Only free if you discount the costs involved in carrying out genocide against the existing inhabitants. But your point stands, that cost was frequently born by the government, so from the perspective of individual settlers it was often free.
One of the things I really miss about those days was the sense of optimism. We knew computers were getting more powerful, we knew they would change society, I hoped they could help make things better for people everywhere. What we got was lock-in and locked-down hardware, mass-surveillance, ad-driven content farms and the attention economy. There have been positives, but man. What a let-down.
IBM launched the PCjr and it was a cover story. When's the last time anybody wrote about a new desktop? I guess Apple and Framework do something interesting occasionally. Does anybody else?
Desktops are very rarely sold as complete products anymore. Basically the only market for them left is gamers who are just going to build their own from parts. Individual GPUs and etc do get articles.
The Mac mini gets quite a lot of attention considering I’ve never actually met a Mac mini user ever. Everyone picks the MacBook.
Not just "we knew they were getting more powerful". We could watch it, month to month, just by reading the ads. Every month there was an ad or three for something that I had never even dreamed you could do with a computer.
The industry has been around long enough to see itself become the villain. I'm sad for those who weren't around during its "hero" days. There was something special about running code copied from magazines, meeting and "trading" with like-minded people at early user group meetings, and having your mind blown by the computers and software that emerged from the tech heterogeneity of that time.
I appreciate my elders' experience, but do note that contemporary AI researchers and enthusiasts often feel similarly about AI advancements:
We watch AI models become better each month, not in ads, but in blogs and posts. While not making cover stories, new models do make the news. I was so excited when Dall-E first came out, I even hosted a guess-the-prompt party four years ago with what seems now like prehistoric-level generated images.
The AI industry may face more scrutiny and criticism than the computer hardware industry of the olden days, but we even have a semblance of open source communities who are trying to democratize this for everyone.
All this to say, similar sentiments still exist in the frontier, it's just that the frontier moved.
In the 80s and 90s, most of the enthusiasm I saw was from nerds who just wanted to make cool stuff and share it with people. It felt like magic to make computers do things.
Much (but not all) of the enthusiasm I see with AI today seems to be from people who think it will make them rich, powerful, and freed from the apparently intolerable burden of having to interact with other humans in order to generate and consume media.
There are a lot of nerds out there who just want to do cool things with AI and share it with people. They're just incredibly outshouted by the people who want to get rich off AI. One of the big problems with the modern internet is that the person trying to make money off something is always going to put far more effort into self-promoting than the person doing something interesting.
I definitely enjoyed the phase of AI stuff where it wasn't actually useful yet more than the current one.
* A comment I saw on HN once where some dude was excited about AI video because it let him play at being a filmmaker without having to deal with actors, camera operators, etc.
* The large number of tragic souls who install chatbot apps on their phones and have virtual relationships with them instead of actual relationships.
* Spending an evening scrolling through TikTok or other social media which is increasingly AI-generated images and video instead of summoning the willpower to call a friend or get out of the house.
* Music producers who use AI vocal generators instead of finding a friend who can sing.
I've seen things like that too, among my friends and acquaintances.
e.g.: a few months back, i was hanging out one evening in the office of a friend who works in the filmmaking field, who i saw creating a presentation to promote an upcoming film course they were going to conduct shortly.
i somehow could detect, by the words and tone, that it was probably ai-generated. he said yes.
then i told him what i intuitively felt, that using such a tool once in a while may be okay but if you use it a lot, your skills will atrophy.
same thing happened with another friend in a different field some days later.
You get what you make of it and I think your description of what we have is far too negative. You can actually get out of that oppressive world, you might not be able to use the latest hardware and may need to maintain some defence against the data parasites you describe but I'm fairly content with the situation we are in running:
- old off-lease hardware providing our services
- those services are based around free software and keep our data where we can 'see' it. No Apple-Google-Meta-Microsoft-etc accounts needed or wanted.
- older laptops, notebooks, mobile devices running free software
Content filtering takes care of the advertising and other data parasites. As to 'the attention economy' that is up to you as an individual to keep out of your life. Ditch the legacy media and you're already on the right trail, find alternatives where needed and you'll be fine.
If some product is locked down you just have to refrain from using it no matter how enticing it looks, no matter how slick the advertising, no matter how heavy the group pressure. You may have to live with your text messages showing up in a different colour on the screens of those who drank the Kool-Aid, you may have to insist on using a different communication channel than the one pushed by FaceMetabook, etc.
