I've been beating this drum for more than 10 years, we were not prepared (as humanity) for the changes social media brought upon us.
I'm completely aware that the same process happened for any other mass media invented, from the printing press, to radio and TV, etc. Still I had a little hope it would be a massively positive change with some hiccups, right now I'm not creative enough to see how we will get through the hiccups... There's a need for something else to bring a shared reality to us but I have absolutely no idea what that would be, I still eagerly wait for it because it's turning out to be extremely exhausting to live in the world post-social media.
Post-truth was already a philosophical question, liquid modernity takes on the information revolution with the dissolution of structures, chaotic societies living in an environment where individuals have to parse their own information, etc.
Bauman wrote about it in 2000, I read it in 2008 and it's been quite prescient.
Is that right? The past centuries seemed to have "pamphlets" widely circulated with all sorts of bullshit, that were just as bat shit crazy and widely circulated. I suppose with FB the bar is even lower, but still. Not sure I would blame the printing press or FB for human attraction to conspiracies.
Pamphlets cost money to print and distribute, and distribution channels were not fast. Most crazy people didn't have the money for widespread distribution, and the slowness of distribution meant that if some insane thing did start getting traction others could get debunking material out before the crazy thing got too far.
With social media the distribution cost is zero to the person posting, so there is no speed bump there. It is distributed in a very short time to a large number of people, so there is little opportunity to debunk it before it has taken hold.
The only real speed bump with social media is the time to write the material. That's generally much lower for the insane stuff then for the correct stuff.
Try debunking sometime if you want to see this yourself. It can take hours or days of work to write a good refutation for something that a crazy person spent a few minutes on. And then when you finish, you often find the crazy person has made a dozen more arguments and their audience dismisses your debunking saying everyone occasionally makes a mistake and pointing at the 10 new arguments that have not been debunked yet.
With pamphlets the aforementioned limitations also meant that you generally didn't see the pamphlets from crazy people far away. You mostly just saw your local or regional sources. Overall the information you received was mostly sane stuff with an insane pamphlet now and then.
With social media you get the insanity from worldwide. You might find that a large majority of your feed is the crazy stuff so even if someone writes a good refutation that would have convinced you it can easily be overlooked in the deluge of world wide craziness.
Well, sure, there are quantitative differences. But I'm not sure they add up to qualitative ones.
Take the Great Fire of London in 1666. While the fire was still raging, huge mobs made up their minds as to who was guilty, and managed to have a go at Catholics, Jews, Dutch merchants too from memory. Some of this story is here : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/great-fire-london-was... this was all while the city was burning around them, and you'd think they had better things to do than mob justice. This seems like a direct analogy to conspiracy theories about the hurricane.
Or the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn't a conspiracy theory as such, rather a proper conspiracy, but it relied (relies!) on people who believe this BS and are thoroughly convinced about racial supremacy etc. Again, all this came to be, and was hugely influential and widespread, well before the transistor, never mind a computer.
Mib violence based on bullshit seems to have always existed, and if anything the violence was, on average, worse in the past.
not only is the reach nowadays wider and the means of dissemination cheaper, but lots of regular folks have more time to "research" and spread them and even make some money in the process.
It's odd how a statement like "I've done my own research, and..." has become an indication that that person is immediately going to make a claim backed by no one else's research.
It never gets brought up, but minivans lack ground clearance. When back SUVs were on the rise in the 90s, I remembered higher ride height as a popular reason that was frequently mentioned. That and the arms race of being in the bigger vehicle during and accident.
I used to joke about creating spray on mud as my million dollar product idea. Macho up your suburban assault vehicle with some many mud splatters without getting your hands dirty.
I see a lot of very well waxed and polished "off-road" vehicles in the nearby smallish city.
I've never seen a rolling coal lifted pickup on a forest road. Actually looking dirty is not part of their aesthetic.
Yours truly, former owner of a ridiculously lifted jeep that's been all over the western half of the US and regularly went up & down dry creek beds with 1+ foot vertical drops/climbs that needed the clearance. That thing never saw a clean day. Hose it until there's no longer mud on the door handles.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dangerous jumps).
I made a basic version of this to help me pass the UK driving test, which is fairly difficult: 40 minutes of virtually error-free driving is required and the pass rate is 50%.
It's 2.5D, I used a 3D engine but the graphics are just satellite imagery projected on to a terrain map.
>> would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
The cities (at least for ETS) are a miniature version with only a couple of streets and some landmarks (in larger cities). It doesn't really come close to reality.
Yeah, it’s a weird take. NYC has extremely high car ownership outside of downtown and midtown. Then add the daily number of cars that drive into the city. More cars is not the answer.
I used to work at a .NET shop. The reason I wouldn’t personally use .NET is MS lock-in. Open source is basically non-existent. Documentation is really bad for getting anything done in a headless way. I don’t enjoy Remote Desktop or running Windows in the cloud.
And while .NET is batteries included like Rails, I just don’t enjoy using it. The docs and frameworks aren’t written for nimble startups, but slow-moving enterprise companies. I know modern C# allows me to code like Ruby/Python/JS, but all the docs are written like 1990s Java. And the frameworks are designed that way too.
.Net has been (_almost_) entirely open source for years now. The whole closed source and Windows-bound .Net Framework is a legacy thing of the past now, since .Net Core (which is now named .Net) everything but the debugger is open source. It's all on GitHub. You can do all your C# development on Linux nowadays, too, with VSCode or Rider.
I think he meant that open source third party add-on packages for .NET were basically non-existent. Not .NET itself. Your "_almost_" qualification has me concerned. Over the decades I've almost been fooled many times by Microsoft's claims of being open and/or interoperable only to find out that it's "almost".
“Freedom of speech?” You keep using that expression… I don’t think it means what you think it means.
You basically want no moderation, but for people to self censor because otherwise it devolves into garbage. That’s still moderation.
And this also presumes people would actually want to visit this site. If you give people the option of scrolling through funny videos on TikTok or getting into an internet argument with someone, they would not choose the latter.
I agree. I think stripe is complicated because accepting payments is complicated. It’s easy to start a new services that only support the 80% of use cases. Especially if you don’t have to consider fraud or regulatory requirements. But that remaining 20% is what kills your simplicity.
Good on ya. I gave a presentation a few years ago on building Promise from scratch and learned a lot in the process. I’ve always wanted to do the same for React.
I’ve done enough freelancing and side jobs to know that I didn’t enjoy and—most importantly—didn’t care enough to get better at the customer service aspect of it.
