This Is Not the Future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_House_of_Brande...

It had huge impact on world history: it indirectly lead to German unification, possibly to both world wars in the form we know them, it probably impacted colonial wars and as a result colonial impact and at least the territory of many former colonies, if not their populations.

I'm fairly sure there were a few very close battles during the East India Company conquest of India, especially in the period when Robert Clive was in charge.

After Wilhem I died at 90, his liberal son Frederick III died aged only 56, after a reign of only 99 days. So instead Germany had Wilhem II as the emperor, a conservative that wrecked all of Bismark's successful foreign policies.

Oh, Japan attacking Pearl Harbor/the US. If the Japanese Army faction would have won the internal struggle and had tried to attack the Soviets again in 1941, the USSR would have probably been toast and the US would have probably intervened slowly and indecisively.

I can't really remember many others right now, but every country and every continent has had moments like these. A lot of them are sheer bad luck but a good chunk are just miscalculation.

History is full of what-ifs, a lot of them with huge implications for the world.

>Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political?

I am much closer to agreeing with your take here, but as you recognise, there are lots of political aspects to your actions, even if they are not conscious. Not intentionally being political doesn't mean you are not making political choices; there are many more that your AI choice touches upon; privacy issues, wealth distribution, centralisation, etc etc. Of course these choices become limited by practicalities but they still exist.

Resisting the status quo of hostile technology is an endless uphill battle. It requires continous effort, mostly motivated by political or at least ideological reasons.

Not fighting it is not the same as being neutral, because not fighting it supports this status quo. It is the conscious or unconscious surrender to hostile systems, whose very purpose is to lull you into apathy through convenience.

This is also my core reservation against the idea.

I think that the belief only holds weight in a society that is rife with opposing interpretations about how it ought to be managed. The claim itself feels like an attempt to force someone toward the interests of the one issuing it.

> Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political? Is it political because of power usage and ongoing investment in gen AI?

Apparently yes it is. This is all determined by your impressions on generative AI and its environmental and economic impact. The problem is that most blog posts are signaling toward a predefined in-group either through familiarity with the author or by a preconceived belief about the subject where it’s assumed that you should already know and agree with the author about these issues. And if you don’t you’re against them.

I think that this is speaks to the present problem of how “politics” is conflated to additionally refer to one’s worldview, culture, etc., in and of itself instead of something distinct but not necessarily inseparable from these things.

Politics ought to indicate toward a more comprehensive way of seeing the world but this isn’t the case for most people today and I suspect that many people who claim to have comprehensive convictions are only 'virtue signaling’.

A person with comprehensive convictions about the world and how humans ought to function in it can better delineate the differences and necessary overlap between politics and other concepts that run downstream from their beliefs. But what do people actually believe in these days? That they can summarize in a sentence or two and that can objectively/authoritatively delineate an “in-group” from an “out-group” and that informs all of their cultural, political, environmental and economic considerations, and so on...

Online discourse is being cleaved into two sides vying for digital capital over hot air. The worst position you can take is a critical one that satisfies neither opponent.

You should keep reading all blog posts with a critical eye toward the appeals embedded within the medium. Or don’t read them at all. Or read them less than you read material that affords you with a greater context than the emotional state that the author was in when they wrote the post before they go back to releasing software communiques.

> For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.

> A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/12/13/lovely-but-dangerou...

I do wonder who the AI era's version of Marx will be, what their version of the Communist Manifesto will say. IIRC, previous times this has been said this on HN, someone pointed out Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.

* Policing and some pensions and democracy did exist in various fashions before the industrial revolution, but few today would recognise their earlier forms as good enough to deserve those names today.

The mistake is pushing it too aggressively, instead of judging on the result of the job itself.

There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.

However, I support ~80 non-technical users for whom that update was a huge benefit. They're familiar with iOS on their phones, so the new interface is (whaddya know) intuitive for them. (I get fewer support calls, so it's of indirect benefit to me, too.) I try to let go of my frustration by reminding myself that learning new technology is (literally) part of my job description, but it's not theirs.

That doesn't excuse all the "moving the deck chairs" changes - Tahoe re-design: why? - but I think Apple's broad philosophy of ignoring power users like us and aligning settings interfaces was broadly correct.

Funny story: when my family first got a Windows computer (3.1, so... 1992 or '93?) my first reaction was "this sucks. Why can't I just tell the computer what to do anymore?" But, obviously, GUIs are the only way the vast majority will ever be able to interact with a device - and, you know, there are lots of tasks for which a visual interface is objectively better. I'd appreciate better CLI access to MacOS settings: a one-liner that mirrors to the most recently-connected display would save me so much fumbling. Maybe that's AppleScript-able? If I can figure it out I'll share here.

