1. There is no magic that will change human nature.

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.

4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.

Also a ban is plainly unconstitutional, people have a right to free speech, free association, and to work for whom they choose.

That feels like trading a problem for an even bigger problem. Everyone has greed but not everyone has competence. The world is in desperate need of more competence. Greed isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's regulated e.g., most people want nice stuff but don't burglarize their neighbors.

We all have conflicts of interest.

You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.

You want people in government making long term strategic decisions that steer society. They should be listening to the will of the people as to what direction to steer it. I hope we can agree on that much.

I think people forget that "regulators" though are really just large organizations that enforce/interpret laws. The obvious example is the SEC; it has 4200 employees and none of them create laws, their rules are an effort to enforce the laws created by congress using their technical competence in finance.

> You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.

That's the world we live in. Congress has been completely incompetent when it comes to regulating finance and I'd expect them to be even worse when it comes to technology.

There absolutely has to be a layer of industry specific competence (from "insiders") to make any sense of industry specific laws. I don't want insiders choosing direction though; I want congress to be less reprehensible idiots.

That boat has sailed. Those who aren't financially incentivized to push for ever more monetary easing are politically incentivized to push for it. We were one vote away from another $2 trillion of government spending and tomorrow the Fed is having an emergency meeting to address inflation. Like pouring gas on the fire while the fire department sets up the hoses.

Maybe allowing private money and politics to mix at all is the problem.

Behind the Bastards had 2 good episodes about it.[0][1]

[0]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

[1]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

At the same time, certain areas of regulation seem inevitably complex. Environmental regulations come to mind. There is an endless variety of environmental hazards and regulations must balance costs and benefits in light of the best available scientific evidence.

It's hard to imagine how this can be anything but the province of elite experts. Politicians or the private sector handling it seems like a guaranteed nightmare (and was historically, that's why we have these agencies).

Has this ever worked in any place on earth ?

Also your very notion of having a referee means applying rules made by a higher entity, which is the gov itself ? Even assuming your vision of the gov just makes fewer simpler rules and don’t change them, we fall into what we are seeing right now with the Olympics: outdated rules that are as arbitrary as it can, and fall short at every corner of reality, gamed through every nook and cranny , with everything staying in place only because the main actors have never been the participants but the countries and corporations.

You mean like a company who force an NDA on you or force you to not work with the competition? Also working at the FDA and be the one to approve a drug and then leave and work for the same company that made said drug, is just pure corruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

Self-awareness is another quality that may come with age.

Which diseases and how wide the requirement tends to be context-dependent. MMR in school, for example, is generally justified because school attendance is mandatory, so forcing people to be in an environment where a preventable disease will spread is inhumane if the spread can be stopped.

COVID-19 vaccination doesn't guarantee a person cannot become infected or infectious. It significantly diminishes spread (a person stricken with the virus and extremely symptomatic is more contagious than a person who is carrying the virus but asymptomatic; mechanically, coughing, sneezing, and gasping for air with fluid-filled lungs sprays more virus-laden particles into the air; it also seems likely that a vaccinated person who picks up an infection throws fewer virus particles in regular breathing, though the studies that I've seen seem to have mixed results on that).

The other reason to vaccinate people is load on medical services; even if someone who is vaccinated is infected, the odds they'll get so symptomatic they wind up in the hospital go way down. Hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients have far fewer resources to dedicate to "everyday" emergencies (heart attacks, car crashes, etc.)... The result being that COVID-19, left unmitigated, can cause systemic collapse of a country's health infrastructure and resulting death due to preventable conditions (because there's nobody available to prevent them).

It's easy to forget (now that most people are vaccinated) how virulent this virus is, and how severe the symptoms are, unmitigated. There's a good reason the world medical community snapped into action on this one.

But keep in mind we've had mandatory childhood immunizations for decades and almost everyone supports them.

On the plasticity of human nature, here are a few of the many unfortunate things that will never be excised from human nature: self-absorption, self-deception, groupthink, dehumanization of the outgroup.

Culture can modulate the expression of these things, and if we're lucky, mitigate them somewhat. But they never quite go away. They always find a way to manifest themselves. And it is the people who think they've transcended these things who are most at risk of indulging in their worst excesses.

If you don't recognize the durable aspects of human nature, you're setting yourself up to be at best a dupe and a mark, and at worst a monster.

