scalio

As I said below, and without knowing if this is applicable to all models, mic and camera can be physically disconnected from the mainboard.

You can open the macbook and unplug the camera and mic connectors from the mainboard.

You're not alone, I feel you. The pendulum will swing back. Let's hope it does so quickly.

It drives me up the walls when some kind of list or collection touch UI doesn't offer any kind of batching, and most don't.

Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.

Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.

/rant over

And there's the problem.

What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?

The solution to a problem is never to ignore it, lock it away, out of sight where it will just fester. The people who produce bullshit (maybe for a living, maybe as a hobby) don't just disappear.

Aggressive filtering of what people see in their feeds is not a solution. What do all those able to discern bullshit from factual content have in common? Exercise for the reader as I don't have a definitive answer. A proper education can be thrown away or ignored when convenient; some people just seem to have a good nose for bs. I dunno.

What civilization are you talking about? The US, western Europe, capitalism, formally educated people? Who is 'they'? There's enough people who just want to watch the world burn, and they're very much part of society, paying taxes and going to clubs and shopping malls. For instance, all those highly capable developers and mathematicians on adtech payrolls. How is one supposed to concentrate on separating the wheat from the chaff when things engineered to distract and capture attention do exactly that?

You should check out what happened less than a century ago. Among other things, it started this whole digital conundrum.

It's naive to think that concentrating so much power over so many people in the hands of so few people can go any sort of well. What happens when the regulators, or the ones charged of overseeing them, want in on the fun? What if they're coerced, which suddenly is trivial to do?

Progress comes from individuals, as such, individuals should be empowered by great tools to make the most of their data. Wanting corporations to solve all the problems is another case of pushing off personal responsibility.

Now here's a reason why I disable js.

The problem is that the same crops are grown globally, so once a disease grabs hold, it can spread very quickly, eradicating yields globally.

I recently read Biodiversos by Stefano Mancuso and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the slow food movement. It's basically a discussion between the two where they lay out the big problems with our production and consumption of food.

For instance, concentrating on making single kinds as productive as possible instead of cultivating variety is extremely dangerous, as shown by this event. The great Irish famine is maybe the most striking example. Humanity does exactly that with wheat, cows, almost everything. The very basis of most of the globe's food comes from a handful of species. In my mind, this is one of the great ticking bombs of our close future.

Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects.

> The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

How so?

Found here: https://aeon.co/essays/the-quantum-view-of-reality-might-not...

Zurek and his colleague Jess Riedel have been able to calculate how fast and extensive this proliferation of quantum copies is for a few simple situations, such as a dust speck in a vacuum flooded by sunlight. They find that, after being illuminated for just one microsecond, a grain of dust a micrometre across will have its location imprinted about 100 million times in the scattered photons.

It’s because of this multiple imprinting that such objects seem to have objective, classical-like properties at all. Ten observers, say, can separately measure the position of a dust grain and all agree that it’s in the same location. Each observation consumes a different replica of the grain in the reflected photons. In this view, we can assign an objective position to the speck not because it truly ‘has’ such a position (whatever that means), but because its position state can imprint many indistinguishable replicas in the environment. What we take as obvious common sense turns out to have secure yet far-from-obvious underpinning in quantum theory.

There’s a seemingly bizarre corollary to this picture. When we measure a property of a system by probing its replica in the environment, we destroy that replica. Might we then potentially use up all the copies by repeated measurement, so that the state can’t any longer be observed? Yes we can: too much measurement will ultimately make the state seem to vanish.

What Quantum Darwinism tell us is that, fundamentally, the issue is not really about whether probing physically disturbs what is probed (although that can happen). It is the gathering of information that alters the picture. Through decoherence, the Universe retains selected highlights of the quantum world, and those highlights have exactly the features that we have learnt to expect from the classical world. We come along and sweep up that information – and in the process we destroy it, one copy at a time.

House of Cards made me realize something very self-evident: the baddies in "realistic" entertainment media do not reflect the baddies in real life (ditto for the good guys, for that matter). I saw one day that I was conflating real world and HoC politics. Not the actual events, but rather how the different actors got or lost their way. Since I don't know what's going on behind the curtains, I started filling that gap in real-world knowledge with constructions based on the personal politics portrayed in HoC. Now, I try to be as suspicious as sanely possible of anything even remotely tied to politics, and yet it took me a month to notice my error.

