text-only discussion of how women or minorities don't belong because they don't want to belong is unwelcoming in itself.
> As for what's today, increasingly it's being white or male that makes you out of place in a hacker space.
You are twisting my words. For one thing, I don't feel "out of place" among non-white non-male people. People are people, I'm not afraid of them because of the color of their skin or what I guess their genitalia are like. For the other, all the hacker spaces I've seen where I didn't feel welcome had large white male majorities.
Yes. And I don't know what your race or gender is, nor do I care, nor would it make a difference if I knew.
> Which is enough for you to spread the old, tired, harmful, and incorrect trope that "people who are not in tech are just not interested".
At this point in time today, not only it's not a tired trope, it's pretty much an obvious truth. Programming today has zero structural barriers to entry, minimal capital requirements, and unprecedented amount of affirmative action targeted at all kinds of minority groups. If in 2019 you aren't programming, you're either not interested in doing so (a fine choice!), or can't (due to economic or health constraints).
Still, I was talking about the times where the Internet was a peculiar things only particular types of nerds, discriminated against in the physical world, ever found interesting. Getting on-line, or into programming in general, required more effort and money - you had to convince yourself or your parents that a PC and a modem and future phone bills were useful expenses - and didn't yet offered obvious paths to riches. If you were in there, it meant you were interested and had wealth to spare. That means, obviously, that a lot of people were excluded.
But if the point you're making is that any group with barriers to entry will exclude someone, then I don't see the point of making that point.
(You'll also notice that all the talk of the tech being unwelcoming started only after commercial Internet exploded and some of those high-school oppression targets made a shit ton of money and influence. Once tech became seen as the easiest path into money and fame, people started asking "how come the population of tech workers isn't uniformly distributed across all the characteristics you could think of", and people who were underrepresented followed that with "how can we fix it so we too get a piece of the pie?".)
I see some people on-line have a peculiar definition of what it means for a field to be welcoming - not only it has to remove all the barriers to entry, but it also has to bend over backwards to make the demographics uniform. It's true that the tech, until recently, didn't do the latter.
With a massive change like this, there must be some sort of societal shift behind it. You don't have to buy the article's thesis regarding the concrete reason. But there was something going on in society that changed young women's minds.
But "society pressured me into losing interest" is not the same as "I wasn't, our could not have been, interested in the first place". So yes, many women "aren't interested" in the trivial sense of "we had enough discussion threads in HN and elsewhere signaling that they shouldn't be interested, and finally this perception stuck".
> If you were in there, it meant you were interested and had wealth to spare.
If we agree that in many cases that wealth came from parents, there is no reason to assume that young women had less of it than young men. Unless there were factors like parents saying things like "computers are for boys". From the article above: "In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers."
If you were in there, it meant you were interested (check), your parents had wealth to spare (check), and you were very likely a boy.
Anyway, all of this has been rehashed many times before, and we're unlikely to change each other's minds.
> For one thing, I don't feel "out of place" among non-white non-male people
This seems like your own biases are your worst enemy then. So a predictor of your comfort is the non-white, non-maleness of the group? I wonder what this predictor would be called if it was black men that made you feel uncomfortable?
You really feel equally "in place" among a group of Hmong women as you do among a group of Honduran women as you do among a group of Nigerian women, but you can't get settled in a group of Russian women?
Yes, I'm familiar with denying the antecedent. I assumed you weren't just making the "I'm comfortable around non-white, non-male people" as a logical declaration in the vacuum, and not part of any point.
> For whatever it's worth, even though I am a white male nerd myself, I never really felt welcome in "hacker spaces" and such.
I never really felt welcome in my university sci-fi club, and only went a couple of times. Looking back, I realise it's because I was cripplingly shy rather than through any fault of the other people in the club. (In fact some of my good friends now were in the club at the time!)
I think this kind of thing is more common than usually acknowledged, especially in this kind of discussion. It's one thing to feel out of place or unwelcome, it's quite another to lay sole responsibility for your feelings on the people around you.
I agree that shyness is a huge factor. I don't think that I wrote or suggested that I'm laying responsibility for my shyness on others.
Shyness is a thing, and it can be hard to overcome. And harder still if you are shy and you are not a white male in a white male dominated community. If the community wants to be inclusive, it has some responsibility in communicating who is welcome and what is offered to help newcomers overcome their shyness.
Seems like "Amy" missed out on that unique moment in history. I joined in the early Slashdot days and the occasional mailing list, and was fascinated how sophisticated the discussions were. Knowledgeable people went great lenghts to prove their points and didn't hesitate to tell others they were wrong. Up-and downvoting comments worked. Usernames were pretty much anonymous and and arguments had to stand on their own merit. I felt like finally there was a medium where reason and facts could prevail. Finally!
But Amy's world has won, the social web is a popularity contest, discussions are group-think and emotion-based, "white male nerds" can be ridiculed. Tragic.
Hmm. When was the golden age of Slashdot? Because I was active in the late 90s up to the early 2000s, and it was already showing the faultlines of the present day. Posting of shock images (goatse was invented there). "GNAA". Trolls got downvoted, but they maintained their own culture down there in the negative comments.
It was always a popularity context. The groupthink was so bad that adequacy.org could very effectively parody the obsession with Linux and AMD, as well as other tropes.
It looked like a golden age because "we" had a community that was "ours", but the only reason it was "ours" was that a lot of people invisibly bounced off it.
If there was a golden age, it ended somewhere between the Columbine shooting (remember /.'s response to that?) and 9/11. The response to that by Adequacy parodies so many comments before and since : http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
> Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.
Now that you mention it, I too remember the problems. To an extent I do consider them growing pains for a new medium, people trying to break the system in a childlike or hacker way. I also enjoyed the raw-ness of the new medium and accepted the "noise" as so many +5 rated comments were infinitely better than what you were able to read in a newspaper or magazine.
Trolling was in it's infancy and at least labeled as such. Today it's organizations successfully influencing elections through social media. And I do think the discussion of events was more nuanced and objective than today, the parody you've linked is actually a pretty good outline for a comment, better than most 140 character tweets.
Note: this applies to new updates to Java 8, as a result of the upcoming Java 11 taking over as the LTS version. Oracle is not charging for Java in general.
As a result the headline and article come across as a bit FUDdy to me.
An AI doesn't need to be upset at humans (or even have emotions as we know them) to be dangerous - it just needs to be powerful and to not care about us as much as we care about ourselves. Humans weren't angry at Dodos.
The history of animal domination has usually been additive in terms of cognitive systems... pure circulatory system animals were bested by animals with an endocrine system. Those were bested by animals who added a nervous system, who were bested by those who added a brainstem. Then the cerebellum and the cerebrum were added... you notice there aren’t giant cerebrums running around ruling the world, they all kept their endocrine systems intact.
I don’t see any reason to think AIs will be different... it’s the ones with all that PLUS machine learning that will be vying for dominance.
And so there’s no reason to expect our overlords to be emotionless.
