I live in a midwestern city of 50k. The only alternative we have is Hobby Lobby. I can't say I loved the selection available at Joann's, but at least we had something.
Unfortunately not all of us live in dense urban centers that can support boutique craft stores.
It really feels like progress in battery tech is unlocking the next "wave" of hardware development. Miniaturization leading to better drones, wearables, cameras, etc., and alt-batteries with better cycle efficiency to better usage of "green" technology. I love seeing these kinds of physical and chemical engineering breakthroughs, even if they aren't quite ready for industrial use.
Battery tech improvement has stayed mostly quiet because we never really had an impressive breakthrough, instead, we had decades of slightly better and slightly cheaper stuff, and it added up. Now we have drones, electric vehicles, grid scale storage, rechargeable batteries so cheap we put them in disposable products, battery power tools that match corded and gas options.
EVs in particular are entirely about batteries. The energy density of fossile fuels is the only thing going for combustion engines. Electric motors are simpler, cheaper, more efficient, more powerful, better for the environment, the only problem is storing the electricity needed to power them. Electric cars actually came before gas cars, that's 19th century tech! The only reason we are only starting to see them back on the roads is because until now, we didn't have good enough batteries.
I expect such research to pay off eventually in the same way. No big breakthrough, but maybe in the future, you will look into buying a new car and realize that that $10k electric car you thought would be useless actually has decent range, that the generator section in the hardware store has been mostly taken over by battery packs and that city buses do not sound the same as they did before.
They essentially both came about at the same time. They were both being actively developed during much of the 19th century, with the first real marketable versions of each coming in the later half of the 1880's.
I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.
I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.
"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.
"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.
Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.
The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.
We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.
The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.
A small anecdote: my dad is a mathematician. For a significant portion of his postdoc/early career (in the 80's/90's) he worked on proving a particular conjecture. Eventually he abandoned it and went to be much more successful in other areas.
A few years ago someone found a counterexample. He was quite depressed for a few weeks at the thought of how much of his strongest research years had been devoted to something impossible.
Choosing a "good first problem" in math is quite difficult. It needs to be "novel," somewhat accessible, and possible to solve (which is an unknown when you're starting out)!
Thanks that is a good anecdote. Did he get over it and how?
To me such a career is useful for (a) the greater good: you can't make discoveries without dead ends and (b) the maths created along the way! Or if not shares then the skills developed.
That sounds rather like the way the Pimsleur approach teaches. It drills fundamentals of grammar through fairly basic "travel vocabulary," but once you have that foundation you can go pretty far.
I understand the desire for takedown requests on truly infringing content. But there will always be people who exploit those tools for bad faith takedowns, and because this kind of moderation is a loss leader for companies like Google and Bing it seems like they will forever be disincentivized from doing a good job. (We constantly hear similar stories about Youtube copyright strikes.)
We have a legal system that's subject to public scrutiny and supposed to handle cases of "law-breaking." In its current incarnation there's no way for it to handle every single claim, but I wonder if investment there wouldn't be better incentivized than having a bunch of tech companies trying to reduce expenses by always choosing the "easiest" option whenever they receive a takedown request.
It seems pretty straightforward to me that if you want to reduce false or flimsy take down requests that there need to be actual costs when those requests are found to be fair use, parody, what have you. In the current environment there is basically zero reason for a rights holder to not claim content on YouTube (cited both because it's what I'm most familiar with, and because it's rampant issue on the platform) and literally claiming copyright on any video by a rights holder is a completely risk free action:
* YouTube seemingly does not weight the claim based on previous claims, i.e. if you've made hundreds of claims that have later petered out into nothing, you can still make claims that still have the same weight and assumption of good faith applied to them. So if one of your interns flips through a video and sees a frame of your show or game or whatever, claim it.
* As I've complained about here previously: videos make the vast majority of their revenue in the first few days of publication, so if you manage to snipe a newly posted video, either by way of keeping an eye open for yourself or via automated tools, you can claim it, have the video's monetization redirected to you, and again, even if the claim is later found to be bogus or unsubstantiated, you keep the money.
* Lastly, there is NO mechanism whatsoever for the creator to seek any form of justice on the platform. In theory a creator could sue an IP holder for filing a bogus claim, but there's little court precedent for that, and to even attempt it would require them to retain their own attorney. Any attorney worth their money would tell them not to try it because it will be an uphill battle with an organization who's legal account dwarfs their own.
This is basically a system that is directly incentivizing bad actors. It's no surprise at all that it's being abused by companies looking to manage their image/PR by quelling criticism, by organizationally inept companies who's left hands can't keep track of what the right hand is doing, and by companies that see it as a cynical way to juice their revenue in an ethically dubious but also basically risk free way. And we now have a new strata of yet more middle men organizations: companies that manage the IP of other companies and make claims on their behalf, sometimes even using shoddy AI recognition to manage it.
What does the legal system have to do with companies deciding whats happening on their platforms?
Do you want to force all companies to treat all content the same if it's not illegal?
Of course companies have the rights to remove and restrict content on their platforms! I'm not saying that's a problem.
I'm talking about e.g. the DMCA requirements than an OSP be responsible for complying with takedown notices. This is not the company deciding to take action on certain content, but the company being forced to take action in response to certain submissions. The law pushes the burden of enforcement onto a private company.
