If saving people from malnutrition is your concern, good news; it’s still a problem today.
Perhaps we could all spend less time generating empty rhetoric online and more time engaged in what we claim to be via logic, our real concerns
It feels really disingenuous when all the pearl clutching office workers go home to video games not a soup kitchen. Spend their weekends hiking not nursing the sick, fixing poorer people’s homes.
Modern day infantilized office worker crowd is the most off putting group of people I’ve ever encountered.
Saving people from malnutrition, hunger, violence and war are noble goals. They have nothing to do with discussing, and assessing, the situation in pre-historical times or the live of tribes living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to this day.
Funny how this topic blew up in the late 00s and early 10s. Google Fiber popped up looking to push the issue
It’s sad how we’re perpetually fighting the same battles with the professional managerial class who tacitly understands their only job is block progress, thus they are miserable from it and to work with
There’s less knowledge needed to manage these systems than we want to believe.
Tech is mired in hustle culture, which means it’s generating a lot of useless “knowledge” to role-play hustle.
Over engineering re-engineering to justify business headcount, importance, and prestige is a bigger danger in tech than the one this article points out
WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.
It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.
I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.
If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.
Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.
Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?
1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.
I don't buy this "WFH makes downtowns drug-ridden war zones" dichotomy. I've been to downtown Portland before Covid, and it was pretty repulsive, just like SF. Sure, it has deteriorated in both places since, but that was not pre-determined. WFH != war zone in downtown.
These problems are so American. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more. Why do people no live in these areas?
It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.
PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.
Until recently Portland had a shitty local government structure that voters recently approved to modernize.
Former city council members often railed against it; as a member they’d be assigned city bureaus (fire, police…) to basically manage day to day.
Former members complained they were so busy dealing with office work rather than understanding Portlands problems in the abstract and crafting legislation. Also the mayor was on the council and did the same job.
The hope is the new system (mayor and council are now separate entities, city manager oversees bureaus so mayor and council can focus on legislative matters).
Also I’d like to point out every city in the US is a raging dumpster fire of homeless, collusion, graft, fraud… Portland isn’t unique and it’s hardly as bad as say PA cities. America is a shithole country full of FOMO obsessed fast fashion clothes, food, gadgets, and media and gives zero fucks about setting that aside to clean itself up. Garbage in garbage out
One or way or another, none of us are getting out of this alive. Not sure where the religious conviction we must save all souls comes from or has any value.
Even if one ascribes to this nihilist POV, it isn't an answer. We see the negative effects on communities, families, and people around addicts. Even if you don't care that people are destroying themselves, when they take out the surrounding area it is a problem we share.
Yeah and humans have seen it for centuries and failed to stop it
Who is to say any progress we make won’t be undid by another pandemic we cannot predict, or some nutter launching the nukes
We have political agents hell bent on war and subjugating undesirables, rather than pushback against them let’s focus on some people who don’t want to live?
Why not ask Oceangate how the war against physics is going. It will always win and erode any social progress we think we made
I don't think that's the goal. The goal is to attempt to reduce harm of something that removes freedom. Try asking a drug addict if they want to keep taking drugs. I suspect you'll be surprised at the answer. Stopping drugs would be like achieving abstinence as the primary form of contraceptive. Both are impossible because they work on the same soup of chemicals, but one has evolved with some form of continuation in mind. The other is a direct injection, orders of magnitude stronger, that just fucks up all the machinery of the brain.
Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.
But hey the toxic mess we leave for the future to suffer through won’t be our problem so shrug
This is the most disingenuous and self righteous thread I’ve ever been involved with. Traditional catechisms and stubbornness will win out against physical reality. RBG fans I guess.
> Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.
If the car has doors your can't unlock, and the plane forced you to fly or you die from withdrawals, both of which follow you around you're whole life honking their horns begging you to get back in, even if you do manage to stop, then your analogy could make sense.
Do you have any experience with addiction?
Having experience with the pain it causes, and not liking the idea of more families being ripped apart/abandoned due to a few milligrams, isn't self righteous as much as sympathetic. I think there's some compromise between complete freedom and "this thing completely removes freedom, so maybe it's a bad idea".
Both times my family wished for euthanization options rather than watch family rot
But patronizing high minds said no; in our society they must suffer until they die
Americans have spent so much time huffing toxic positivity whippets.