What happens in minds that don't? I suspect they imagine the real world functions like the dream worlds created in studios. I think that's the insidiousness of propaganda you're describing.

True, but I think this problem can only be solved sustainably through education. At some point, we may just have to accept that one has to deal with some number of idiots a day and get over it. Discovery suffers dramatically, sadly.

Pretty thought provoking. It ties into my view that a free internet is a major democratizing force (like the next stepping stone after printing): anyone may speak up, anyone may distribute knowledge, it spreads at near light speed. And possibly, given an initial investment, basically for free. This is very powerful, which is why I don't approve of the glorification of the developments in many governments or Silicon Valley or elsewhere. A walled internet is just as powerful as an open one, but in the wrong direction.

I guess we're going to find out soon enough what Apple thinks of that demographic considering their WWDC announcements.

Helping the power user is the whole point imo: let those who know what they're doing see and run the code themselves. As such, it doesn't matter whether Apple is in some business or not, it's simply a security measure.

I believe ecology has to be turned into a strong economic factor if we want anything to happen in its favor. Assuming political cooperation, the easiest way I see is to just slap a tax on any and all polluting emissions. That's very much top-down and seems very useful.

Does that work only on US cars or internationally?

Check out ipfs.io

You can only prevent entire java script files from reaching your browser by blocking domains, which is not helpful when js is required for functionality. I use umatrix and noscript. Both are set to block by default and tediously kept updated.

Google has recently started undermining my efforts on YouTube by sending ads over the same connections as actual video data. The shitty truth is that at the moment, there are no practical ways for the end user to properly manage the execution of other people's code on their machines that happens through app stores and browsers (including binaries downloaded with them).

The thing that stood out to me was the 'Disable all' button. I don't know how that compares to other platforms, but it's a good feature to have.

I guess I'm not the only one who's noticed the steady stream of "Do x with google" on the frontpage. This is what's unsettling me, they seem to want to seep into every last crack of our lives, starting with all things web.

Edit: At least it felt like a slow stream to me. Search isn't being very cooperative towards my cause right now... The only item matching my memory is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13013494 , but I'll be damned if there weren't others.

You're right, we've come this far because intelligence is a competitive advantage. However, we do not fully understand the mechanisms of evolution, and I thus find it hard to categorically deny all other beings' ability to think extensively. Their intelligence probably wouldn't be competitive ("how do I get there before that guy"), but maybe there are other kinds of intelligence. Kindness and compassion is not a human invention, and may well be an evolutionary advantage under some circumstances (grouping is needed for survival, and the group survives better by sharing), leading to intelligence based on kindness and not focusing on any single individual.

Have you created great works of art, literature, architecture and poetry or built complex machines? That's precisely the kind of arrogance the author is arguing against. Yes, as a species we create art and complex machinery, and we write. How exactly does that make us better than every other life form on Earth? What does 'better' even mean? How is an elephant supposed to hold a pen? Elephants can be very agile with their trunk, but that's just one member. We've got ten of them. We can physically do more nifty stuff.

Who are we to deem an elephant's mind inferior to our own? Its brain is three times as massive as ours! Perhaps elephants have long solved questions we aren't even considering, handing down knowledge from generation to generation. Maybe their memory is more reliable than ours and preserves knowledge perfectly. How can we know?

This human arrogance seems to stem from the fact that communication with other beings is difficult at best. We have no practical way into their minds, and they don't write, so they can't show us what they're pondering all day. That does not mean they sleep, eat and fuck waiting for the coffin like the rest of us. Make no mistake, humans are more physically sophisticated, but mentally? Bar the rare individuals that advance our civilization, we're a bunch of wildly destructive animals held together by a set of rules we can't actually agree on. We're the only species that destroys environment and life just for the heck of it.

I like humanity a lot. It has a great ability to transform its environment, and writing things down certainly helps in enabling its intellectual progress. As you rightly point out, we've only come this far through competition, but I think we have reached a point in our technological development that enables us to shed that character and refocus. We should turn inwards, because the outside is reaching the limits of what it can give us. Our minds are something we have no grasp of, and provide those who look with endless wonder and discovery. If we want to be truly more advanced than any other life form on this planet, we have to get our shit together regarding the mind, otherwise it's all for nothing (i.e. will physically be blown to pieces sooner or later).