-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
> Apart from my tech criticism, what I notice about reading those links is the very detached, indifferent, irresponsible, even COLD attitude from everybody involved in cheering on this experimental AI algorithm -- from the Google research authors, the Tubefilter authors and commenters there and in the Y Combinator discussion. While a few people complain about their music choices or political videos, or how they can make money from the new algorithm -- most of them don’t think ahead about consequences, or about other people at all. They should have just kept their experiment in the laboratory.
> Nobody discussed how the gimmicky algorithm would affect real people or ruin cultures around the world. Nobody there, in all seriousness, “thought of the children”. Now we, here, are discussing and solving THEIR industrial fallout, like factory pollution spread over a community. This is why James Bridle’s timely article was so essential to identify “infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects”.
> In my opinion, the negligent people who gave the green light to this untested algorithm or cheered it on are, in fact, responsible accomplices to infrastructural violence. And the violence is real. Their "Frankenstein AI" foolishly recommended toxic movies that harmed millions of children (and adults). The AI cheerleaders felt no hesitation to exert control over what billions of people watch and think, in a very sneaky way -- while allowing greedy marketers to manipulate their choices to make ad money, and allowing sinister pervs to groom the children watching those badly recommended movies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7ebw14/reverse_engineering_the_youtube_algorithm/dq3v7jp/
- Ugh.
> There is a catch, though: the Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G technology, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialled scientists in the radiation research field”, according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like mobiles, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14R6QNkmaXuelFrNWRQcThNV0U...
Just out of curiosity, how would one go about locating the direction of 5G antennas? At the very least, I'd gleefully shit-talk anyone involved I come across. Just out of principle. It doesn't even matter how safe it turns out to be -- just how needy and dumb people are adopting anything thrown into their through, how reckless not just with their own lives, but with their effects on others and the environment, calls for some serious fucking wrath. And this is as good a starting point as any.
- Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's a million times worse than even what we have now.
The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, exactly, are you arguing for?
- The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
- In your case, not egging it on would be a start even.
There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability.
Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed.
"A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force.
What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
- > Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
-- The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) [ http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU ]
If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.
Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.
Opera Mini could do magic with forcing text to wrap on small displays, why are mobile browsers shit today? If you don't want this to be usable on an actual computer, why not make HN an app and be done with it? Comments could become even shorter and more inane than they generally are already.