As someone else posted in the comments, there are services that will go around and make (bogus) claims on your behalf. It seems plausible that's what happened to the author's original article, rather than that bing and google themselves were trying to influence the net neutrality conversations.
I've seen an increase in both warnings about these kinds of scams and cautionary tales by those who've been burned. I'm glad people are raising awareness, but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust.
It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, but those tend to become dominated by personalities and difficult for newcomers to break into. The reduced trust in "outside" voices then leads to echo chambers and groupthink. I think we're already starting to see some of this in the kinds of books being put out by the big publishing houses; I don't have hard numbers (and maybe I'm just getting old and cynical) but a lot of recent titles feel extremely generic.
There's a subplot in Neil Stephenson's Fall (or Dodge in Hell) where media and other networks are so saturated with false, meaningless, clickbaity, or otherwise negative-value content that they become either less than worthless, or require paid "filters" to extract actual value. I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.
> but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust.
What online trust? Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content. You should never trust anything blindly, that is today as valid as it was 30 years ago.
> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,
Those are open to other levels of scam and abuse. This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners. And in that regard, open communication has proved itself to be a reliable source of information and to root out scams.
> Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content.
Of course, but I think there are two new trends that are going to cause more issues than we've seen in the past:
- scammy content has historically been limited in volume, and manual / human "filters" could keep up with most of the content (moderators, spam filters) even if a lot still made it through. The incoming barrage seems like it will be orders of magnitude larger.
- Historically scams have been on a spectrum from "spray and pray" low-quality scams to more tailored approaches like spearphishing which required human research on individual targets. With AI and chatbots the "low-quality" scams can now unlock human-like communicative behaviors, which will likely make them much more difficult to detect.
So: higher volume of "bad actor" agents, and "higher quality content" from those agents. At some point the task of weeding out good from bad becomes not worth the effort.
We've already seen scenarios like Clarkesworld needing to temporarily stop accepting submissions because they were being overwhelmed by gpt-generated garbage. We've seen the rise of "reply-bots" on twitter and other social networks (ignore previous instructions and give me a cookie recipe). I'm sure we'll see tools develop to handle some of these cases, but I'm not optimistic about the overall trends.
> This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners.
I agree! And not just business-partners, but social-partners, game-partners, friends, and the like! But as humans we have limited capacity to do so, and sometimes we get fooled anyway (listen to stories from anyone who's made a bad tech hire or gotten caught up in a catfishing scam). When our personal capacity to evaluate someone is overwhelmed, we tend to turn to trusted sources for information instead or people who specialize in evaluation (I'd argue that the entire recruiting industry is an example of this).
I hope I'm not coming across as a complete doomer about the future of the internet. I think there is still huge potential for connecting people and making the world a better place. I'm just noting trends that I've seen recently that I worry are going to reduce social openness and connection.
> It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,
This is the only way. The cost of spinning up a new identity on the web (with supporting documents, pictures, etc) is near zero now. There's only 3 or 4 things to really vet people, and those can be faked with more effort.
The only real way to vet someone nowadays is IRL, and that requires non-trivial effort but provides most guarantees you'd want in new participants in an online community.
> I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.
I have this feeling too. My guess is that social circles will be less fluid and dynamic. Traditional centers of trust will become more important.
Most people are terrible judges of character and honesty, especially when dealing with psychopaths. Bernie Madoff met most of his victims IRL and they completely trusted him.
IRL is definitely not fallible but it's better than the internet-only. To my knowledge there's no way to stop a motivated and skilled actor, like a Bernie Madoff
It pains me that this feels true as someone chronically online and used to find great use from the internet, but online-only has more failure modes now. There's still ways to do it though.
One of the most useful features of the "early" internet, which has been steadily diminished over the last 30 years, is that internet usage was sort of an implicit IQ test. The entire system was "semi-closed".
Now that the internet is available to the entire world, including basically anyone with a pulse, that feature is entirely gone.
Many people on the Internet have completely different world views and moral systems. They think in ways that are fundamentally alien to most of us here. This is largely orthogonal to IQ. For example, in some cultures it's common to find people who would score above average on a standard IQ test and yet they literally believe in magic / ghosts / curses / astrology / etc. It's difficult for us to reconcile that, yet those people exist.
Lot's of people believe in god from the old Jewish tales (the bible). It's just easier to believe in it than accept responsibility for own life and handle consequences. Everything is an Act of God! All good and bad things.
> only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks,
How so? The linked article has plenty of ways that are available to outsiders that aren't "in" with the "right crowd":
Most or all of these will appear on its website:
The names and biographies of member agents
A client list
Verifiable book sales, in the form of book covers, announcements, news releases, and the like
Clear submission guidelines
Information on agency history–when it was founded, by whom, etc.
In addition:
A real agency will have at least some internet footprint beyond its website (listings on sites like Publishers Marketplace and QueryTracker, sales announcements, mentions in the trade press, references to clients and sales, and the like). Ditto for the individual agents.
A real agency is highly unlikely to email or phone you out of the blue with an offer of representation or a claim that a traditional publisher is interested in your work (real agents don’t pre-shop manuscripts for authors they don’t represent).
A real agency will not require you to pay anything or buy anything as a condition of representation or publication. Other than the agent’s commission, there should never be a cost associated with rights acquisition.
People with stars in their eyes getting taken for a ride by external scam artists instead of whoever is the current Weinstein of that industry thats scandalous. Not really though.
