Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.
No frank conversation is going to change those situations.
The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster...
Not good enough. The same strip should go faster and faster over time and decelerate near its end. It sounds impossible, but I can think of a few ways to make it work.
The naive implementation is a train: everybody enters at once at a fixed point, the strip accelerates, everybody leave at the next stop or stay for the next stop. I wonder if you devised a way to make people keep accelerating while other enter and leave the strip. Side strips at lower speeds are too easy a solution.
Honestly, I can't get myself to worry about "societal damage"... what would the contact mean for individuals? Medical and technical advancements would extend our lifespans and could add enjoyment to our lives.
A civilization capable of space travel doesn't seem that would be so interested in slaving or torturing humans for the sake of it. Would "our culture" disappear? I still doubt it. It'd be kept as History.
I like visiting museums and learning about the history of ancient civilizations but by no means I'd like to live in the any of those past environments.
There's a joke about a speeding BMW that crashes into the back of a hay cart. The driver complains that the cart should had a red rag to signal its presence. The carter responds "you didn't see the cart, would have you seen the rag?"
The info in Voyager is just a vanity plate... or a time capsule. Nothing wrong with that anyway. Some time in the future, humans will locate it and put it back in a museum.
Laws should be enforceable, but at some point "it's a bad law if it can be bypassed with corruption" just completely surrenders any hope of holding powerful people / companies accountable to anything at all.
That's a very absolute outlook. The fact is that they were very naive and, althoug they seem to be adjusting, it's been painfully slow and the harm has been done and the public is suffering meanwhile.
Law making is a way of predicting the future and setting up incentives to achieve a goal. You need to foresee what can go wrong, talk to incumbents and anticipate the response. It's a technical matter and this has been a debacle.
It's useless to put the blame in the advertisers. Even if they're evil, that doesn't make the situation any better for the public.
> The fact is that they were very naive and, althoug they seem to be adjusting
Who are "they"? The law hasn't changed, it's enforcement that is changing, albeit very slowly.
There are so many institutions that can be rightfully blamed - chiefly the DPAs and the national governments, but your continued insistence on blaming the lawmakers makes no sense. The law is clear, it's just not being enforced.
Of course advertisers deserve all this blame too, but their blame is irrelevant when discussing enforcement. I don't expect them to stop any more than I expect a serial killer to turn themselves in. This is still a failure of the institutions.
Well almost all websites in France do the legal thing now with an obvious "decline all" button, which was not the case at first.
It took just a pair of ruling that made it clear this illegal pattern was going to actually be cracked down upon, and now these popups are just a small annoyance rather than the absolutely enraging trap that they were at first.
Of course I still wish they were unnecessary, but they serve as a reminder that these websites are still trying to prey upon their visitors.
I agree. These websites should just not spy on me and therefore not have a pop-up.
But in the absence of that? I appreciate at least being asked for my consent so that I can press the "I do not consent to being tracked" button. It shouldn't exist in the first place, but since these websites are unwilling to just not spy on people, this seems like the next best thing.
> That's like saying "don't visit places where people get murdered if you don't want to get murdered."
Nope. Murder is an action after which the victim can not make any more actions. It would be like saying "don't go to the bakery where they spit in your food and slap you in the face every time you order something". You are enraged by the behavior of the websites you visit and you still keep going there every day. Either you are a masochist or "voting with your wallet" or, in this instance with you attention, doesn't really work. Why do you give your attention to those that treat you like shit?
> How about you just enforce consumer protections for everyone?
They are. What gave you the idea they aren't? Because some pages still behave illegally? You understand that murder still happens?
> Because that is clearly not the law.
Do you know anything about GDPR? Because it seems that you do not. Could you point to the text of the regulation that you object to? I'll wait but I'm sure I'll be waiting for godot here.
> Murder is an action after which the victim can not make any more actions.
What does that have to do with anything? I think you missed my point.
> Why do you give your attention to those that treat you like shit?
Because I have no choice. Every website has these damned popups. Where am I supposed to get my news from otherwise? I mean, what internet do you use...?
> They are. What gave you the idea they aren't?
Because sites are still allowed to track me? Why bother with consent around tracking? Just make it illegal to begin with.
> Do you know anything about GDPR? Because it seems that you do not.
That's inappropriate for HN. Please see the guidelines. Assume good faith.
Lawmakers should have a limit on the number of laws they can write. Say it's 100. They can regulate 100 things, so they need to consider importance. If they want to regulate something new, they have to give up something else. Which one is more important?
The vast majority of laws are never enforced, so in practice this isn't as absurd as it sounds. It would make people consider what laws they spend time writing.
Of course the politicians share a portion of the blame, but we cannot ignore the fact that websites are just playing the blame game as well.
We’re also seeing tracking despite the lack of user consent as well. This could be a fluke but when I make anonymous search on website and switch to another, I’m seeing the product I have just searched in the ads. With all the tracking disabled I mind you.
The difference between a law an a program is that the computer isn't a malicious actor trying to do everything in it's power to subvert the law. A law is nothing like a program, because a computer will do nothing without a program, but societies do all sorts of things regardless of laws.
The world a program works in and the computer it runs on are often very malicious, or they sure act like they are. Not to talk about users, some are pure evil :-)
We put a lot of safeguards, exception handling and all kind of measures to control errors.
So you can imagine my incredulity when a few days ago I received one email message telling me that if I don't take action urgently, my One Drive account is going to be deleted, maybe even my files in the cloud.
Indeed. Totalitarians of the past century didn't need any AI to control masses and cause more than 100M deaths. And those ideologies are far from dead.
Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger.
This is the worst. It permeates all kind of GUIs. Windows has this mini preview windows that pop up when you're hovering over the apps in the taskbar. Also if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are minimized except the one previewed.