In short there is still a bright future for those who know how coax it from the materials at hand, you'll just have to fight the parasites who always appear in thriving ecosystems. Squash them like the bugs they are and you'll be fine unless you happen to live somewhere where the state uses repressive means to keep everyone and everything under its control. If this is the case you can try to fight it, especially while they have not achieved full control and there is still a chance of turning the ship around. If not you're probably best off by moving out of that state, the world is a big place and there's likely to be some country where your skills are welcomed.
Another view: in the past, when you started using a new technology, you wanted to explore it and find new ways to use it. Now, when you start using a new technology, you need to tiptoe around it and/or find ways to disable it.
Again this depends on the technology and, even more important, on the decision to even start using that technology. When confronted with some 'new technology you need to tiptoe around [...] and/or find ways to disable [...]' the decision should be to not use that technology. Home speakers, cloud-connected everything, data parasite owned doorbells, payment systems run by the same - don't use them. If you really want a 'home speaker' make one yourself, it won't be much worse than whatever you get when you allow one of those data parasite-produced spies into your home. Don't put a camera an microphone at your door which sends all images and sounds directly to the cloud,if you want a camera at your door make sure it only sends images to a network and storage you control.
Data technology has gone mainstream and with that it is used by adversarial actors, this was much less the case in the time of yore. There was no 'big data' because the storage and processing capacity to enable it did not exist while nowadays it is available to anyone who has the means - and those means are steadily going down. In biological terms data technology used to be a niche which was found by a group of critters which happily lived in their secluded valley until it suddenly spread over the whole world. With that came new opportunities - jobs galore for anyone who knew his way around - but also new threats, predators and parasites. That is where we are now so the name of the game is survival of the fittest. In other words, up your ante, ditch parasite technology and learn to thrive again. You'll have to swat some buzzing parasite every now and then, both the winged as well the branded variety. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.
We once envisioned a future of greater connection, with information flowing freely and accessible to all. The irony is that we've instead created a fragmented society where misinformation and scams flourish.
Apologies for a (mild) thread-jack. My opinion, one problem with our economic system is focus on short-term results, to the point that several notable companies' stock prices are completely divorced from the reality of their performance. This makes sense if the stock market is primarily a device for gambling or extracting wealth. Investors care less about the prospects of the company than the prospects of the market. I suspect this can trickle all the way down: Board -> CEO -> managers -> individual contributors, all given goals intended to pump the stock short-term, rather than build long-term results.
How do we start to care about quality, building lasting things, fundamentals? What would happen if we taxed capital gains at 100% for the first, I don't know, 3 / 6 / 9 months of holding an asset? Maybe investors would have more incentive to care about fundamentals?
Anyway, I assume I'm wrong about all of this, just looking for someone to explain why. ;-)
There’s no fixing capitalism. It’s a failed system, as Marx predicted 100 years ago. But despite that for more than 100 years almost every country in the world implementing with same disastrous results.
> to the point that several notable companies' stock prices are completely divorced from the reality of their performance.
Which companies? Because the net income and profit margin trends for the most highly valued companies have been the highest in history, for many years now.
I've heard a few things on this. One is that there were a few high profile but very bad cases in the 80s, kids getting kidnapped and trafficked with law enforcement not really willing to even look into it. The odds are infinitesimal, but the cost of the negative outcome is very, very high. Second is kids getting run over by cars. Comparatively that happens all the time. Third is a general breakdown of social connection with people in your neighborhood.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I knew multiple kids who were severely injured by cars. For whatever reason, this did not seem to have any impact on my mother's parenting and no new limits were placed on my freedom as a result. For the record though, one of the kids I knew who was hit was leaving the property of their school with plenty of adult supervision around at the time of the collision (and received a large settlement from the school).
Adam Walsh was 7yo and abducted from a Sears. His parents left him to play Atari while they shopped.
They made a movie about it in 1983. Politicians introduced new laws around it.
His father John Walsh went on to host Americas Most Wanted on TV for 24 seasons. Prime time TV whipped up a culture of fear for that entire generation.
Kids growing up with that culture are parents now. Not surprised to see these results.
My personal read on this is that everyone is still trying to recreate the "sudden success" of FAANG-like companies in their start-up phases. (Never mind how long it actually took them to become big.) Basically upper management incentivizes "big bets" that might turn into a "moon shot". Those bets are new features. You'll never get rich quick just by optimizing latency. You might get rich slowly, but how is that going to pump the stock this quarter / get me promoted?
Can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but I was pretty disappointed with the way Democrats under Obama tackled healthcare.
One of the big differences between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that Clinton was in favor of an individual mandate, and Obama was not. We still ended up with an individual mandate, which is both offensive on grounds that the government is forcing you to find and pay for insurance (not always easy on the exchange), and on the grounds that the primary purpose of the mandate is to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable.
