-increased frequency and magnitude of destructive weather events
-global weather pattern shifts
-increasingly dysfunctional governments in previously stable nations
-markets dominated by players decoupled from reality
-a stock market bubble of immense proportions
-the end of the post-WWII order
-an interlinked global economy with very little resilience
-an increasing amount of war
I have no idea what shape the world that emerges from all the above is going to be, but I strongly doubt it will be better than it was. The obvious analogs seem to be the Great Depression and the World Wars.
I don't know exactly what will start the dominoes falling, but the current war in Persian Gulf has a lot of potential to do so.
My main concern isn't how or if we survive, but who we survive as- the rewriting of what the context of being human is the biggest threat to me- imagine social media but spreading increasingly depressive and depraved social attitudes. We need social buffer- and contentment and contextualising media to see us through this, alongside everything else.
(A luxury i know as it shows i have a comfortable and stable existence)
As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go- it's not the fault of Graber or anyone else- but they should allow people to turn off the turbo redditor type people with a few settings.
> As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go
Very surprised to hear this... the few times I've visited Twitter in the last year I've been met with a deluge of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic comments. Like there's practically no moderation on there. People saying "Hitler was right the whole time" and shit like that.
I don't use Bluesky much either but I definitely wouldn't have considered it worse than Twitter
Twitter still attracts top quality initial posts from prominent people, even though the replies are garbage, or worse. Honestly, it doesn't compute to me how people can justify continuing to contribute there.
Its not worse than twitter. It's not close in compared to toxicity; though i've personally noticed a high-minded snobbishness toxicity that shuts down discussion on it.
The response was to someone commenting the discourse on Bluesky was "off putting" so they went back to Twitter.
I wasn't touching on freedom of speech, just the relative quality of speech in both platforms.
As a centralized service operating in Canada and the EU though, I do believe Twitter is legally required to remove certain kinds of hate speech. The qualification for removal might be debatable (e.g. "the Austrian painter was right" is another thing people say which is a dogwhistle, but probably not explicit enough for companies to be compelled to remove it) but the requirement is there.
> but I'm sure you hold dear the right to say whatever you want, whether others agree with it or not
You know, reflecting back on my youth, I wish certain things I said (and might have posted on social media had it been so present) were immediately stricken from the record. Banning hate speech which incites violence against a minority group is a slippery slope, but I think it's for the better. At the same time, of course it can be abused, such as with the IHRA definition of antisemitism used in many jurisdictions, under which many valid criticisms of Israel would be deemed "antisemitic"
Spewing stuff like what? Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father (a proud Zionist and Mossad agent) was the co-founder of McGraw Hill, the second largest textbook publishing company in the US. Are you trying to tell me a proud Zionist who is publishing textbooks is making it his priority to ensure they paint an objective picture of history in relationship to Israel? My textbooks (whether in High School or University) certainly didn't talk about the Sabbateans or Jacob Frank / Frankism - yet understanding their history is critical to anything approaching objectivity.
What I expect is for all narratives to be able to be questioned, and not for there to be one that is unquestionable. When narratives can't be questioned, it's a pretty good indicator that something is being lied about.
> This is a perfect example of when I think freedom of speech restrictions (such as laws criminalizing Holocaust denial) are a net positive.
Of course you think that, because you don't want to have an objective conversation about the events that took place, you want a single narrative to prevail unquestioningly.
> My grandparents were holocaust survivors, so I know directly from them what they went through, and I know about my family members who were killed.
I'm sure they were. Just like I'm sure the number of survivors keeps increasing as the years go on. Wild how that happens.
> I have no sympathy for people who publicly spread lies and misinformation to deny or downplay the severity of any genocide.
Convenient when you can brush off what Israel is doing by claiming it's not a genocide.
> Sorry not sorry.
I typically don't expect pathological liars and pathological victims to be sorry about much.
You basically can, can't you, with it's robust blocking features and feeds?
Personally, I've found bsky has a far healthier culture than Twitter, even before Musk turned it into his own personal megaphone/therapist and neo-nazi safe-space (and I follow a lot of political accounts)
The lack of payouts for engaging posts and the robust blocking really does change the incentive structure over there. That twitter-style toxic engagement-bait type posting doesn't get rewarded as much.
There are some far-left groups there who are very toxic and will harass some people, but they are easy to block. Most of them seem to block people at the drop of a hat anyways, and so end up in their own isolated bubbles.
because black people didn't actually want to drink from those water fountains, did they throwaway290? consider using your real account to make such false claims
The myth of american moral superiority had been dead for a while. Why would china be any more evil than the US, which has waged far more colonialist wars and killed far more foreign lives in recent times (look at the news today for inspiration)
I don’t see any contradiction with what the OP said, though. You don’t have to be morally superior to still be concerned about a country’s forces killing you.
