re: techno-optimism: I'm plenty optimistic about technology. It's neat. The problem is people using it for unethical, short-sighted, and selfish purposes, from planned obsolescence to mass surveillance. I'm all for advancing science and technology but there's no single magical panacea that enough VC money will uncover and thereby fix the human condition.
What's the term of venery for cops? A brutality of police? Maybe a civil-rights-violation of police? Or a state-sanctioned-extrajudicial-murder of cops. A qualified-immunity of pigs. A civil-forfeiture of cops. A gang of sheriffs, although this one is just a literal, factual description of certain sheriff's departments. A pRoTeCt-aNd-sErVe (pronounced extremely sarcastically) of law enforcement officers. An absurd-majority-of-the-city's-budget of police. A paid-leave of cops. An I-smelled-marijuana-so-I-shot-your-dog of cops.
A literal glass house, you say? A house, made of glass? ... no, I shan't. It's too easy.
Unrelated, who wants to help me build a medieval siege engine?
I dare you to find anyone who says that they wouldn’t prefer a real human relationship to an AI girlfriend.
I guarantee you there are MGTOW weirdos out there who'd vehemently claim that an AI girlfriend is superior to one of us gold-digging whores with low sExUaL mArKeT vALuE (I can't bring myself to type or say that phrase un-sarcastically), or whatever they're calling women these days. But your point still stands. The economic and social problems mentioned in this article aren't the fault of AI girlfriends; the problems are caused by flesh-and-blood people.
"We would catch so many more criminals if we could just declare certain people are criminals without having to prove it" -- Kym Worthy, Wayne County prosecutor
I agree that there's too much internet infrastructure: specifically, the infrastructure that provides Ted Cruz with Internet and allows him to inflict his thoughts on the rest of us.
You're right about it always being the excuse. So if they aren't using the extremely detailed data to improve service, then they certainly won't mind being required to not collect it and fall back to aggregate usage statistics, right? I'm sure the decision makers and elected officials in charge of the budget for public transit systems across the country care deeply about the public's opinions and have only the public's best interests-- Just kidding.
Librarians are okay in my book, though, pun intended. One time I obtained a pdf of a very expensive and hard to find book which was missing two pages. I looked it up on WorldCat and started emailing libraries, and every single one of them got back to me even if they couldn't help. The sixth or seventh library I tried responded with apologies that they don't offer scanning services, but attached a scan of the two pages anyway. I love librarians.
You know how many libraries stopped keeping histories of who checked out what item? Maybe that's the right approach. Of course libraries and transit systems need to know general usage stats to manage their services, but do they need to know exactly who is reading or riding?
I finished reading Walled Culture recently, so now I'm annoying everyone in my life by complaining about copyright law even more than usual. Like this morning I got into an argument with someone I know irl about this article. His stance is that actually corporations should be allowed to destroy creative works if the copyright of those works is their property, and my stance is wtf no they shouldn't. I made no progress persuading him and now I'm in a bad mood. I will console myself by donating to the Internet Archive again.
Recently I decided to upgrade my phone because 32GB internal space just wasn't cutting it any more. I decided on the Pixel 3 with 128GB, so I went to the Verizon website and got connected with a support person in the in-browser chat window. I said "I want to upgrade to the 128GB Pixel 3" and they said "okay I'll set that up and you can pick it up tonight at your local Verizon location".
Then like an idiot, I assumed everything was on the up-and-up, and didn't actually check to see if I'd been given the correct phone--it said Google Pixel 3 in large letters on the box, but the small print on the side label said 64GB.
Could have been an honest mistake, sure. But then, since I'm still on the family plan, my mom decided to upgrade to the Pixel 3 as well, and she'd get the 128GB model, and we'd swap devices. So she went online and arranged to get it sent to her local store, and right before actually handing over credit card info, she said "just to be sure, Pixel 3 128GB, right?" and the support person said "oh sorry I put that through as 64GB; let me fix it".
So I think Verizon is doing dishonest and creatively incompetent things behind the scenes. Because once is an accident, twice is suspicious.
I'm a rabid fan of ebooks for my personal library, but I agree that textbooks or anything with indices, lots of footnotes, or cross-referencing between pages of the book is a huge pain to do on an ereader. I don't know of any way to conveniently reproduce holding a physical book open to two different pages and looking back and forth between them.
Pearson is the absolute worst anyway. Everything they do is to grab more money. I predict that their ebook portal will be bug-riddled to the point of unusability their response to students' complaints will be, essentially, "sucks to be you."