Microsoft has systematically terminated every single way of disabling this idiocy.
Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD. I'm no proud of it, but I think I'd use physical violence if I could confront the culprit.
> Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD.
At one time in my life, I might have called you out for bad-taste hyperbole… but no, this kind of thing is genuinely traumatising. And that's ridiculous: what has the world come to, that desktop operating systems are giving people PTSD‽
If you're a politician, you need people to vote for you. "Your" people will. Try not to alienate too much others so you can fish moderates and get to 50%.
If you're an "influencer" you need engagement. You can live off a 10% easily. And you need retention. So keep the message heated.
Hmm, I'm not sure the former holds true anymore. We're seeing societies getting far more polarised with some extreme rhetoric and and proposals coming from political parties, especially in places like the US and Western Europe.
Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
Yes, that's been the explicitly stated goal for the last decade or two. Like, no one is even attempting to hide it.
A lot of them are just moneymaking machines, they don't really want community engagement. This is demonstrated in their approaches to community organizing / engagement. I directly witnessed this as a boardmember of an organization ostensibly representing over 100,000 voters:
1) The "90%-ers" view of the suggestion that they identify and court their supporters from (for them) the "40%-er" constituencies because they would be able to sway other 40%-ers due to the "liking" "weapon of influence" (Cialdini): this was mostly treated like a suggestion that they lick dog vomit.
2) Community / consensus building: what issues should we focus on? This was done by dividing participants up by some feature and then having those subgroups come up with maybe half a dozen concerns each. (Something is supposed to happen here before the next step.) Then those concerns were listed on a board and the concern(s) which were reflected across the most subgroups were selected to focus on. The missing piece, which the organizers absolutely knew about: the caucus! What goes wrong without it is that concerns about pedestrian safety, speeding, children walking to school, people getting to bus stops, etc. all get listed differently by the subgroups and... awwww, too bad, you were the only group which cared about children walking to schools... but every group cares about saving the whales (no offense to the whales)! But no whales live here, so what are we to do?
> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.
They definitely are. The goal for Trump this election was clearly to stoke the base with inflammatory rhetoric bolstered by influencers spouting that same rhetoric.
"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets."
I'm not sure I agree. Leading political parties are certainly fishing moderates, but for smaller parties it often makes more sense to cater to extreme views - both because people who care strongly about it will vote for you, and because it gives you more visibility.
This is an interesting distillation of the article; focusing on _how to use_ social media depending on who you are, but dismissing or de-emphasizing the main point of the piece, which is, what is social media doing to our social discourse?
We’ve succeeded to make people vote for the fight against global warming, which clearly says people have to reduce their lifestyle, so I think there can be enough audience to make this topic the platform of one party.
Well, one party’s stated solution for high oil imports was not to reduce consumption but rather “drill baby, drill!”
Inefficient regulation also incentivizes car companies to make larger less efficient vehicles because they can’t make the smaller ones efficient enough. And the public has no problem buying enormous vehicles… (Doesn’t everyone need an off road extended cab 4x4 truck for commuting to the office?)
Frankly, I do feel there is a segment that seems to over focus on conservation to the point of impracticality.
However, the “single use” consumption has got to end. I don’t even see the debate here. Plastic lids, styrofoam containers, gotta go. Maybe not outright ban, but the culture has to change. Ordered a pastry in a bakery — clerk put it into a large styrofoam container, inch thick stack of napkins, plastic grocery bag, plastic fork/knife.
Unfortunately I was eating it there… All that waste for one pastry baked there?
On the other hand, I wonder if Amazon is the devil we assume. If I drive my car around town to get a few items, maybe it’s more fuel efficient to just have them delivered with others’ ?
> Well, one party’s stated solution for high oil imports was not to reduce consumption but rather “drill baby, drill!”
It's important to note that the other party's response to that was "Who says we don't want to drill!?" followed by a disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (or "America" I think we're supposed to say now.)
It's never on the ballot unless it truly does not matter to anyone with any power.
It's also important to note that one party wants to drill while also greatly increasing development of renewables so we can reduce the need for future drilling, increase regulatory limits on emissions over time, provide incentives to adopt more energy efficient appliances, and recognizes that the world needs to reach net zero sometime in the next few decades and is trying to reach that gradually.
The other party wants to drill while doing everything it can to discourage renewables, is eliminating as many limits on emissions as it can and stopping enforcement of those it cannot yet eliminate, and their views on addressing global warming are a superposition of {it is a hoax by the Chinese to harm the US, it may be happening but humans have no way to influence it, it is good, even if global warming is as bad as predicted and we get a few degrees rise it is no problem because we can increase fossil fuels enough to make cheap air conditioning available so we can get by fine just like Dubai gets by fine with an average temperature of 35F higher than that [1]}. They also want to eliminate funding for satellites that monitor the climate and eliminate emissions reporting requirements for the industries that do most of the emitting.
This is not a serious conversation. One party pays lip service while simultaneously trying to appease people who want lower gas prices by approving more drilling and pumping, seemingly assuming we can somehow entrepreneurship our way out of the pit we're digging ourselves. The other side actively wants to drive us off a cliff. No candidate for president in either party has ever offered even a serious evaluation about the threat global warming poses our way of life.
> Well, one party’s stated solution for high oil imports was not to reduce consumption but rather “drill baby, drill!”
The idiotic lie here is that the US doesn’t really have the right refinement plants to handle US based oil, so they have to swap oil with other countries who do. Building out new refinement plants isn’t easy or quick, yet would be necessary to actually reduce oil imports and become self sufficient.
Sometimes problems are real. That guy will never be my friend because he wants my position. That other guy is scared because he thinks my work is a threat to his silo, and he's right: the management is after him.
No frank conversation is going to change those situations.