[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
It's a way to shut down debate while pretending to use a legitimate debating technique. A tale as old as the internet itself.
Such people can be pretty miserable, sometimes all the time, thus prone to venting.
They would stop if you could fix their broken body and broken lives.
While you use qualifiers like "some" and "can" throughout, I don't really see any substance to the comment.
Basically, a single person existing that does match your comment makes your comment true, without any hint at how pervasive this might be.
There used to be -- and may still be -- hash tags and such on Twitter to help such people find each other.
I'm very seriously handicapped and don't get out much. It's why I spend so much time online.
It's called testimony -- giving a voice for a topic I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. I have no idea why you are attacking it so aggressively.
As such, I thank you for sharing your story: that requires courage for sure, and can certainly give support for any one point! If that use of qualifiers is what gives you that courage, take my apology for being so "aggressive".
I was simply suggesting to avoid generalizing, even (especially) when starting from your own experience. Your comment suggested that all the handicapped people might have the same reasons and same feelings, which I felt inappropriate.
Note to self:
Next life, be a rich white male or some shit.
In retrospect, you didn't do anything wrong, and I read too much into it: my bad, so sorry!
While they had a strong reaction to this that was over the top at points, I still feel it was a worthwhile thread documenting a new problem.
I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema
https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...
In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week.
Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally?
It's crazy, isn't it?
You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.
I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.
Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal or official standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of and accepts. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.
Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.
It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"
Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.
I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.
Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.
Yay for Brexit.
We're a species that has navigated its way across the world.
Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing.
We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.
> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.
You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.
That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.
OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.
That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.
I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.
It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.
(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.
Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)
Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...
However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
> I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do
No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard
phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem
every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop)
It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions
it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations
this has the disadvantage of making you even less at home in other devices but hey, my reality is what when this happens I wouldn't have been any better off regardless
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-tw...
That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.
I will be impressed, though, if you can find (or make) Dvorak keycaps for my keyboard that match its current style.
"In September 2022, Microsoft announced it was terminating support for the iOS version of SwiftKey. The app was removed from the App Store on October 5.[15]
In November 2022, Microsoft announced a reversal of its decision to discontinue SwiftKey for iOS devices. The app was relisted on November 18, with Microsoft promising future updates for the app. The company cited "customer feedback" as a reason for SwiftKey's return.[16]"
Assuming "customer feedback" is a euphemism for people complaining online then perhaps this is sometimes an effective strategy. These so-called "tech" companies often have no meaningfui Customer Service as they do not want to pay for it, but it seems they do pay people to monitor what is said about them online.
There you go. But we need to go a step further.
They need to get off altogether rather than being terminally online or addicted to social media. In regards to this, it is very sad to see of all things, many on that site are throwing a tantrum....
...over a keyboard.
Well, Twitter has not been killed yet, actually I think it's been quite remarkable how Twitter has had relatively little issues (bar a few which had been quickly resolved) and was even able to roll out new features and test how the community reacted to them after reducing the workforce by so much.
Poisoning? What does that mean? The only thing I noticed is that Twitter doesn't suppress balanced debate anymore. If you were hoping that Twitter remains a far left echo chamber then I guess poisoning is the right term but I thought it became more balanced again. I always found myself disenfrenchised by Twitter before. I'm not a right wing American. I'm a European who hates guns, thinks climate change is the biggest problem we have, has mostly turned Vegetarian and supports the strikes and the workers strikes in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. That would make me very left, but then equally I also believe that some controversial topics were not debated enough, especially around safe spaces for women and I also mistrust our mainstream media, I think that during COVID honest debate was suppressed by our governments and media and the same is happening now with the war in the Ukraine. I support the Ukraine, but I am also aware that not everything we are being told is true and there is a massive propaganda machine going on to get the Western population in support of this awful war and now nobody is allowed to mention that anymore.
You can see I have a very varied and wide range of independen beliefs and I really felt like that under the previous leadership of Twitter independent thinking and critical thinking was taboo and I would have been thrown into the same category as extreme far right Trump supporters who stormed the Capital, when in fact I am very far away from them in my personal belief system, but the extreme left wing Twitter echo chamber didn't allow people like myself to remain curious. I like the new Twitter if I'm honest. It feels more honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites
Also, it seems Ukraine war topics are down-ranked so people don't see as much about it anymore
Rather than that, I am frankly amazed that the site largely works after firing 80% of its workforce. It's staggering.
Now I don't spend as much time on it because Twitter actively pushes its politics and hides Ukraine-Russia war content. I often check out stuff on Mastodon since it doesn't have a biased algorithm
But in the push to become public the site becomes worse and worse.
First they created the "new" reddit, which is picture and ad driven. This might bring in stupid people, but kills usability and long term harms quality discussion.
Then they started to not so subtly push the new reddit: you need to go there to setup cookies, the site "accidently" turns it on like once per month, things dont work in old reddit (e.g. polls).