One last thing: ebooks can absolutely be shared in a group setting. It won't take long for someone smarter than me to crack Pearson's DRM. They could do something like Microsoft does with electronic copies of certification exam study texts and put "from the library of Purchaser's Name" on every page, but that could be sanitized away if needed.
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re: techno-optimism: I'm plenty optimistic about technology. It's neat. The problem is people using it for unethical, short-sighted, and selfish purposes, from planned obsolescence to mass surveillance. I'm all for advancing science and technology but there's no single magical panacea that enough VC money will uncover and thereby fix the human condition.
What's the term of venery for cops? A brutality of police? Maybe a civil-rights-violation of police? Or a state-sanctioned-extrajudicial-murder of cops. A qualified-immunity of pigs. A civil-forfeiture of cops. A gang of sheriffs, although this one is just a literal, factual description of certain sheriff's departments. A pRoTeCt-aNd-sErVe (pronounced extremely sarcastically) of law enforcement officers. An absurd-majority-of-the-city's-budget of police. A paid-leave of cops. An I-smelled-marijuana-so-I-shot-your-dog of cops.
A literal glass house, you say? A house, made of glass? ... no, I shan't. It's too easy. Unrelated, who wants to help me build a medieval siege engine?
You guys ever read Asimov's "The Feeling of Power"?
"We would catch so many more criminals if we could just declare certain people are criminals without having to prove it" -- Kym Worthy, Wayne County prosecutor
I agree that there's too much internet infrastructure: specifically, the infrastructure that provides Ted Cruz with Internet and allows him to inflict his thoughts on the rest of us.
You're right about it always being the excuse. So if they aren't using the extremely detailed data to improve service, then they certainly won't mind being required to not collect it and fall back to aggregate usage statistics, right? I'm sure the decision makers and elected officials in charge of the budget for public transit systems across the country care deeply about the public's opinions and have only the public's best interests-- Just kidding. Librarians are okay in my book, though, pun intended. One time I obtained a pdf of a very expensive and hard to find book which was missing two pages. I looked it up on WorldCat and started emailing libraries, and every single one of them got back to me even if they couldn't help. The sixth or seventh library I tried responded with apologies that they don't offer scanning services, but attached a scan of the two pages anyway. I love librarians.
You know how many libraries stopped keeping histories of who checked out what item? Maybe that's the right approach. Of course libraries and transit systems need to know general usage stats to manage their services, but do they need to know exactly who is reading or riding?
I finished reading Walled Culture recently, so now I'm annoying everyone in my life by complaining about copyright law even more than usual. Like this morning I got into an argument with someone I know irl about this article. His stance is that actually corporations should be allowed to destroy creative works if the copyright of those works is their property, and my stance is wtf no they shouldn't. I made no progress persuading him and now I'm in a bad mood. I will console myself by donating to the Internet Archive again.
I'm excited to read this. Science fiction/speculative fiction is like catnip to me.
Verizon sucks
I have a tangentially related story:
Recently I decided to upgrade my phone because 32GB internal space just wasn't cutting it any more. I decided on the Pixel 3 with 128GB, so I went to the Verizon website and got connected with a support person in the in-browser chat window. I said "I want to upgrade to the 128GB Pixel 3" and they said "okay I'll set that up and you can pick it up tonight at your local Verizon location".
Then like an idiot, I assumed everything was on the up-and-up, and didn't actually check to see if I'd been given the correct phone--it said Google Pixel 3 in large letters on the box, but the small print on the side label said 64GB.
Could have been an honest mistake, sure. But then, since I'm still on the family plan, my mom decided to upgrade to the Pixel 3 as well, and she'd get the 128GB model, and we'd swap devices. So she went online and arranged to get it sent to her local store, and right before actually handing over credit card info, she said "just to be sure, Pixel 3 128GB, right?" and the support person said "oh sorry I put that through as 64GB; let me fix it".
So I think Verizon is doing dishonest and creatively incompetent things behind the scenes. Because once is an accident, twice is suspicious.
Re:
I'm a rabid fan of ebooks for my personal library, but I agree that textbooks or anything with indices, lots of footnotes, or cross-referencing between pages of the book is a huge pain to do on an ereader. I don't know of any way to conveniently reproduce holding a physical book open to two different pages and looking back and forth between them. Pearson is the absolute worst anyway. Everything they do is to grab more money. I predict that their ebook portal will be bug-riddled to the point of unusability their response to students' complaints will be, essentially, "sucks to be you." One last thing: ebooks can absolutely be shared in a group setting. It won't take long for someone smarter than me to crack Pearson's DRM. They could do something like Microsoft does with electronic copies of certification exam study texts and put "from the library of Purchaser's Name" on every page, but that could be sanitized away if needed.