I think there’s a lot of poor incentives at play here. Having to mash everything down into a handful of top line success metrics (annual test scores, attendance rate) is certainly one, alongside this obsession with one-size-fits-all age-cohort based schooling.
It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
I think this is just once again an example of the interests of corporate ownership running counter to creative culture ala “Everything is a Remix”. Music samples, fan fic, fan art, reaction vids, etc.. are natural artifacts of culture. Corporations want to harvest the value of these artifacts without allowing the free flow back into the commons that provides fertile soil for these things to exist in the first place. It’s as unhealthy to culture as strip mining is to the environment.
The best reveal was not that he accidentally liquified the biosphere, but that he doomed generations of re-seeded humans to a painfully primitive life by sabotaging the AI that was responsible for their education. Just so they would never find out he was the bad guy long after he was dead. So yeah, fuck Ted Faro, lol.
Ack, sorry, seemed like 9 years was past the statute of limitations on spoilers for a game but fair enough. I’d throw a spoiler tag on it if I could still edit.
There’s really two types of people that tend to be drawn to libertarianism at some point: humanists and narcissists.
Those who are fundamentally humanist want to tear down systems of oppression because it pains them to see their fellow humans abused and brought low by corrupt laws and regulations. They (perhaps naively) imagine that if the system was dismantled or at least shrunk to minimum size, basic human decency will step in to fill the vacuum and people will thrive. Folks like Penn Gillette are the face of this group.
The narcissists are drawn to the movement because they feel like “if only everyone would get out of my way, I can do GREAT THINGS™ “. They like ideas like social Darwinism because they are already privileged enough to not be worried about losing in a survival of the fittest contest, and don’t tend to concern themselves with the second order effects of dismantling the system because it is simply an immoral impediment to their greatness. Peter Thiel and folks like him are the face of this group. This is largely the strain that has taken root in SV.
I see a whole lot more that end up at libertarianism as almost the default answer to "what philosophy most emphasis less government".
It's a generational thing I think, you see public money being spent on junk, and laws used to entrench and make competition hard; and you think "why do we want the government to do these things at all?". And if you look at common ideas around 20 years ago, the default answer was libertarianism.
The current crop of LLM-backed chatbots do have a bit of that “old, good internet” flavor. A mostly unspoiled frontier where things are changing rapidly, potential seems unbounded, the people molding the actual tech and discussing it are enthusiasts with a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice vibe. Not sure how long it can persist, since I’ve seen this story before and we all understand the incentive structures at play.
Does anyone know how if there are precedents for PBCs or B-Corp type businesses to be held accountable for betraying their stated values? Or is it just window dressing with no legal clout? Can they change to a standard corporation on a whim and ditch the non-shareholder maximization goals?
There’s nothing old internet about these AI companies. Old internet was about giving out and asking for nothing in return. These companies take everything and give back nothing, unless you are willing to pay that is.
I get the sentiment, but if you can't acknowledge that AI is useful and currently a lot better than search for a great many things, then it's hard to have a rational conversation.
No, they don't. They soak up tons of your most personal and sensitive information like a sponge, and you don't know what's done with it. In the "good old Internet", that did not happen. Also in the good old Internet, it wasn't the masses all dependent on a few central mega-corporations shaping the interaction, but a many-to-many affair, with people and organizations of different sizes running the sites where interaction took place.
Ok, I know I'm describing the past with rosy glasses. After all, the Internet started as a DARPA project. But still, current reality is itself rather dystopic in many ways.
Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now.
I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win.
There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.
Oh, very cool. Just watched the YouTube on some of the porting challenges. Love the idea of a full fledged game dev environment the kids can graduate to from scratch Jr. and the like.
Combine this with an Apple Pencil, Pixelmator pro and Blender and you’ve got yourself a great little hyper portable game kit. Don’t think I’d do too much hardcore coding in this form factor, but if I had an existing prototype that I just wanted to tweak a bit and play around with, it seems legit.
The undissmissable badges in settings irk me to no end. Using language like “finish setting up” in iOS to describe me opting out of Apple Intelligence by choice as leaving MY device in some sort of “unfinished state” is user hostile too. With the amount of effort it takes me to push back constantly on these dark patterns, I know for a fact all my less tech savvy friends and family just aren’t bothering and that’s what they count on.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
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