Now they killed i.reddit (aka .compact reddit) what kills the smooth phone experience. When I open reddit on phone now, like every page takes 5 seconds to load, then nags me to install their app, then is unreadable mess.
Since Im ranting: oh how much I miss the reddit toolbar (top comments on one part of the screen and website on other). I wish there was an addon that could emulate it - perhaps by opening two separate windows somehow and gluing them.
When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.
This is definitely just a matter of time, they're slowly moving there by killing off things like `i.`. They'll lose a bunch of "us", but overall it's probably not going to affect their bottom line. Some specific high-quality discussion subreddits dying out means nothing if there are dozens of multi-million user subreddits with generic memes or TikTok-reposts.
they've been insufferable for a long time, and on mobile I've completely given up on them
And, again, Reddit hasn’t had an 80% workforce cut (though it sorely needs it).
Instead, in some Chomskian myopia there is a considerable number of people in Europe and USA spreading FUD and reducing their opinion to "war is bad (sad emoji face) Ukraine shouldn't do war".
From now on (Day G1?), we're going to be awash with AI written stuff. Literally drowned in it. The first AI drafted marketing emails have already started hitting my inbox, and that's just the start I guess.
Do you maybe want your country to abstain from the conflict, save money/resources and let the survival of the fittest take place? What side do you believe it will benefit?
So for example anyone who is keen for Ukraine to be defeated more quickly, by opposing military assistance, are the "war supporters".
Anyone who wants to prevent the warmongers from winning and thus profiting from the war they started - those people are against the war.
You're essentially saying "it's not support for the war if I'm (perceiving I am) making sure my team wins". I'm not faulting you for that, it's the most common position, but it is support for war.
But now explain why that, in the face of actual aggression and genocide, is a bad thing compared to the alternative?
In this case there's a more important point, though, that a broad understanding that war will not be allowed to change the status quo will decrease the number of wars. Building and maintaining that understanding has the expense (sometimes) of making individual wars longer, but when it is (at worst) unclear which of those effects dominates it is unreasonable to label picking one side of that trade as unequivocal "support for war".
The west has two options: 1) support genocide by letting Russia systematically invade its neighbors (we've seen this story before and the outcome is not good), or 2) support Ukraine to such a degree that ongoing war is not sustainable and Russia calls off their expansionist plans.
For example, I support the west providing weapons to Ukraine - but I would not support a US return to Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, or an intervention in Mexico to wipe out drug cartels, or an invasion of China because of the internment of Uyghurs - even though those are all awful.
Politicians will often go as far as explicitly announcing the criteria by which they'll decide which wars to involve their country in - for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine
Also, just because you don't see a *technical* issue doesn't mean there are no issues. There is quite an increase of serious litigation and a massive debt bill that Twitter needs to figure out.
I said I support the Ukraine, but I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us. What you said there is quite a jump from what I said and exactly the type of nonsense that people would say in order to silence any meaningful debate.
I think if you believe that the support which the Ukraine gets from NATO countries is only to "help the Ukraine" and that NATO has no underlying geopolitical agenda and you don't wonder why we didn't support other nations at war with similar enthusiasm or why we never held ourselves accountable for the crimes committed in Iraq then I think your judgement on a balanced debate is not reliable. But that's okay, we both should be able to voice our thoughts and opinion and neither of us should get bombarded with replies which make us uncomfortable to debate and effective silence us.
What are you going to do about it, tiger?
You can't force anybody to think the way you want them to think. You are only going to frustrate yourself with your power trip fantasy.
There are countries where it is not against the law to be a nazi, but you still get to live as a nazi.
As I've mentioned somewhere else in this thread, russian government and russian mass media outright call for ethnic cleansing. Putin in his speech at the start of the war said "that he has taken steps to finally solve the Ukrainian question". Solovyev and Skabeyeva - very prominent, prime-time media personalities - are actively promoting ideas of ethnic cleansing, like Skabeeva saying that the gruesome beheading of a Ukrainian POW by Wagner is righteous and should happen to all Ukrainians who oppose russia. Prigozhin publicly claimed that they have "killed most of the active Ukrainian male population" (which is BS) and therefore "achieved the goals of Putin's Special Military Operation." (which is an super significant statement about their intent!)
In light of this, your whataboutism is both tiresome and irrelevant, because you are outright ignoring explicit statements by one side. This is per definition unbalanced.
What is the mainstream media? Is there a conspiracy between unrelated news organizations around the world to help Ukraine?
You're being super vague. Just say what you don't believe, out loud.
You don't believe that there's people out there calling for eradication of ukrainians? Just go on Twitter, my dude. There's even american personalities calling for it. Do you see this shit? https://twitter.com/realstewpeters/status/164670071474641305...
You don't believe "what's happening" in Ukraine? I mean, why don't you go there; it's not inaccessible, and you don't have to take up arms to do so. But fine if you don't, just.. look at people who do. There's millions of people there right now, most of them with phones, and plenty of tourists and non-tourist foreigners.
