I think we’ve been spoiled by an extended era where it was possible to be truly anonymous on the internet, which is public infrastructure at its core. In that perspective it’s fundamentally worse than real life for privacy. Everything goes through centralized hardware, making it trivial to log your traffic and digital fingerprint in perpetuity. Imagine if the camera at your local park didn’t just see you enter, but perfectly stored your height, weight, shoe size, eye color, gait, etc…

From that it becomes pretty clear that the only safe way to use the digital space is read-only on socially acceptable platforms with the herd protection of the pseudo-anonymous crowd. And of course, that makes the internet much less interesting and useful, so I might as well go touch grass and talk to my friends in physically private spaces.

Well it was fun while it lasted at least… 🍻

Not if we stop tracking it 🤠

Hear me out: down zoning. We dig some deep ass bunkers and throw parks on top of them.

I’ll take a crack at it:

• It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
• It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
• It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
• It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
• It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision

[Apologies in advance for the essay]

I think your description is utopian because it distills civilization (and by extension the universe) into a stable system in an ideal balance. Any society has to exist within its material constraints and those limits invariably devolve and shift through entropy.

Socialism (and basically all early-modern political theory) was born in a time of incredible scientific advancement. It has an implicit axiom that all factors can be solved and accounted for, and by doing so we can asymptomatically approach a perfect society.

But we know a lot more now and can prove that’s just not possible. Our physical reality imposes instability on society whether we like it or not. An unstoppable, aggressive blight could destroy the agricultural output of an entire continent. Suddenly it’s just not possible to give to each according to their need and only the most insular and asocial pockets of civilization survive.

There’s no amount of creativity or human goodwill that can weather the unfathomable forces beyond our control. I mean, what happens to our carefully crafted socialist society when the earth’s magnetic poles flip. Or when the moon finally drifts away from the earth and permanently ends our seasonal stability. Or when the sun explodes or we deplete Earth’s finite resources or etc…

I don’t say all of this to be unreasonably pessimistic or nihilistic, but to point out that these ideological theories are fundamentally unsound. Our current world does desperately need these socialist policies, but dogmatic adherence to them as indelible rules is counter productive.

In my opinion we should focus on instilling basic guiding principles and solve our problems in any way that satisfies as many as possible. Some off the top of my head, in a rough ordering:

• Maximize political engagement and representation
• Minimize our ecological footprint and don’t develop an over reliance on any resource
• Preserve and extend our scientific knowledge
• Delegate labor and distribute resources as equitably as possible
• Limit restrictions on personal freedom

You’ll almost never be able to satisfy every principle, but establishing something like that as a baseline allows for good faith discussion and decision-making without the need to villify your opposition.

There’s a lot of comments about how digital devices are viable/helpful for note-taking and just as good as a pen. I think that’s missing the crucial point: virtually every device we own today is designed as a distraction machine.

A pen + paper isn’t going have any notifications or reminders or updates or emails or texts or ads or alarms or alerts. If there’s any device without those that’s as reliable and as cheap as a notebook, I’ve never heard of it.

But it’s not possible to get unbiased content on the internet. Everything exists with an agenda behind it, for the sole reason that hosting anything is going to constantly cost money.

This wasn’t a huge deal when individuals were paying to host and share content to a small audience, it was a small amount of money and you could see their motives clearly (a forum for a hobby, a passion project, an online store, etc…).

Social media is different because it presents itself as a public forum where anything can be shared and hosted (for free) to as many people as you want. But they’re still footing a very large bill and the wide net of content makes their motives completely opaque. Nobody cares that much about the headaches of maintaining a free and open public forum, and any profit motive is just another way to sell manipulation.

Trick question, we all lose

For my people struggling with no AC, don’t underestimate awnings, sun sails, and street coverings. Depending on the building and conditions, an awning could lower heat gains by multiple degrees.

So what I’m hearing is if you want to commit a violent crime just wear a hard hat/hi-vis vest and say you’re going to hammer things at work? Or put on a funny chef hat and walk around freely with your knives? Seems like the regulation only exists as fig leaf for minority profiling and harassing young people.

We’ve been in a pseudo-birth strike for decades, kids have been increasingly expensive as real wages dropped. The only thing it’s gotten us is regressive assaults on reproductive rights.

How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.

If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.

Here’s a wrench for you: the Luddites were 100% right

The theory behind DEI policies is to formally challenge personal bias (both explicit and subconscious) in hiring and participation. There’s nothing inherently tied to unfairly favoring minority groups other than the fact that they are usually the target of negative bias.

It’s a pretty basic and logical idea that acknowledges human fallibility. I hate that it was rapidly co-opted on all sides as a shorthand for racism and opposition to cis-white-male dominance.

Forget 1914. Try 1905. George Cove’s solar electric generator is remarkably similar to modern solar panels.

Maybe we just didn’t let enough children die… 🤔

Step back everyone, we’ve got an Enlightened Centrist here!

Don’t call for violence, let’s just compromise to allow a little fascism! 🤏

Nobody here is calling for purging wrong-think. There are very obvious and visible threats to our society from an enclave of people tearing it apart. You’re making a strawman to conflate targeting them with targeting freedom of thought