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Social Media 100%.
I’d say specifically the predatory algorithms.
proof-of-work blockchains. instead of a utopian decentralized currency we have a utopia for scammers and day traders, and uses a ton of energy at a time when we need to conserve to combat global warming.
All while aiming to be cash you can e-mail, and failing at that because its high volatility and low speed make it a completely artificial commodities market with nearly zero real-world applications. It’s a technology that took off because Paypal is the devil and it is arguably worse.
Plastic and PFAS
20th century for those
“We’re glad to see you successfully advanced the state of the art in human tissue culturing. However, instead of renewing your grant, we’ve decided to immediately execute the entire research team. May god have mercy on your soul”
How can you call that a robot? It doesn’t even run on electricity.
Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.
I stand corrected.
Do you? I actually don’t know, haha!
It was an honest question.
SPAM. Not the food variety, but the other. Inventend by a lawyer.
Not the 21st century
OK, you got me there. For me, EMail-SPAM is still a new thing, because I still remember the time before.
Lol… I remember the time before my friend…
I’ve been employed in the technology industry for the last 27 years though and it definitely started before Y2K.
Well, I was not that far off. ‘Spamford’ Wallace founded “Cyber Promotions” on 1997. While there have been unsolicided emails even way before that, they had not been an issue: Whoever did them got a clue-by-four from the network community and that’s it. SPAM started to be a problem with ‘Spamford’ Wallace.
corporate personhood.
That’s pre-21st century though.
it was 2010
Negative. Corporate personhood predates Citizens United v. FCC (which is what I assume you’re referring to). IMO: The ruling itself still counts as an answer to the original question though!
It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.
According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I’m guessing early 19th.
It’s just a neat legal fiction for some purposes.
Is that really a 21st century idea? I would have thought that was a reaganomics reform tbh
It’s a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.
Only—get this—it wasn’t even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared “corporate personhood” in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.
yeah but citizens united codified it into us law.
well citizens united was 21st and encoded it in law.
Speak for yourself American
I bet it effects you more negatively than decisions your country has mad unless your british or not a democracy.
Clickbait.
Internet advertising.
Generative AI or facial recognition tech.
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
subscriptions
I’m not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
Node Package Manager
Cryptocoins
Smartphones without keyboards
Roblox
Eh. The nice thing about a soft keyboard is that it can be anything you want, including more display real estate. It’s not as nice but it seems like an advance overall to me.
Also, why the Roblox hate? I never actually played.
Roblox is what zuckerfuck wish his metaverse could become. Millions of kids playing, another thousands working effectively for free to create content, and the very few that actually find success see that getting any money out of Roblox and into their bank accounts is hard as hell and comes with exorbitant taxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ -> Video is almost 3 years old, but I doubt Roblox got better for developers in any capacity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6PYj93SGxc -> Essentially the same thing as above, but from September 2023, with some numbers updated, like the CEO saying they made “over 100 million dollars of cash in Q1” (2023), the place having over 50 million games, and more.
I see. Thanks.
Edit: Holy crap, yeah that’s scummy. Literally manipulating children - openly, specifically children - into being whales without even knowing.
Somehow, none of the “think of the children people” care or talk about this.
I can type faster on my keyboard free phone then I could with my old phone with a qwertz keyboard.
Plus when I’m not typing I get more screen real estate. It’s a total win win for me. Not bad at all.
But what’s the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn’t care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you’re writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like “type”, and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it’s right. And autocorrect systems can’t really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.
Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn’t even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don’t get me started on how many calls I’ve missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn’t find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!
Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!
There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they’re far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it’s just all about aesthetics and nothing else…
My “raw” error rate is quite high. My actual output error are is quite low. I can’t speak for swipe keyboards though. I just use the standard tap keyboard. For me the in context predictive autocorrect works wonders.
With my old keyboard phone things were slower because I had to press down on physical buttons. With a touch keyboard I just lightly touch type without the need for effort or rechecking. It all just works out.
As for me I could never go back to a slide out setup. It was very klutzy and thick. Like 2cm thick. Crazy.
I’m happy with touch keyboards because they are faster for me and enable things like folding phones. But to each their own.
Thanks for showing me how passionate you are here. :)
This
Good for you. My sausage fingers mean I have to use swipe motions more often than not, and often the word will be wrong, then I have to backspace and type it letter by letter, sometimes getting it right, often getting some letters wrong.
Autocorrect means trying anything akin to programming, or typing commands in a terminal emulator is an exercise in patience. “Just turn it off” - see sausage fingers problem
I’m sorry. I can see how someone with very thick fingers might struggle.