Of course, I didn't believe this when I was young either.

I agree that zealotry is best avoided.

However, please note that cutting people out of discussion "because this is something you'll learn as you age" is not a great way to convince them of something (which may not be your goal).

You've ignored the majority of what I've said, including everything about how age is not a bright dividing line between the wise and the foolish.

Evidently you want to keep believing what you believe. So, go ahead and do that. I really can't stop you and don't wish to.

If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.

I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.

Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.

But I beg folks, please don't use 'weaponizing' and 'freedom of speech' in the same sentence, because doing so renders this principle/moral into a cynical shell instead of something that is part and parcel of core democratic values (and has had an ancient political history and evolution, with many sacrifices along the way).

Everyone says that but what specifically are you looking for? What’s the social media equivalent to no smoking indoors?

There's no (in the U.S.) legal precedence to regulate "misinformation" and hate speech, not because these things are good, but because they, unlike smoking, require authorities to create sets of approved and unapproved information, . There is a precedent of governments controlling harmful information and it isn't good - thus the bar should be set way high.

I'm not sure what you mean by "everyone says that." A lot of people say these are private platforms and rebut that one can always create a competitor, for example. Certainly it's a common refrain about techie communities such as this.

Tech (big and small) is regulated today and there are rules on the books which protect at least some of the individual privacy points you highlighted. [1] You, and many others, have stated that you find those rules insufficient and would like new/different rules in place.

Can you provide specific goals that address the issues that you think exist, and that law makers could use to draft new policy?

[1] https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business... and https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business...

Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.

It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

> I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile

Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Literally the approach I used when I quit smoking.

> Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Well, that sounds like something everyone can agree on. Or do you just mean your opinion is bigger than anyone who disagrees?

Most of all, don't try to legislate away everyone's freedoms because you have a problem with something.

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/internet/social-media-more-...

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.

Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.

However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.

I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.

I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.

I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.

If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.

> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.

One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)

One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.

What's an example of the anti-social media that fits the mould you seek? BBSes? email groups ?

I agree about mindless repetition of terms like misinformation and censorship. These terms are used to attack political opposition rather than advance any progress.

Yes, BBSes/forums, chats, NTP news groups and mailing lists are not "social media" in my book. It's important to note that the word "social" in social media was always a kind of marketing ploy.

(a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).

(b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid.

(c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.

Depends on which groups of people and time periods you're talking about. Many groups of people have suffered through total dystopias throughout history.

Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams:

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it.

It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.

On balance, Adams definitely had the more relaxed, froody attitude towards it all.

I feel like Instagram is utterly toxic in the materialistic ideals it spreads, but TikTok mostly seems to have been fairly harmless compared to Facebook and Twitter which just seem to be rage amplifiers.

Also Telegram groups seem to be a hive of scum and villany, but also the organising ground for people fighting for their freedom, so I don't know how I feel about it.

Young people seem to have drifted away from the "broadcast" social media systems and towards messaging systems, but as a middle-age person without teenage kids I suspect I'm probably being naive.

I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.

The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit.

I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.

First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works.

Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day.

As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".

This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs.

There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have.

I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.

This attitude is setup as an unfair game. Instead of just living our lives alongside time, we are actively fighting against the time we have and wanting to make every second count.

We then go to these platforms to find some sort of social validation and compare ourselves to others in the process. This makes us more lonely than ever. That gives us some sense of failure in our own lives as we might not be as successful or as far along in our journey as other people who are publicly sharing theirs. It's a losing game. The house always wins.

It's not about blaming humanity or ourselves for letting it get this bad. It's about taking drastic action today to do your part. Practice digital minimalism and have digital sabbaths on the weekends. Only use technology when it's necessary for you. Find better ways to spend your time on things you're truly passionate for. It's a long journey, but it sure as hell is worth it and makes you happier.

For example, there are decentralized social medias built on gossip protocols and mesh networks, and ipv6 that are creating participatory platforms and economies.

There are also a variety of alternative fuel, permaculture and solar punk groups creating living environments that are sustainable.

Join up with them. Our physical needs are minimal, our cultural needs are to help one another.

Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).

This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).

I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.

A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.

It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.