All the high minded worship and praise of the economy, tech, feeding notions of American exceptionalism has led us to believe we really can do anything
But we all can’t live forever and have no guarantee the future won’t just screw it all up again
Physics rules, not human philosophy. Reality itself is the root of our misery. There’s no eradicating suffering without eliminating humans; we cannot violate physics and the physical word fosters suffering. Erosion and entropy of all structure.
This forum is sounding way too religious. Thought it was science nerdy when I signed up but it’s just typical “America great!”
You don’t have to watch others rot just because they are alive - you are choosing to stay alive to do so, and can change your mind at any time without imposing on anyone else’s rights.
You seem to argue for ultimate freedom for others as some abstract goal while ignoring how you take from others by existing
You generate waste and increase costs by reducing resources for others
You get in the way of others free agency due to management of your mess
Just by existing you impose yourself on others. Stop pretending physical reality doesn’t apply to you an vacuous political poetry about rights waves away externalized burdens your elder self will foist on the next generation to preserve your perception of rights at the cost of them to perceive what they value for themselves
I’ve been in pain from surgery multiple times, it’s awful. You’d leave dying people in pain to suffer through it versus violate spoken tradition of the dead. Our own experiences mean nothing to you, just adherence to philosophy.
> Well we all better stop flying and driving if we’re set out to reduce human suffering.
No, we're better off regulating safety, setting increasingly strict pollution and mileage standards, and continuing to update laws to eliminate behaviors such as DUI or texting to continue to have those freedoms while limiting externalities.
Humans have absolutely stopped it in places with draconian laws. The use of heroin in Singapore, other parts of south east Asia and parts of the Middle East is essentially zero because they give traffickers the death penalty and jail the few users for a very long time. If you can truly secure your borders and you can’t grow poppy in your country there will be no heroin.
By that logic, we should remove any suicide prevention or other mental health support as well. Allowing, even encouraging, people to suffer when the very nature of their disease destroys their agency should be repugnant to everyone. Religion is a red herring here.
You won’t be saying the same thing when it’s your kid that’s “out of the way”. Making heroin easily accessible means someone that does it a handful of times is truly hooked. Your life is essentially a struggle from that point out.
It’s electron state in a synthetic machine which has learned nothing about the world through its own agency and curiosity but the “sit, stay” demands of organic intelligence.
Universe already made matter twinkle with consciousness. Humans should come up with something actually new
Artificial Intelligence has been an academic discipline since 1956. Don't get distracted by science fiction: what OpenAI do is absolutely part of that discipline.
Academics have no authority to demand others normalize to their opinions.
I went through academia. They wanted people to come up with ideas back then.
Now they want people to normalize to theirs.
It’s just people in rooms waving around prestige words. None of them have broken physics. They normalize descriptions of observation, often incorrectly at great cost to others
Characterizing them like popes and tribal shaman whose outputs are inviolable truth is really odd
The symbolic logic and leaky abstractions of academics are crude approximations, not accurate representations of reality for which even a tiny inch of space would require infinite logic to describe. The translation to human language always leaves even more detail out.
Academia is often peddling a marketing gimmick to sell society on. Academics are people looking to capitalize first
Use an app that’s already universal if users are so desperate.
Playing whack a mole back and forth over a chat app as if it’s some high minded fight for speech when countless options exist is melodrama for the sake of melodrama and engagement farming
Beeper real goal is like everyone else in tech; get rich. It found the perfect marketing meme, the old David and Goliath story, to piggyback its business goals on.
I had to purchase an iPhone solely to use iMessage. Believe me, I would have loved to use any other internet-based chat app. But I just can't move my entire social circle to a different app. The network effects and friction are too high.
The only thing end users really have control over is their own client. I don't know if they'll succeed in the long run, but I'm really rooting for beeper
Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device? That sounds just comically bad. Where is that? USA? I just checked, the iPhone market share appears to be around 57% in the USA, which is sure a lot, but still it means that every second person does not have the ability to use this app. So how comes it ends up being inconvenient for normal people, and not for iPhone users? Weird.
Seriously, I'm struggling to imagine that. It suddenly reminds me of when Microsoft had to offer users to choose something other than IE because of anti-monopoly legislation. What you are telling me about iPhones sounds way, way worse than that. After all, it's not like people had to use IE before that, they just didn't know better. There was no network effect and vendor-lock with IE.
