wikitopian

The growing failure to speak about science, technology, and policy without politically coding the speech has caused irreparable damage to public science, technology, and policy discussion.

Perhaps the most egregious example was the liberal coding of vaccination during the pandemic, with the self-fulfilling prophecy that vaccine skepticism is for the other tribe of people who are bad.

You had people with preexisting conditions terrified of making a private medical decision because of the extreme political coding that both sides egged on to hysterical extremes.

What if I tried to have a conversation about violent crime that opened that we need to talk about how registered democrats commit dramatically more violent crime than registered republicans?

We would end up arguing about everything but the ostensible topic.

No.

We need to divorce the public policy conversation about climate change and carbon emissions from all of this inflammatory and polarizing rhetoric.

Promote policies that target the worst sources of environmental pollution without coding your speech in a manner that causes everybody who voted for trump or itemized their taxes or whatever to stop listening in the middle of what you're trying to say.

Ankylosing Spondylitis is one example, though I believe the area is critically under-researched.

Self-driving cars are the least obvious scam on the list, for sure.

The reason we appear so close is that well over 90% of driving is incredibly easy and can be performed without a sentient human being. This creates the impression that we're 90% there when we're nowhere near that close. We have decades of research to borrow from on this matter from drunk drivers, who are a perfect proxy for artificially intelligent machines attempting to drive automobiles without a sober human's fuzzy logic reasoning skills.

Both Big Tech and drunk drivers are very emboldened by that 90% of driving that doesn't require thinking and that 99% of driving that's not a life-or-death test of fuzzy logic reasoning skills.

Not even NFTs, where people were aggressively bidding against one another for a database entry confirming their ownership of a cartoon monkey on drugs? Not even quantum computing, where wall street is investing billions in quirky (quorky?) transistors that might maybe potentially crack a limited subset of cryptographic algorithms within the next several decades? Not even with self-driving cars, which are taking on the ultimate life-or-death task before machine learning can even reliably outperform a minimum wage laborer at heavily constrained and scripted tech support tasks?

You're all in on all that?

I'm surprised that "combating UFOs" hasn't joined quantum computing, the metaverse, machine learning, self-driving cars, and crypto among the bullshit investment bubbles.

I bet there's a market in consulting with corporate executives to help them future-proof their enterprises against alien invasions.

Sending humans into space is an expensive boondoggle that distracts and detracts from legitimate scientific research.

Whether or not outer space scrambles your genes, we know for sure that we've scrambled several astronauts and nearly scrambled several more.

I politely but firmly ask that we stop scrambling people to appease people who misplace their sense of wonder. Even if they volunteer to be scrambled.

This is a technology website.

I'm commenting on tech trends.

One should not be leading the elderly to believe that self driving cars are going to be dramatically enhancing their mobility any day now.

Not only will your elderly mom not live to see self driving cars become commonplace, you won't either.

Hopefully we INTJs will soon be able to apply for disability on account of being too arrogant and boorish to work with other people.

This mindset exists in every occupation. And it's always superficially true.

Everything would grind to a halt if it weren't for people who do X. Everybody else exists because X people are doing X.

Engineers that have to do management and paperwork stuff cry that they're so busy with paperwork that they can't engineer. So management hires a guy for them and they cry about how that guy doesn't do anything.

Ultimately, culture will be defined by a strange sort of radical authenticity defined by ever more subtle and specific signals of genuine humanity.

Sophisticated cants will emerge that are structurally challenging for computers to emulate.

And because there's a lot of work going into preventing AI from computing anything racist, sexist, or offensive to HR, the new ways of communicating will likely gravitate towards those spaces -- but ironically.

And for those of you working from home, quit ignoring and disrespecting your cat.

Shit, I can't even tell you what I was trying to do with software I wrote a week ago. I imagine the person who wrote it knows about as much about the code as the person calling them.

Just switch to vaping.

It's easier to step down with it, and if you fail to step down, you're still getting fewer carcinogens.

Thank you, fellow nineties emo kid.

The public key cryptographic algorithm is in the public domain so the question is really just how humanity will grapple with the fact that humans can communicate privately.

I agree it presents a lot of problems, crypto has harmed millions of people, and the people who presented crypto as investments should be held accountable by standard government rules.

Claiming that pedophiles also wish to communicate privately as an argument against private communication is beneath my comprehension. To even think that way gives me a sort of ice cream headache of the soul. Knowing that a large and growing share of people actually think that ways triggers and harms me.

It's entirely okay to bully people who've made billions atop open and open source software into contributing back to the community.

Especially when you can make the case that doing so will help their bottom line and legal footing.

I'm talking about an elegant technical solution to cloudflare's very real business problem. If they deliver a solid open source solution to the dark web name resolution problem, there's less pressure on them to host all sorts of marginal content.

A rare win/win.

"civil society tends to operate in the open"

... Some of us aren't up to your standards of civility and propriety, and we're going to find ways to get on without your permission.

The tor dark web already exists and everybody knows what goes on there. There are already decentralized crypto-driven naming services.

Merely improving the tor network's name resolution has nothing to do with your grand philosophical argument against internet freedom.

This is the future, but they're doing it backwards.

Start at the top with sqlite compiled to webassembly as a virtual machine and prove that the tabular paradigm is superior to the scalar, vector, and object paradigms.

It'll be more fun that way.

The way that webassembly and wasi are designed to not fall back on unix tradition creates the opening to escape from the traditional files, streams, and objects universe.

Everybody in America who doesn't have the state department's line on the war is subject to censorship and retribution. They're just less honest about it here.

In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call.

I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?

There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.

I feel like ethnic cleansing of minority populations through systemic erasure of their heritage and identity is a fine pretext for war.

Fair point.

The infants, children, and frail who are most imperiled by this plan to freeze them to death on purpose don't have equal access to the internet debate over whether it's worth it to do that.

As a purely hypothetical, counterfactual mind game, how would you adapt your position if Russia were winning the ground war, economically stable, and firmly behind both Putin and the war?