Libra00

And I want Windows and all its bullshit to heck off!

Fortunately I’m winning that one so far.

PRETTY_NAME="Nobara Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)"

Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.

increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.

The word you’re looking for is enshittification.

Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.

I listen attentively to pretty much anything Cory Doctorow says about the internet and technology, he’s been consistently insightful as hell on the subject. His books are also pretty good.

For sure, I even said so.

Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt

I hate to break it to you though; I grew up during the Cold War and propaganda was literally everywhere before the invention of the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Red Scare?

This seems like a capitalism problem, not a technology problem. That endless drive to greater productivity so that others can extract the bulk of the value thereof for their own benefit instead of the benefit of everyone is a big part of what’s eating up the purported leisure-time. But also that’s a choice you can make: I choose to spend my spare mental capacity learning about how the world works and engaging with ideas about how it ought to work. If people choose to spend that extra capacity doom-scrolling social media and keeping up with the virtual Joneses or whatever then that’s on them, but I’m not here to judge, I do that sometimes too. Life takes it out of you, sometimes you just need some low-effort destressing. But the point stands: offloading labor (mental or otherwise) to technology and then turning that time/energy/etc to stuff that’s more important is just how humans work.

That’s fair, and not something I disagree with.

No, fear and hatred lead to things like MAGA and the rise of Nazis. Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt, but it is by no means the cause of those things.

The people who were used to the oral tradition were right. Memorising things is good for your memory.

Except people didn’t stop memorizing things. I went to school in the 1970s - unarguably a long-ass time after we stopped using the oral tradition as the primary method to transmit culture) and I was memorizing shit left and right. I still remember those multiplication tables, ‘in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, etc 40-odd years later.

No, I don’t think people will stop thinking altogether (please don’t be reductive like this lmao)

Sorry, I thought it was pretty clear that I was expressing skepticism at the idea that anyone actually thinks this.

But people did get worse at remembering things.

If you have evidence that suggests that people got worse at remembering things between, say, ancient Greece and the Industrial Revolution I’d love to see it.

We know that using tools makes us worse at whatever the tool automates, because without practice you become worse at things.

Likewise if you have evidence that people stopped thinking with the invention of books, the calculator, computers, the internet, etc, don’t be shy about it.

because without practice you become worse at things.

You assume that offloading some mental processes to AI means we will stop practicing them. I argue that we’ll just use the capabilities we have for other things. I use ChatGPT to help me worldbuild, structure my writing projects, come up with thematically-consistent names, etc, for example, but it’s not writing for me and I still come up with names and such all the time.

I was making an argument about should, not does, and executing people is rather different than shooting someone in defense of yourself/others.

I agree that financial crimes should have harsh penalties, just not death. The problem is that we don’t generally apply penalties to this type of crime at all; fining a company $500mil after they made $40bil or whatever by circumventing laws/regulations is not a penalty, it’s the cost of doing business.

People said it about fucking writing; ‘If you don’t remember all this stuff yourself to pass it on you will be bad at remembering!’ No you won’t, you will just have more space to remember other more important shit.

Our dishwasher broke a few years ago.

This is a bad example because going from using a dishwasher to washing dishes is not a big leap in effort required. I doubt many of the people who get to do intellectual work in offices instead of doing back-breaking labor all day on a farm because of technology would agree that going back to that would improve their quality of life. Some of them would certainly find that to be a ‘richer experience’ too, if not for the lack of healthcare and air conditioning.

Did you get the impression from my comment that I was agreeing with the article? Because I’m very not, hence the ‘It’ll definitely be true this time’ which carries an implied ‘It wasn’t true any of those other times’, but the ‘definitely’ part is sarcasm. I have argued elsewhere in the post that all of this ‘xyz is making us dumb!’ shit is bunk.

Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, ‘If you don’t remember all of this stuff yourself you’ll be bad at remembering!’, etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.

I’m old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I’ve been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called ‘terminally online’ ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I’m not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I’m reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn’t go away, it just got turned to another purpose.

Oh lawd, another ‘new technology xyz is making us dumb!’ Yeah we’ve only been saying that since the invention of writing, I’m sure it’s definitely true this time.

I mean my own counterargument to it as that no state should have the power to execute people, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on criminals, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on financial crimes. Yeah $12bil is a lot, and I am absolutely in favor of hard time as a punishment for financial crimes, but I don’t think seriously think anyone should die over it.

No, this is the way. But the above article is a good start.

‘HA ha!’ -Nelson Muntz

I dunno the UAE’s energy situation, maybe they installed a shitload of solar in the desert and are practically giving away electricity, but it still seems stupid to build anything water-intensive in a desert. I lived in Albuquerque, NM in the late 90s/early 2000s and they had a big Intel fabrication plant out there, in the desert, using so much goddamned water that they were depleting the water table. But they don’t care as long as it’s cheap today and probably cheap tomorrow. Expensive eventually because of resource depletion is a problem for future quarterly reports.