Also, what's even so special about this app? I maybe could understand that, if it was unique. But come one, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, plain old SMS after all… And I'm not even talking about older VoIP/messengers (Skype, Jabber), community-centered apps (Discord, Slack, MS Teams) or some fringe messengers nobody uses even though they are clearly better than everything else (Matrix). By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols…
> Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device?
The problem is this isn't how a non-technical audience views the problem. To them, they get a fully featured chat (rich media, reactions, hi def photos, etc) with most of their social circle. They don't have to install anything, they don't have to sign up for anything, they don't even have to remember different credentials, it just works. Best of all, it just works across their ipads and macs, too.
Sure, it doesn't work for a portion of their friends, but from their perspective, their friends are the weird ones: why wouldn't you switch to a phone that has a "better" experience like this?
> By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols
This is a bug, not a feature, in a world where there's no common clients that work across all those ecosystems. You go back to 2008ish and you have half a dozen clients that speak Jabber or XMPP. You can sign into GTalk or Facebook Messenger or (gods forbid) Yahoo Messenger all from the same application, and it all mostly works. Now you have a zillion apps and a zillion logins and some of them have nice features and some don't, but without interop, there's an upper limit to the number of chat apps people are willing to maintain to just talk to other people.
Especially when, for Apple users, the best one is already on their device.
Do you hear yourself? Using using an iPhone for communication is perfectly normal. I’m at a top 10 (biggest in terms of number of students) university in the US and I can confidently tell you the overwhelming majority of people carries iPhones. The 57% statistic use site probably skewed toward the older demographic, where older people are more likely to use flip phones and androids. I would if I knew that strange if I wasn’t a part of group chat just because I have an android. Technical users like the increased privacy and security, while more regular users like the extra features. They’re just isn’t an argument to be made for having androids in group chats. And no, nobody is using signal or telegram or WhatsApp in college
I will place a bet with you, if you like, that will be very easy for you to win if you're correct in your comment.
The bet goes something like this: Pick a group chat you're in of 10 or more real-life acquaintances who all currently only use a single messaging platform, and convince them all to move the group chat entirely to a different messaging platform, and delete the old group chat.
It doesn't matter which messaging platform you're moving to, any will do, and as you mention there's many to pick from -- some of which are probably better and more feature complete than the one your group chat is currently using.
Curious why social media is to blame when adults exploiting and denigrating youth is timeless.
When society as a whole turns a blind eye to their future struggles; drill baby drill! What you want to afford a home and a fam? Lol no; hustle culture and technology to fetishize!
Did social media manipulate the economy to deflate GenZ and empower the dying?
Was social media responsible for 2008 crash, money printing?
Government full of entitled people who don’t like what the kids had to say about them, so they retaliated.
Is it tech or is it American Civic Life that’s garbage?
anxiety is a disease. we didn't have a major war or famine so it's unlikely that material factors are so bad as to cause mass stress and anxiety like they do during wars. OTOH genz were raised under the watchful and judgemental eye of large crowds/mobs, and everyone thought that was OK. I think we will soon have convincing evidence that this sort of constant comparison is as bad as destructive addictive substances
As an anxious millennial who left social media and daily news a while ago: Yes they're a problem. But the main factor is that we're destroying our natural habitat and fueling geopolitical instability.
Both of these are extremely complex problems to solve and would require consistent efforts over generations. However the people in power are happily trading the future of humanity for more money and power, and finding support from a large section of the population in doing so.
I can't speak for everyone but this is why I have a hard time working on my next jira ticket after reading the news.
Try having that plus a bit of disability and trying to keep healthcare coverage while navigating employment/layoffs.
And yeah, seeing the temperature anomaly charts this past summer makes you wonder if anything is even going to matter in a decade or two. I’m ever glad I never wanted children; I can’t imagine the anxiety of trying to raise them in the modern world.
Perhaps we could all spend less time generating empty rhetoric online and more time engaged in what we claim to be via logic, our real concerns
It feels really disingenuous when all the pearl clutching office workers go home to video games not a soup kitchen. Spend their weekends hiking not nursing the sick, fixing poorer people’s homes.
Modern day infantilized office worker crowd is the most off putting group of people I’ve ever encountered.