decasteve

It's one of those books I think are more relevant than when it was written.

The basic concepts and quotes don't do it justice. Read it fully. The "parlor walls" as social media give the book chilling metaphors for our current era.

Montag's "Sieve and the Sand" subway ride and dialog with Faber are some of the most powerful and relevant to today.

Poundbury by Prince Charles [1][2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury [2]: https://robskinner.net/2020/09/03/poundbury-prince-charles-m...

The Groklaw farewell post: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

Given the circumstances of the Snowden revelations, I was struggling to articulate how I felt about privacy, the chilling effects of surveillance, and making sense of it all in terms of who I am, where I come from, and how I make my livelihood. That farewell post, along with introducing me to the writings of Janna Malamud Smith (Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life), helped shape and define my perspective on privacy.

That definition of Spyware Engine has existed for a while. Every browser checks sites and downloads using Google's Safe Browsing [1]. Firefox constantly phones home to googleusercontent and AWS. Apple sends hashes of every application you run on MacOS to its Akamai hosted service -- try blocking Akamai on your firewall while still connected to the internet and the OS becomes unresponsive. The OS features to scan and report home have been around for a long time.

I think Apple checking photos before they uploaded to its own servers is their way around the Fourth Amendment while using relatively similar methods that they already use for malware.

Devil's advocacy aside, I buy the slippery slope argument and I find these methods reprehensible and open to abuse. I agree with all of it. I think this new addition is a step on the downward slope. I don't use MacOS, nor Windows, nor any cloud services personally. I keep an iPhone 7 around to chat with "iMessage" friends -- and this is the straw that stops me from using for that. I have never used iCloud for photos even when I was using an iPhone regularly.

I used to have an Android phone, which I also never sync'd with Google's cloud/drive. Then after an update, the sync-to-cloud option was automagically turned on again and my photos started to upload. I deleted them from the cloud and swore off ever using an Android phone again.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Addendum: That Mozilla support link is also interesting in terms of privacy. It's flagged as a privileged page for me so it loads Google Analytics that would otherwise be blocked by browser extensions.

In the past it could have been an anti-trust issue. Does the FTC care about this nowadays?

DDG relies on Microsoft for both search results and hosting as far as I can tell. The site itself is served from Azure endpoints.

Paraphrased from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which he referred to books but I think he captures the sentiment universally:

It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

> Raising children at home.

Then fetuses raised outside of the womb in an apparatus.

"Brave new world", indeed.

It would be nice to see some analysis. This is just a write-up of the G7 talking points.

I wasn't trying to make a point other than sharing examples of companies, like Akamai, that store a lot of personal data on behalf of others. Storing data with Apple is storing it with Akamai, and all of the other third parties involved--where "third parties" becomes a blanket term in privacy policies and not an exhaustive list. The "chain of trust" in this regard has some missing links.

So far as their businesses are concerned, the data is safeguarded and I would never expect it to be sold--not by the top of the data food chain in any case.

But there's the issue of data being stored with US companies requiring being subject to US laws, such as the USA PATRIOT Act.

Akamai and Microsoft.

When your Apple device communicates with "Apple", many/most of those IP addresses are owned by Akamai.

Even when you search DuckDuckGo, both the search results (Bing) and web servers that serve the content are owned by Microsoft (Azure).

I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school?

Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment?

In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.

I think he predicted the opposite of what Bitcoin is now. Bucky thought a globally stabilized energy grid, along with computer facilitated time-energy accounting, would lead to a measure of "real" wealth and value of exchange. Bitcoin's value acts more like gold rather than a measure of exchange tied to the time-energy it takes for a "cow to convert grass into milk".

The idea that a world-connected electricity grid via ultra-high-voltage interconnections would lead to a different value of currency and wealth, one that would be more equitable in terms of energy is a nice idea and maybe it would pan out that way. I think a world grid would help solar and wind provide a bigger share of the load.

Under the right conditions maybe this is possible but for me it's harder to see now than when I first read Critical Path. I'm a little more pessimistic these days but I'm still a huge Bucky fan.

Or slide windows like the old Land Rovers.

I've been going deeper into the mid-19th century to pre-WWI era. I keep thinking that the war eras of the 20th century and industrial consumerism lost the diversity of ideas and art that preceded it.

I've been diving into (or revisiting) Darwin, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoi, to name a few. It was an incredibly rich era that could help us better navigate this one.

I get a sense that Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, had a better connection to it and could articulate warnings of where the mid-20th century might end up if it progresses on its path. I don't think we've ever been closer to realizing their warnings.

I'm saying platforms can't have it both ways. If they want to avoid ad-blockers and video downloaders then pick another medium, or invent one and create a new thing that achieves this objective. The web is not TV. Public content on the web is public and user-rendered. That's what made the web and YouTube what it is today.