Tech is what you make of it. It was depressing to tune back in and see what a mess the Web was with advertising destroying most sites. Support has gone to the birds. You used to be able to get hold of humans who could help you. Now, you're just fucked, there is no way out.

AI is starting to get scary, like we might actually make an AGI that destroys us. Even now you can do some fucked up shit using GANS to create fake videos. Take this for instance - we know Tom Cruise is fake, but is Paris a deepfake or real? I cannot tell, and I've worked in CG:

https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182...

This shit gets better, not yearly, but monthly. Soon it'll be possible to fake anything of anybody. So AI is already taking us towards destruction. Perhaps we can turn it around and AI can be used to save us. I hope that's the end game.

Without tech though I couldn't do some awesome things, like see my loved ones on video chat half a world away. So, it's not all bad...!

Aslo check out stuff like Pinker on war https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli... and Ridley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo It's easy to think things are getting worse because that's what the press reports because 'horror crash' get's more clicks than 'things not bad really' but if you look at history they are getting better in most ways. For instance as to things getting Orwellian, Orwell was writing after the holocaust, WW2 and communist famines killing tens of millions. Facebook ads are quite mild in comparison.

Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies.

The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.

The three projects chosen for the argument were started by companies, but let's dig a bit deeper. Kubernetes wouldn't be possible without container technology, enabled by modules contributed to Linux, and Linux did not start in a company, but rather by a student at the University of Helsinki. Pytorch wouldn't exist without Python, which was started at CWI (another research institute) in the Netherlands. Heck, we are having this argument over a protocol developed by CERN. The references seem to indicate a bias towards machine learning, but I can tell you that the researchers working on these tools would still be doing so at a university even if the companies weren't bankrolling the salaries, and even though they are at a company, they still act as if they are in academia.

Thus, I would claim that saying "most of the open source tools today are not coming from academia" is short-sighted at best. The revolutions are happening in academia, where it is safer to do more greenfield research, as opposed to working in a company where you have to have a shorter runway to profitability.

"The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc."

IMHO, the problem exists on both sides. Yes, someone needs to pay to keep the lights on, and consumers should be expected to pay a nominal fee for some services. But they shouldn't need to pay with their privacy, or by shady manipulation, or by disingenuous EULAs. I don't know the solution, but I do know that cookie tracking isn't it, nor forcing people to watch ads with eye tracking like MoviePass is suggesting, nor surreptitiously spying on people's watching habits to subsidize TVs.

My point is that the by-product of big tech is a useful set of tools which would not exist without substantial R&D investment subsidized by revenues from ads.

Also, I am looking at reality vs what should be. If given an option, consumers would not pay, not even 0.99. This is reality. I.e. consumer are willing to give away their privacy for 0$ and free tools.

There is some truth in that, but think of the incredible value just in your smart phone. It's a: - weather forecaster - GPS - phone - news source - email client - gigantic resource library - pedometer - entertainment provider. Music, videos, etc. - and on and on.

All this in a little device owned by even people of modest means. It's a miracle!

Social media lets you stay in touch with friends and relatives. You can make connections that would be impossible just a few years ago.

Our lives are so much better. Sure, there is some trash, too. But rise above that, open your eyes to all the good. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

Apple has funneled $275 Billion to China [1], 10x more than what Intel got to start the Ohio fab. Gutting out American rust belt is one of the key problems in US and no one seems to care. It has brewed a whole political movement and we will suffer for decades.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all)

But why stop at the virtual world?

Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace.

Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime.

Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone

Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them

Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors.

Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release.

Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide.

Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems:

  the anthroposcene

  ecological collapse

  plummeting biodiversity

  (insects, birds, tigers)

  non-biodegradeable plastic

  greenhouse gas effect

At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms.

At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?

I'd say that those two scenarios directly contradict each other in many ways.

First of all, the cameras would have watermarks signed with private keys to authenticate the video so the deepfakes won’t matter.

Secondly, no need to prove anything, in order to do the AI thing and precrime.

And thirdly, when it comes to court cases, however you make arguments, the AI can help you make lots of plausible info for parallel construction.

I get inspired by reviewing the following things: 1. Child mortality rate over time: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country=

2. DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough signals a promising decade for the science of proteomics. Most directly, being able to predict protein shapes will enable us to discover drugs more rapidly.

3. The cost to produce PV modules: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

4. Advancement of geothermal as a potential energy source. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry who think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions.

