I see government in different levels in this discussion though. FBI/NSA/etc are very technically capable when they need to be. Congress however, are very not technically capable. For example take comments asking to change the orbits of earth/moon to help climate change, the internet is a bunch of tubes, and other unintelligent sounding comments does not lend to a sign of technical understanding. The scary thing is that these are the morons saying what is/isn't legal, and the tech savvy arms are using that to their complete advantage to get away with everything.
I was going to say, I have a dehumidifier in my basement that I empty a gallon of water out of/day during the summer in Pennsylvania. I can't believe this kind of shit wins the xprize.
Right?! I've always wondered that about this smart stuff. Like the smart water bottle that counts how many bottles of water you've had. Can't you just keep a tally? Like you said, this stuff is just bullshit that rich people buy when they have nothing better to do with their money.
I also really like your point about the data being skewed because of the price!
> in the novel, 1984 you didn't have a choice if you want a televisor in your home, or not.
This makes a lot of sense I recently heard a comparison between Orwell and Huxley that stated that they differed mostly on how they believed control would be taken.
In the case of Orwell, he believed that control could be punished into the population and that they'd comply for fear of being punished again. Though, Skinner had evidence that this wasn't really feasible.
In the case of Huxley, he believed that it could be rewarded into the population to the point where the population would crave it and seek it out.
Feels like Huxley had the right idea. People are paying really good money to buy these spy devices to put into their homes.
To be fair, I don't think it's worth discussing which of these paths we will take.
What's worth discussing, although - is the fact that these two (opposing and heavily developed) points of view both will degenerate the society towards the same authoritarian state.
Imagine a world where the government uses terrorism as a justification for it's surveillance programs and the companies are pushing the surveillance devices for customer satisfaction? Wait a minute...
The solution space is much wider and is thus more probable.
Na man I love the fact that I no longer have a headphone jack, my battery can't be replaced and goes bad in a year, my processor runs super beefy and drains my battery faster, but I can charge it wirelessly. Yeah I'm with you the new era of phones are just bullshit. It feels like they're running out of cool things to make them do and change about them so they're just doing stupid stuff to try to find something that accidentally works.
There's a guy who makes youtube videos like this a lot. He's a good guy and a smart guy but seems to either not care or not realize he isn't helping. I've seen videos like "Computer Vision In 5 lines" where the first line is "import helperclass.py" or something like that and that helper class has like 1500 lines of code that he wrote to implement. Sure people need to be aware of what they're learning but if someone has no programming experience and finds that video they're going to just think it's magic.