YouTube has every right to create a proprietary YouTube client (which they do on mobile devices) and prevent browsers from accessing it. Don't serve files to my browser if you don't want me to use them.

Creators, for better or worse, are putting themselves at the mercy of YouTube, as serfs to feudal lords. I'm sympathetic, and happy to pay (and do) for your goods directly, but don't complain to me if your lord mismanages your affairs.

Even TV users had VCRs to save content "offline".

Serving videos without ads was how YouTube's monopoly was built. It became an ad platform later. That created an expectation that YouTube was a library in the public interest. Pre-2010 Google marketing had that public interest and internet stewardship angle to it.

Serving content over the web assumes that the content will be downloaded by a browser for rendering. Control over what and how that content gets rendered is controlled by the user. I think this aspect made, and still does make in the present tense, the web what it is. That's why the browser is called a user-agent--an agent that acts on behalf of the user.

YouTube could also move to another protocol, or develop a proprietary one to protect its interests. Otherwise it feels like they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Dairy farmers don't sell cows, they milk them.

I've had a similar thought: what consequences might there be from years of institutional classroom based learning on human development? Are there similar rates of ADHD in non-institutional learning? How do homeschooled kids, alternative education, or remote bush/tribal people compare?

I vowed never to watch CNN again after exclaiming how excited they were to be going back to Iraq for the 2nd war.

Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too:

We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.

I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.

If I'm trying to read, watch, or listen to something of a thoughtful nature, something that requires my utmost attention to grasp or process, and reflect upon it, ads are destructive. They destroy the experience and slow or limit the learning process. If everything we do is interrupted, it's an attack on our thoughts and disrespectful of our time.

Our Internet experiences are becoming Ray Bradbury's worst nightmare, interspersed with its "Denham's Dentifrice" ads and Facebook Mildreds everywhere.

A direct causal relationship is unlikely, however, the link between increased cyanobacteria in our waters and glyphosate spraying is possible and being studied elsewhere.

New Brunswick also carried on with heavy spraying of DDT into the 1980s stopping much later than most places.

There have been more diseased moose sightings in recent years too.

What about the possibility of contaminated seafood?

So many possibilities. Quite scary with no concrete answers.

Not just seafood but fish from remote lakes across the US and Canada which were heavily sprayed with DDT to kill the spruce budworm. This was done up until the early 1980s and now accumulated in lake beds with concerning levels still showing up in fish.

We're also seeing blooms of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) in remote lakes that are now being linked to widespread glyphosate spraying over young forests.

The was exactly the argument for dumping nuclear waste in the ocean originally. That was until the places they once thought were dead zones are teeming with life.

Baseload is the demand side of the equation. Sure, no single wind or solar farm can meet localized baseloads over a 24 hour period, like a single nuclear or hydro station can. However, given distributed solar and wind turbines at sites across 1000s of kilometres, working in conjunction with high voltage 700+ kV transmission, it is possible. Hence my assertion that the problem is social/political, and not a technical/physical limitation.

I don't think it's an either-or scenario. There are other options and other factors at play. The assumption of global peace for thousands of years in a world dotted with world-ending bomb material is a big gamble.

The current politics of energy production and consumption, the state-by-state compartmentalization and lack of wider cooperation hampers cleaner options (spoiled-views NIMBYism and regional politics).

Wind, solar, and hydro coupled with transcontinental UHV power transmission could solve it with much simpler technologies.

> And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ``playing'' - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

Given the circumstances of the time, post-war, and his circumstances, the loss of his wife and stress of the Manhattan project, I might argue a guess that he was grieving.

So it's not just that he found playfulness with physics, it's that he was ready to find it.

What I'm trying to say is don't force it if you're grieving or suffering from some traumatic event. Feynman could play with physics again because he was ready to do so.

Gandhi's take on the "bread-labour" idea via Tolstoy/Bondarev puts a better perspective on issues of intellect. Bread-labour being the physical labours involved in the direct sustainment of human life.

Based on their insights, I think that if we're privileged enough to live without worry of the basics needs of human life, and make our livelihoods on intellect alone, then that comes at the expense of humanity's potential for equality. If this is what is happening, then engaging some of our time in bread-labour becomes a concrete way to combat inequality.

School, the institution is not for everyone, and is definitely not normal, even though society has normalized it. My son went through periods of anxiety and stress through school and there was a push by a teacher and an administrator to have him diagnosed with something, anything really. If my daughter hadn't been at the same school and witnessed a couple of incidents of him being publicly shamed and bullied by the teacher, I wouldn't have known what to do.

He's now in a private school which takes place predominantly outdoors, nature based, and the transformation in him is phenomenal. The anxiety is gone and he's such an open mind and engages in conversations in ways he'd shy away from before.

I wonder and worry about kids who've experienced the same but suffer it for their entire grade-school experience with no reprieve.