5. Space exploration. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s Falcon 9 is at $2,600/kg.

6. The improvement in adult literacy rates over time. So much more to do here, but a literate population is one that is more likely to contribute to our global productivity and success. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=...

7. Quantum computing experiments and trails are doubling the number of qubits every couple of years right now. Quantum computing will cause a re-imagining of security and cryptography of digital assets if it becomes production grade. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073

I am sure there are many other examples. Even though I am an enterprise software guy working at Dell, the progress we made in the areas of technology that we get to work in have some contributing impact to all of these trends.

Direction of society: If you are a small player like me, you have no control on it. The best that can do is what you can do for yourself along with similar minded people. For those that are disillusioned with people in general follow the link on my profile. ( summary: if you are a misanthrope, actively from alliances with 'level-headed' people, whatever your definition of 'level-headed' may be)

Direction of technology: No comments.

There's another distinction to be made which is also useful, that between open and closed systems. The PC ecosystem in the 1980s democratized computing yet was privately funded, so I don't think the private funding barrier is impossible to overcome when trying to make progress.

One thing I don't hear much about is how any system that relies heavily on a large database produces concentration. The internet era came to be dominated by companies with huge databases.

That's different from the PC era. This is mostly just a technology yo-yo between centralized systems and decentralized systems over the years, and you have to ride out the storm when your favored flavor is on the outs.

Techno-optimists should be focused on building decentralized databases and many are. Until we've solved the problem of systems with huge databases outperforming systems with decentralized databases, concentration will continue.

LOL. Peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

I'm disabled and in the winter I can't even leave my apartment building. I get almost everything I need from Amazon and I honestly don't know what I would do without them. Their overall economic value may be negative but they sure have a lot of positive value for me.

And then, there is no public internet. Wikipedia is valuable, and it sustains itself, but we don't have public email or public blogs. Why? Expression and association are rights

Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad.

But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.

It will take a small disaster now to get back on track.

Truth. Try and find what void technology is filling and fill it with non-tech solutions

In the midst of this emerging, high-energy system-of-systems, please notice that there are other systems-of-systems also, quite vigorous. Like two painted dots on the surface of an expanding balloon, those dots are expanding away from each other, but also from all other possible dots, at once. Systems-of-systems are growing (or dying) right now, at the same time as the energetic emergence that you rightly call attention to here.

Your own stable intelligence and committed efforts, are required to steer away from these self-referential and empowered systems. Overall, I tend to agree, but differently in degree and specificity. best from California

And yet here you are sharing your thoughts with supportive strangers who will hopefully provide some meaningful responses to your concerns.

sometimes that's a small open source tool, maybe that's remembering to help a neighbor out, or going out to a public trail and picking up trash, something positive that I can do immediately and that takes my focus off the negative stuff

there's a lot of good in the world, but the little black mirror can obscure it

I believe in this causal chain

    Computers are insecure
    Which many bad actors find profit in exploiting
    Which makes new web sites a risk
    Which makes users prefer their known "safe" spaces
    Which leads to walled gardens
    Which then sell the "users" for profit to advertisers
    Which incentivizes dark behavior of those walled gardens
    Which then attract the rentier class
    Which then leverage control for more power

The Principle of Least Privilege [2] was adopted in the Unix system in a weak form. The superuser (root) account was a special privilege, which administrators and code was supposed to use as little as possible.

There were (are???) implementations of a multi-level secure systems, which saw limited application in the military, and briefly elsewhere. However, for general use, the root/user separation was widely seen as good enough.

There are now efforts to fully extend operating systems so that they can provide tools so that the users can also use the Principle of Least Privilege. I believe that eventually it will be as easy to use these as more conventional systems.

In these systems, no default permissions are given when running a program, the allowed resources, also known as capabilities, must be specified. This is similar to deciding which bank notes you are going to hand to a cashier, instead of handing over your wallet. It is up to US to demand that it be as easy for any user to do so, in a transparent way.

It is my hope, that should this model be accepted, a new causal chain will arise

    Computers will be made secure
    Which users will grow to trust
    Which will allow experimentation
    Which allows new ways of communicating
    Which don't require corporate sponsorship
    Which doesn't require the rentier class
    Which helps innovation
    Which helps society

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

30 years ago people have libraries and encyclopedias. Now billions of people take it for granted that you can have a handhold device in your pocket that has access to virtually the entire body of human knowledge.