But, as always, we tell on ourselves even with how we use language.
He always refers to Ukraine as "the" Ukraine. That itself speaks to someone who is considerably older than the Russian Federation or someone who likes to parrot the opinions of that Federation. Because Russia sees Ukraine as its territory. It is a region of Russia. But it is not. It is its own sovereign country. We don't say "the" Japan or "the" Germany or "the" Ireland.
The guy is the quintessential "enlightened centrist", finding the prevailing opinion of a place and then putting himself squarely on the opposite side "to provide balance".
The "final solution to the Ukraine question" that people are bringing up is being atrociously and dishonestly taken out of context, since those words were never uttered, and the "Ukrainian question" being solved is that they believe a nation that was "always part of Russia" will return to Russia as a semi-autonomous state. (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMoRfFtWYAA9qJ5?format=png one such article for reference)
The Russian war is unjustifiable. You do not need to lie to make it unjustifiable.
Just because russia's strategy is ethnic eradication through assimilation does not make it less ethnic eradication.
Pretending that it's not is lying.
I guess what I'm saying is why are you interpreting their words that way when they started a war?
The world complains about the US being the "world police" until they want us to spend all of our resources to defend them...
However even if we look at the percapita number, the US out spend all other nato nations. Between January 24 and November 20, 2022, NATO members committed at least 75.2 billion euros of that 47.8 came from the US.
Per Capita for that period breaks down as
US: 142 Euros / citizen
UK: 117 Euros / Citizen
Canada: 96 Euros / Citizen
Germany: 70 Euros / Citizen
France: 21 Euros / Citizen
Germany would have to 2 double their per capita contributions just to match the US.
Who in NATO has given more than US, UK and Canada?
Show your sources
Twitter threads of Ngo using selective video editing to make it seems like up is down: https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/116496174509978828...
General summary: https://www.salon.com/2019/08/28/right-wing-journalist-andy-...
Ngo lying about leftist critics being violent, and Musk taking him at his word and banning them: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Does it surprise me that his detractors would claim he is “neo-nazi-friendly”? Not in the slightest. The “anti-fascists” routinely claim the people they brutalize are fascist nazis - it’s a form of projection / deflection.
Oh well, if being neo-nazi-friendly is OK, will you still defend him hanging out with pedophiles?
Here's pics of Ngo hanging out with Amos Yew, a year after Yew's tweets (also in pic) that children should be able to have sex, and that child porn should be legal: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FidcvHsX0AI1ncI?format=jpg&name=...
Feel free to admit that Ngo is a colossal liar and a horrible person any time now.
This is an incredible characterisation of a site that was full of right-wingers before the sale.
Perhaps it's just a case of maximum engagement generation instead...
Did Twitter even care about your local politics before Musk? They banned Trump, while the ayatollah, CCP etc. retrained their accounts.
Facebook was also actively censoring discussion related to American politics, while hardly noticing that a literal genocide was being coordinated on their platform in southeast Asia.
Was this a decision or simply a lack of resources for that area.
It's fine to note that they are both bad and both mean culpability and liability, but pretending they are literally the same thing is the worst kind of rhetorical device.
When Sri Lanka pulled the plug on Facebook as violence was starting to erupt, Facebook did then reach out...to ask why their Sri Lankan traffic had dropped off.
This is documented in a variety of places, but for an excellent write-up of these tragedies I'd recommend The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.
1. Facebook wanted or didn't care at all that a genocide was going to happen and happened
2. Facebook cared to a reasonable extent but due to an american centric setup isn't prepared to censor posts in certain areas of the world
Bad? Yes, evil? No big difference
Twitter went from a business that moderated content based on policies, to a business that moderates content based on the day-to-day whims of an easily distracted Elon Musk. The idea that it’s somehow more open for balanced conversations now is directly contradicted by how it is actually operating.
Capricious, malicious, and selfish moderation is poisonous to a business that depends on free user-generated content.
I didn't expect there to be technical issues. A lot of people cried wolf.
sounds very healthy.
On another note, I have just installed two alternative keyboards today to play around with. OpenBoard and AnySoftKeyboard both with some nice features.
What you are doing is an overly simplistic deflection
The keyboard works in such a way that it learns your typing style and then understands what you type without the requirement for actually hitting the right keys.
I can type "ky nt gromf koe stw uoi" and it will become "hi my friend how are you".
This makes typing on a phone extremely fast.
The problem is that other keyboards that claim to have similar features are not able to understand my typing gibberish.
In essence, I and many other Swiftkey users have trained ourselves to no longer be able to use any other keyboard.
Is this worth being mad over? In my opinion yes, a product loved by many being purchased by a big company who then close down support avenues is always a good reason to be mad.
"Welcome to the Microsoft Support Community! Thank you for your excellent question. As a Microsoft MVP (Mostly Vacuous Pinhead) I am more than happy to help with your problem. I am sure this will help:
<useless copy-pasted non-solution>
1. Set fire to your PC
2. Give up on life
People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.