Anecdotally, I hear lots of people talking about the short attention span of Zoomers and Gen Alpha (which they define as 2012+; I'd actually shift the generation boundary to 2017+ for the reasons I'm about to mention). I don't see that with my kid's 2nd-grade classmates: many of them walk around with their nose in a book and will finish whole novels. They're the first class after phonics was reintroduced in the 2023-2024 kindergarten year; every single kid knew how to read by the end of kindergarten. Basic fluency in skills like reading and math matters.

More generally I think the problems we got into were inevitable. They are the result of platforms optimizing for their own interests at the expense of both creatives and users, and that is what any company would do.

All the platforms enshittified, they exploit their users first, by ranking addictive content higher, then they also influence creatives by making it clear only those who fit the Algorithm will see top rankings. This happens on Google, YT, Meta, Amazon, Play Store, App Store - it's everywhere.

The SEC was decently anti-crypto for quite a while, basically until Trump 2. It was following an established strategy of going after the worst actors to establish case law to underpin rulemaking that would therefore be less vulnerable in court once made. In finance you can assume defendants will be well-funded so it's not the dumbest strategy.

It of course made nobody happy -- the anti-crypto crowd thought it was nowhere near aggressive enough, while everyone in crypto was crying a river about the "unfair" and "corrupt" SEC "doing Wall Street's bidding" by making things hard for pump-and-dumpers.

Meanwhile, in marked contrast, Bitcoin itself was more or less given a clean bill of health as long ago as 2012, when FINCEN ruled that miners were not money-transmitters. Say what you want about bitcoin, but it's not transparently a security like pretty much every NFT and most leading altcoins.

Anyway that's all ancient history now since Trump 2, although Gensler had already more or less lost once the Bitcoin ETF was approved. Tradfi seems to love crypto now, what could possibly go wrong?

Lol. Permissionless payments certainly have utility. Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility. Buying stuff the government disallows, often illegitimately, has value.

Any outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist outside scams and fraud. Your inability to imagine or dismissal of those is telling as to your close-mindedness.

The idea of a universal, anonymous digital currency itself is old (e.g. eCash and Neuromancer in the '80s, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in the '90s).

It was inevitable that someone would try implementing it once the internet was widespread - especially as long as most banks are rent-seeking actors exploiting those relying on currency exchanges and un-banking/financially persecuting undesirables was a threat.

Doing it so extremely decentralized and with a the whole proof-of-work shtick tacked on top was not inevitable and arguably not a good way to do it, nor the cancer that has grown on top of it...

Imagine new coordination technology X. We can remove any specific tech reference to remove prior biases. Say it is a neutral technology that could enable new types of positive coordination as well as negative.

3 camps exist.

A: The grifters. They see the opportunity to exploit and individually gain.

B: The haters. They see the grifters and denigrate the technology entirely. Leaving no nuance or possibility for understanding the positive potential.

C: The believers. They see the grift and the positive opportunity. They try and steer the technology towards the positive and away from the negative.

The basic formula for where the technology ends up is -2(A)-(B) +C. It's a bit of a broad strokes brush but you can probably guess where to bin our current political parties into these negative categories. We need leadership which can identify and understand the positive outcomes and push us towards those directions. I see very little strength anywhere from the tech leaders to politicians to the social media mob to get us there. For that, we all suffer.

Co-ordination problems are the hardest problems.

What i dont like about this sort of article is that it fails to come up with _any_ meaningful ideas on how to convince others to "just say no"

My personal experience is that most people dont mind these things, for example short form content: most of my friends genuinely like that sort of content and i can to some extent also understand why. Just like heroin or smoking it will take some generations to regulate it (and tbf we still have problems with those two even though they are arguably much worse)

Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?

If cooperative coalitions to resist undesirable abusive technology models the real world better, why is the world getting more ads?

Ads frequency goes up : more ad interruptions in tv shows, native ads embedded in podcasts, etc

Ads spaces goes up : ads on refrigerator screens, gas pumps touch screens, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, Google Search results, ChatGPT UI, computer-generated virtual ads in sports broadcasts overlayed on courts and stadiums, etc

What is the cooperative coalition that makes "ads not inevitable"?

Absolutely a cooperative game - nobody was forced to build them, nobody was forced to finance them, nobody was forced to buy them. this were all willing choices all going in the same direction. (Same goes for many of the other examples)

The really simple finding is that when you have both repetition and reputation, cooperation arises naturally. Because now you've changed the payoff matrix; instead of playing a single game with the possibility of defection without consequences, defection now cuts you off from payoffs in the future. All you need is repeated interaction and the ability to remember when you've been screwed, or learn when your counterparty has screwed others.

This has been super relevant for career management, eg. you do much better in orgs where the management chain has been intact for years, because they have both the ability and the incentive to keep people loyal to them and ensure they cooperate with each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Just because we weren't able to discover all of the law of physics, doesn't mean they don't apply to us.