Sure people use that device for all sorts of crap that ranges from the inane (eg "look at how amazing I am or my life is" IG posts) to the dangerous and outright harmful (eg cyberbullying, QAnon BS) but let me clue you in: I challenge you to find a point in history where this wasn't the case.

I mean a few centuries ago we were burning witches in the US. Only decades ago we had racial segregation. We had lynchings. The 20th century saw people killing millions of other people. We dropped nuclear bombs on cities. In the 19th century (and earlier) we literally bought and sold people and ripped them from their homeland to drag them against their will to a new continent.

The fact is when it comes to social media you can completely ignore it and it won't have a negative impact on your life. In fact it's probably the opposite.

I'm genuinely curious: when were things better? And why?

Tyrannical, greedy, and well-resourced psychopaths have been using technology to lead us into an Orwellian hell-hole.

Without them, all of this tech is a fantastic opportunity to empower and connect our world.

And that will happen - they've overstepped their mark and most people who matter know this already.

The real threat of technology is not some rogue AI taking over the world but human intelligence and energy being harnessed and shepherded for nefarious ends.

The second thing the computer did was model atomic explosions.

Computers are war machines first and foremost.

> IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer, the vacuum tube based IBM 701, in 1952.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History

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

Things didn't use to be name "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.

- - - -

> Oh, I remembered one less decade, it was 5.

Not to split hairs but IBM was founded in 1911.

> Things didn't use to be named "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.

Babbage and Lovelace had the idea a couple of centuries ago, but tabulating machines and the business machines IBM sold aren't quite the same thing as what we think of as a "computer" today. Arguably the thing that most differentiates them- easy of re-programmability -is exactly what makes our modern machinery so untrustworthy.

Leaving aside the argument that accounting and tabulating are themselves tools of "the state" (e.g. the tabulating machine was "designed to assist in summarizing information ... for the 1890 U.S. Census.") can you deny that what might be called "computational supremacy" has been and continues to be a crucial aspect of international relations?

The most nefarious weapon invented previously has been around for 75+ years and was developed as far as to reach the capability of completely destroying all human life in a matter of minutes. But... it never has.

And this is despite it being repeatedly under the control of those whom are arguably the worlds greatest and most inhumane psychopaths.

That is, there must be something in human nature, or the nature of life itself, that prevents it from using technology to annihilate itself with it, even when such power is given to those most likely to use it for that.

Not to say there isn't a danger, even a great one. And I could understand being disillusioned by the present state of affairs. But, as with all such dualism, there exists just as strong a pull to catapult the other way.

Just as there were greater, bloodier and more heinous wars prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, it would seem that with such mastery of destruction comes a greater responsibility - that ultimately we rise to embrace.

I'd like to thing the hippies had a similar fallacy, where they thought they could overthrow the system with flower power (mainly psychedelic drugs).

Looking forward to the next iteration.

Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on.

Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification.

Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp.

More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together.

[1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/cons... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827

Second, yeah, kiss your ass goodbye, it's too late, and you should probably move into the woods and learn to make fire with sticks and hunt and gather. You're still going to be fucked when the climate goes wonky, but at least you'll be happy and more-or-less bullshit-free until then (unless you wind up needing a dentist or surgeon! Brush your teeth and don't jump around too much.)

Third, and this is general advice, try not to go by what the masses are doing. Humans are only really intelligent as individuals or small groups. Above a certain size (roughly 25) groups of humans are actually pretty dumb. If you predicate your emotions and outlook on the mass behaviour of humanity "you're gonna have a bad time."

- - - -

With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks.

We do have already all the technology we need to live well on this planet even with a few billion more people. We can reduce our fossil fuel use by 100x-1000x without sacrificing quality of life. Look into applied ecology (Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, etc.), and passive solar design et. al. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design ),

We also already have technology for dealing with our psychological and emotional issues. Things like Nonviolent Communication ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and weirder stuff like Core Transformation Process ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ ).

But you seem to be much more concerned with the effects of the Internet on people and culture.

> The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

Pretty much. I mean, my neighbor is into NFTs.