It's a reversal of the more likely situation which is the us getting it and china following in response. Nuclear weapons anyone? Remember who started those.
Vietnam war, iraq war, afghanistan war, iran war, gaza war, allowing iraq to get and use chemical weapons on iran, forced regime change in south america (then and now). Get real it's not equivalent in any way
How can you say the Uyghur genocide isn't "equivalent" to the things you listed? What math are you using to compare them? How do you compare regime change in South America to Uyghur genocide, for example? Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that lists the value you're placing on lives, war and geopolitical actions, in order to make a fair comparison?
The UN has released a report on human rights abuses in China, but has not called these a genocide. The more credible accusations of genocide came from a handful of political bodies in Western countries, but crucially the acting governments have not defined it as such.
There’s absolutely no consensus that the legal definition is met, in contrast with another ongoing situation which enjoys wide recognition.
It feels that this is more a geopolitical cudgel, pulled out when the discourse against the US becomes negative. But given the events in the last years, this seems like a lost cause even in the West, never-mind the rest of the world.
Surely that's only because China has a permanent position on the security council and wouldn't allow such a report to be made. Israel does not sit on that council, and while the current admin is quite cozy with them, the Biden admin became fed up with Netanyahu and his treatment of Palestinians, culminating in the US ambassador to the UN abstaining from votes against Israel rather than voting to protect it.
But that's beside my point. It's too late to edit my post, so pretend I used the word "culling" instead of "genocide." How does one weigh a Uyghur culling against a South American regime change? What's the exchange rate?
Use Mullvad Browser or Brave (both require no extensions to block ads, with mullvad browser being modelled off of tor. Use data traffic fingerprint obfuscation even behind vpn (yes they can tell if you're messaging, watching a video, torrenting, etc 90% of the time even behind vpn) use mullvads daita (makes packets the same size) or nymvpn (mixnet with tor like routing and in built delays). Tor doesn't protect against traffic analysis at all.
Also, it's probably tricky to find a Schelling point that a broad range of people can agree to.
* no military use
* no lethal use
* no use in support of law enforcement
* no use in support of immigration enforcement
* no use in mass surveillance
* no use in domestic mass surveillance (but mass surveillance of foreigners is OK)
* no use in domestic surveillance
* no use in surveillance
* require independent audits
* require court oversight
* require company to monitor use
* require company to monitor use and divulge it to employees
* some other form of human rights monitoring or auditing
* some other form of restriction on theaters/conflicts/targets
* company will permit some of these uses (not purport to forbid them by license, contract, or ToS) but not customize software to facilitate them
* company can unilaterally block inappropriate uses
* company can publicly disclose uses it thinks are inappropriate
* some other form of remedy
* government literally has to explain why some uses are necessary or appropriate to reassure people developing capabilities, and they have some kind of ongoing bargaining power to push back
It feels normal to me that a lot of people would want some of those things, but kind of unlikely that they would readily agree on exactly which ones.
I even think there's a different intuition about the baseline because one version is "nobody works on weapons except for people who specifically make a decision to work for an arms company because they have decided that's OK according to their moral views" (working on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision) and another version is "every company might sell every technology as part of a weapons system or military application, and a few people then object because they've decided that's not OK according to their moral views" (refusing to work on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision). I imagine a fair number of people in computing fields effectively thought that the norm or default for their industry was the latter, because of the perception that there are "special" military contractors where people get security clearances and navigate military procurement processes, and most companies are not like that, so you were not working on any form of weapon unless you intentionally chose to do so. But, having just been to the Computer History Museum earlier this week, I also see that a lot of Silicon Valley companies have actually been making weapons systems for as long as there has been a Silicon Valley.
There is definitely a muddle on so many levels about signaling and agreeing on ethics in technology.
But as innovation slows globally, it is implementation, ethics, and ideology that will once again be the dominant metrics of progress, so there's a new window emerging to push for this social/moral change in technology once again.
So it's still critically important that we actively work towards finding a meaningful, socially contagious differentiator other than "ethical technologist" even if it's difficult- look at what OpenAI gets away with under that flimsy banner.
"Starting today I will be asking prominent members of the tech community to sign their name onto this. A code of conduct, authored by me, that pledges them to a universal ethos, which I created, that I call tech ethics or Tethics for short."
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