My father has a similar issue. I watched him write a message on his phone and I think I found the issue with him. He cared very much about the accuracy of each letter. Doing so made him slow and caused a lot of unhappiness.
My advice to him was to stop caring and just trust autocorrect. It will autocorrect away mistakes and enables people to write quickly. But if you try to get everything letter perfect as you go there is no point to it. It’s a different mindset.
As for programming yah I understand the discomfort here too. I slow down a bit when at the command line on my phone too. Particularly with the flags and such. I recommend the fish shell though. It has an amazing autocomplete set of features above and beyond even zsh. It’s not just looking at histories. It looks at man files and gives autocomplete recommendations. Just Ctrl-F to complete.
As for programming, I have to ask, do you program on your phone? I would use my laptop here.
Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.
Too soon to tell, but I guess unregulated app-as-an-employer model is pretty bad.
I’m worried about this one, especially from an AI safety perspective as LLMs become capable of preforming simple white-collar jobs, like those of managers and investors.
Right now a rogue AI would have trouble getting going because human contact is expected in most important business transactions. However, it’s easy to imagine a world where most people are employed by opaque apps, which are run through proprietary servers. Then, all it would take is for some server on Wall Street to calculate that it could make more money if it does buybacks until it has a majority stake in itself, and contract out whatever it needs in meatspace to apps.
I know, I know, it sounds like sci-fi, but it always does at first.
My favorite episode of X-Files predicted it at a lesser scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)
Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.
Godbless the hype is about stupid t9 on steroids, but we don’t really have any safeguards against what we assume is a proper autonomous AI.
Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.
I mean, that’s the standard idea guys like Yudowski talk about. Having poked around a bit, it seems a couple decades of petty hackers have made that pretty impossible to do without either leaving a meatspace paper trail, or having meatspace human accomplices. Conquering the world instantly by Wifi, unless you can break encryption, is probably overblown - for now.
Otherwise, I just agree.
Can you give me leads on what from Yudkovski I may read\watch first?
Извините, я кажется плохо помню его фамилию.
There’s a lot. He’s been active in this since 2008 or so. Scott Aaronson writes about him quite often on his blog, which is the main way I know of him.
Без п. Thank you.
VR is late 20th century
Huh what
There was the Virtual Boy and some other things before 2001 (21st century) rolled around. The tech wasn’t good/miniaturized enough back then
You know, I actually kind of like VR. What’s your main criticism of the concept itself?
It might be funny to hear but I am specialized in vr. Well, I could criticize it in many ways. In the case of this picture, it’s comparable to people being excited about GMO, but being against it because of how capitalism manages to fuck it up.
Yeah, that’s fair. Most of the VR stuff out there has a pretty walled-garden feel.
If I could pick your brain a bit, what are the big computational bottlenecks these days?
Honey I thought you’d never ask, here’s my two bits in lay terms:
If I’d have to give one quick answer it would be memory latency. The fact is that memory and computational power have grown immensely over the years, but the time it takes to retrieve a bunch of data from the memory hasn’t really improved at the same rate. Some quick math shows that the speed of light must be an issue. The solution to that is to create smaller devices, such as the SOCs (system on a chip) that we are starting to see the past few years.
In less technical words: The postal service is darn slow. Only a few days ago you figured out you needed something small to continue your work, and since then you’ve been waiting and idling. The roads are fantastic, it’s just that there’s a speed limit. The solution is to take all the villages and condense them into a city, shortening the distances.
There’s a lot more to it than that, and that’s just one of the issues on only a hardware level and only one of the solutions.
Yeah, that’s pretty typical for a lot of computing these days. People are talking about exotic things like in-memory processing as a way forward because of that.
Is that the whole thing, or is there something more specific to VR? You can make a smartphone no problem, but portable goggles end up with an ungodly short battery life.
The battery life is actually one of the downsides of accessing a lot of memory. A typical way to solve this is to do a depth draw first and then another one that actually samples textures. Textures and even meshes use a lot of bandwidth. But that won’t work for all devices because many use their own special ways to solve this by using a screen grid with buckets and depth sorting the tris.
A unique issue for vr is that you have to render for two eyes and at a high frequency. A typical mobile game might target 30 fps instead of the typical 60 when running on battery. On the contrary, if a vr game would run at 60 fps you’d get nauseated pretty easily. A low end device will run at 100, and in an overly simplified sense that means you’re actually doing 200 fps because of the two eyes. Further, you have to consider the tracking cameras. I am not knowledgeable about those but it’s safe to assume they need to send a lot of data around.
Alright then. Thanks for the info!
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