I don't know what you and I as individuals can do about it. To me it seems like billions of people are happy to be reduced to peasants in a newfangled techno-plantation. The lure of convenience seems to overwhelm all other principles and values.

The wedge is that most of them aren't happy, so there may yet be room to get in there and pry people from their digital thralldom. I have no idea how, though. :(

- - - -

The one concrete idea I do have is something I call "A Machine for Easy Living". It's sort of like a vertically integrated real estate development company that build (ecologically harmonious) neighborhoods and rents homes at a drastically reduced rate (like 10% of market value) with the covenant that the residents use some of their free time (freed up by lowered cost of living) to "pay it forward" culturally and economically.

My hope is that folks would spend more time doing things like participating in local government or volunteering for elder care or whatever rather than vegging out on their screens.

- - - -

I think we're seeing the emergence of vast AIs that have humans as neurons. I don't mean in the future, I mean now, right in front of us. These corporations with their unprecedented insight into the daily lives of billions of people are like nothing we've ever seen before.

I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615

Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5.

That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders.

Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future.

This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token

However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it?

No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity.

Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents?

Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people.

Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc.

We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Poverty, presumably one of the major causes of human suffering, has also declined dramatically worldwide. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

Maternal death during childbirth, child mortality, and plagues dominated peoples' lives and offered no escape other than dumb luck before the rise of technology. Superstition provided the only hope of escaping the grim reaper who was omnipresent — could strike at any time and without warning.

Mass starvation was commonplace throughout history, but is now quite rare — due to high tech farming and distribution of foodstuffs.

All of those fears have faded enormously since the rise of modernity and public health advanced tech. COVID-19 would have been FAR worse (especially to the elderly and unhealthy) than it was but for the advancements of modern tech, especially the MRNA vaccines which, through the rapid advancements of tech, were created at an ASTONISHING rate. And it was only through the presence of tech that we've all been able to continue sharing our lives with friends and family during this, the first truly GLOBAL pandemic in history.

No, I'm thankful for the rise of technology EVERY DAY, and it gives we a lot of hope to continue improving everyday life in years to come.. It's the failures of humankind individually to advance emotionally and rationally that I fear. Humans still have a lot of growing up to do before we start responding to the vicissitudes of life like responsible adults still. In far too many ways, we still behave like children convinced the best response to difficulty is to behave badly and tear our hair in despair.

Fact is, living now, with all the plenty that tech has given us, should offer more hope for a better future than ever before. Yes, tech is disruptive, as it always has been. But tech has made the world a far better place in the past 300 years, and I for one expect that to continue, once the public gets some perspective on what life was BEFORE industrialization gave us hope for a better future.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski#Industrial_...

What makes unfulfilling work meaningful is it going to yourself. When you work and your earnings are not going to a feudal lord or bank, it's worth it.

Modern finance engineering is ruining everything, and tech is beneath it.

Wait till you learn about serfdom, slavery, French revolution and so on

Just read about how a software glitch lead to conviction of people for alleged theft in the UK. This is a severe example of people being overwhelmed with technology they don't understand and I don't mean the clerks.

I don't necessarily disagree that Big Tech is driving dystopian changes in the nature of governance, but I don't think a rose-tinted view of the past is very helpful. Spying, disinformation, and corruption in the controllers of communication technologies has been a thing since the telegraph, if not earlier.

He says using technology.

>Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.

Im not sure about this emotional vampire factor.

>They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.

Good luck fixing it though. Imagine I waved my wand and made you emperor of the world. You then instant ban and shutdown these social media entities. Their stock prices go to $0. Nobody on earth had a chance of selling. What happens? Tons of retirees just got their benefits drastically reduced. Most likely all of them are headed to the job line. Too big to fail.

>For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.

Hard to prove.

>What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

Not too late, but you cant take down goliath, you have to displace it at this point.

>I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

Out of curiousity, what is your opinion of Trump?

I think Amazon has added a ton of value to end-users. (No affiliation with Amazon.)

C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you!

Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc.

It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it.

> The internet is like an opiate

Yeah

> as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions

The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.

Most tech does not serve any real utility like this. Beyond generating money through increasingly deceitful means, what does Google do nowadays? The search engine has helped turn the internet into white noise. It has essentially become the obstacle it was designed to bypass.

If it wasn't for extremely targeted and manipulative advertising a lot of tech products wouldn't have a place in the world at all.