Former Al Gore running mate and future republican Joe Lieberman is often given credit for stopping the nationwide insurance exchange in favor of state-level exchanges, again tipping the market in favor of insurers.
Ending denials for pre-existing conditions was nice, as were a few of the other details, but it felt like a far cry from the hope and change voters were promised. Mostly it exposed more-of-the-same pandering to the rich and powerful. Last I checked Medicare For All polls quite favorably.
Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect, but it had tons of positive effects and could later be improved. Republicans seem to be the only ones with a 50-year plan and the discipline to see it through.
>Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect,
No, that's BS. It was worse than nothing and probably set us back years. We'd probably have a more workable alternative at this point if not for the detour.
> with an individual mandate, which is both offensive
I find the mandate entirely inoffensive. Its purpose is not to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable. Its purpose is to avoid adverse selection, and to ensure that everyone adequately ensures against health risks, to avoid forcing others to either pick up the tab or watch people being kicked out of hospitals and die miserably.
Many years ago, my daughter (maybe six at the time), lost something semi-important to her, I don't recall what. I think it might have been her username / pictorial password card for her school network account. Anyway, we were looking for it, and she said "Dad, dad, I don't know where it is, I feel like I'm going to say a bad word".
I, having just read an article like this, said "That's ok, sometimes saying a bad word can help you process your emotions and feel less stressed. Do you want to go down to the basement where nobody can hear you, and say the bad word?"
"Yes". She goes down the stairs, I close the door, and she yells at the top of her lungs: "I can't fucking find it!". I managed not to laugh, she comes back up, "Do you feel better?" "Yes." Great moments in parenting. :-) (We did eventually find whatever it was.)
To think, you could've taken that opportunity to point out to her that saying the bad word didn't actually help her find it. Or you could've told her immediately that you heard her through the door because she yelled. Instead, you raised a casual swearer who's unaware of her surroundings. I hope nobody ever has to live in an apartment next to her.
It's comments like this that really make participating on this forum not fun.
It's a cute story. Fuck is just a word. They aren't going to grow up to be a bad person because they said it as a kid, and it's wild to say stuff like this to someone when you have literally no other context about their life or upbringing.
Your weird negativity to a stranger and implying they aren't doing a good job parenting based on them sharing a couple sentence long story is, in my opinion, a worse character trait than saying fuck every now and again. You have 0 idea what kind of kid they are raising.
I have a pretty amazing t-shirt that says "Fuck you" all over. I believe it is available in a hoodie version, too. I do not mind wearing it to the doctor's office either. Even though they may not speak English, everyone knows what "Fuck you" means.
No, but it did teach her you can't just blurt out words like that, teaching self-control. In theory anyway. And she was aware of it - the fact she removed herself etc taught her not to be a casual swearer.
The trick isn't to hide them from bad words - no matter how much censorship you apply to TV, film, youtube, whatever they will learn them. But it's to teach them when to (not) use them. If done right, they'll know they shouldn't just casually use it.
> you could've taken that opportunity to point out
Let the kids make some "mistakes", and let them think they got away with it. It gives them the some agency, it encourages them to explore and push boundaries, as long as you're there to make sure they don't cross a line they can't come back from. Light swearing is not where you need to draw that line.
It’s bold of you to critique someone else’s parenting when it’s clearly your own parents who raised the sanctimonious little cunt (not a curse, just an observation) in this conversation.
That word has a literal meaning, and it does not apply to me, nor would it fit in the context of your comment. You used it in the derogatory manner of a curse word. You can't just say "not a curse" to make a curse word not be a curse word.
Thanks for demonstrating the level of critical thinking you operate with as someone who likes to curse, though. Attempting to frame an insult as an objective reality (and at the same time insulting two other people on the basis of one internet comment) is surely less self-righteous than what I said.
I mean, if there is a pattern of her going to the basement to yell whenever, then yeah, it would indeed be bad parenting, and I would not want to live next to her either when she becomes an adult. :D As long as it was a one time thing, sure, but if she was conditioned to believe it was "the right way to swear", then nah.
That said, I could not give a fuck about who swears and who does not swear, but I do give a damn about volume.
(Says the guy who is going to get married to a Latina soon.)
Aging sucks! Obviously you can do everything wrong, and mess your body up pretty good. You can also do everything right, and just have bad luck. Lingering injury, hereditary health conditions, things add up. By the time you are in your 60s, it takes a combination of good habits and good luck to be in good shape. It's comforting to point to active older people and say "I'm going to grow up to be just like them". Just aware of survivorship bias.
Good news: most studies show that adults that do moderate exercise have a lower rate of fall-related injuries in old age than those that do little to no exercise.
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