from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...
I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war is over isn't going to be very effective.
I think Stallman figured out early on how much he valued collaboration over competition, and liberty over authority; and moved on naturally from there.
Sure, I would argue that good hygiene is a useful tool for liberal collaboration, but that doesn't make his behavior ideologically inconsistent.
I don't think Stallman cares about that nearly as much as you do. He already resolved that problem by making his work about collaboration instead of competition. That's really the whole point of free software in the first place.
Of course, that doesn't mean I'm here to encourage idiosyncrasies. My entire point is that you aren't going to win such a person over with an appeal to authority, because that was their point already.
I want the least friction possible when using my computer. As a user, the biggest complaints I have about the App Store were not being able to buy an ebook directly from the Kindle app and other restrictions on buying digital content from the app because of Apple’s rules. That’s a least temporarily been fixed in the US because of the judge contempt order.
As far as the 30%? It came out in the trial that 90% of in app revenue is coming from pay to win games. Why should I care about them?
The small Indy developers are paying 15% - the very few who exist and are successful
Perhaps "Faustian computing"?
> otherwise why would the user even get them?
Why does a moth fly into a flame?
Sources of light which are physically close disrupt this instinct.
"Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum—
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
[...]
Drum hab ich mich der Magie ergeben,
Ob mir durch Geistes Kraft und Mund
Nicht manch Geheimnis würde kund;
Daß ich nicht mehr mit saurem Schweiß
Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß;
Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält,
Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,
Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen."
Actually, I think you got it backwards: Anti-personnel mines are highly problematic especially when they are not needed anymore. They often linger in the ground for extended times after a conflict and are a cause of death and injuries in civilians, who just want to live their lives. Contrary to this, anti-personnel computing is problematic in the times when civilians are incentivized to use it.
When immediate survival is at stake, the future is heavily discounted. Slow and channel the attacker now, and consider the demining cost later - if you survived the war.
Utility of anti-personnel mines is at system level of state war (no human-level participant meaningfully "wants" its effect on another human).
Utility of anti-personnel computing is the same -- compute resources used to benefit of system, but to detriment of human actor below.
The difference is we don't equally understand the battle damage we take to our minds the way we understand battle damage to our biology. This might change though
EDIT: but yes, there are some differences thru this lens that make the metaphor a bit strained
That said, I think more lovecraftian horrors that have taken on their own life, aided by the human creation of corporations...
I don't recall where I first saw it, but this is fairly apt :P
---
Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?
Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.
Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.
---
Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?
Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.
Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.
All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.
The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.
I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.
You'd probably enjoy reading Charlie Stross' "The Laundry Files" series of novels, then.
Related: the scene in Bojack Horseman:
"And this time, it's personnel!"
'Uh, shouldn't the line be, "It's personal"?'
"No, because it's like, he's saying it's an inside job, so, personnel."
If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers…
anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to target, harm, control or neutralize individuals
Anti-personnel describes more precisely, the perverse prioritization of a 3rd party's goals over the end user's goals.
The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.
Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism.
It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast.
Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine.
It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.
Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history
Regardless, this is a commentary on the state of the web, not my personal usage of it. The vast majority of people do not block ads, otherwise they would not make money. If everyone did this, these sites wouldn't even work in the first place at least in the way the web is currently designed, which is part of the entire problem.
If you're not going on the web to have ads lobbed at your head, and you can reasonably expect there to be a ton of ads, so taking precautions and installing an ad blocker makes sense.
Expect? Yes. Reasonably expect? I'd dispute that: ads aren't inherent to much of the web (advertisement archives and classifieds sites being exceptions).
You can run an ad blocker that completely removes ads, so you don't have to interact with them at all, and it's an improvement. Try to run a baseball blocker, and you've ruined the game of baseball. The risk of injury from a baseball is a consequence of the presence of baseballs, thanks to physics; and the harm from advertisements is likewise a consequence of their presence, yet there is no reason for the latter to be there to begin with!
Getting hit with is a baseball isn't inherent to much of the game of baseball (aside from enforcing unwritten rules, apparently), but it's still a thing that one can reasonably expect to happen from time to time.
While I agree, yes, ads aren't necessarily inherent to much of the web, that's not the world we currently live in. We could live in that world, eventually, with either legislation or some tech advance that completely destroys the ad industry's ability to target ads, but right now one can reasonable expect that they will encounter ads on the web. Knowing that, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to use an adblocker if they're complaining about ads on the web.
(I think we're using "reasonably" in different ways - I mean it as "something that someone involved with an activity knows can happen" (something that's reasonably foreseeable), like being hit with a baseball while playing baseball, as opposed to "it is a logical and good thing that something is happening", such as web advertising.)
What does this mean? "Quite" does not fit in there for me.
Is there some other meaning you had in mind when asking this, or was this a pedantic question?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)
>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.
Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!
And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!
My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and location can be used to use public data for specific purposes alone.
You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number.
It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers not from people living there or even similar faces and devices seen around similar crimes.
I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to purchase shoes.
Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications for job offers that fit our resume.
I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.
Tepix•9mo ago
An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough?
--
¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
aleph_minus_one•8mo ago
I had this discussion with other people who deleted their account at some website that can be considered "social media" in a broader sense. They told me that the reason why they deleted their accounts was that they realized that these bursts of dopamine rush that they got from the respective site was not good for them.
I, on the other hand, have never felt this kind of dopamine rush, even though I was a likely even more active user on the respective site. My reason for really wanting to delete my whole account was "purely logical" (I hated a lot of decisions that the respective company made).
What I want to tell with this story is that I thus see strong evidence that the "sensitivity" of people for dopamine rushes from websites/games varies a lot between people (and I am very likely one who is at least "mostly" immune to them).
Really: if I had to name one thing that gives me dopamine rushes that are so much more intense (I would say: "multiple magnitudes more intense") than any dopamine rush that I got from any social media site that I visited, then I would say "understanding deep mathematical proofs and strongly simplifying them" (but I agree that these dopamine rushes are earned much more toughly :-) ).
benzopaladine•8mo ago
I think susceptibility to negative emotion is relevant too. Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.
flobosg•8mo ago
A literal translation (the pressure of suffering) sounds more meaningful to me.