I write about technology at theluddite.org

  • 1 Post
  • 98 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • Sounds very doable! My friend has an old claw foot tub that he lights a fire under. If you want something a little less country, you can buy on demand electric or propane water heaters and hook your hose up, though I’d expect the electric one wouldn’t be able to keep up at 120v. Hardest part of this project is probably moving the tub. I say go for it!




  • Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

    I’ve been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it’s everywhere




  • Other people have already posted good answers so I just want to add a couple things.

    If you want a very simple, concrete example: Healthcare. It depends on how you count, but more than half the world’s countries have some sort of free or low cost public healthcare, whereas in the US, the richest country in the history of countries, that’s presented as radical left wing kooky unrealistic communist Bernie idea. This isn’t an example of a left-wing policy that we won’t adopt, but of what in much of the world is a normal public service that we can’t adopt because anti-socialism in this country is so malignant and metastasized that it can be weaponized against things that are just considered normal public services almost like roads in other countries.

    A true left wing would support not just things like healthcare, but advocate for an economic system in which workers have control over their jobs, not the bosses. That is completely absent.

    Also, this meme:

    Two panel comic. top one is labeled republicans. bottom one is democrats. they're both planes dropping bombs except democrats has an lgbt flag and blm flag

    It’s glib, but it’s not wrong. Both parties routinely support American militarism abroad. Antimilitarism in favor of internationalism has been a corner stone for the left since the left began.





  • I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that’s right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges the very institutions that produced the knowledge exorbitant rents to access it. It’s all upside. Because they’re the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.




  • My two cents, but the problem here isn’t that the images are too woke. It’s that the images are a perfect metaphor for corporate DEI initiatives in general. Corporations like Google are literally unjust power structures, and when they do DEI, they update the aesthetics of the corporation such that they can get credit for being inclusive but without addressing the problem itself. Why would they when, in a very real way, they themselves are the problem?

    These models are trained on past data and will therefore replicate its injustices. This is a core structural problem. Google is trying to profit off generative AI while not getting blamed for these baked-in problems by updating the aesthetics. The results are predictably fucking stupid.


  • This is nowhere near the worst on a technical level, but it was my first big fuck up. Some 12+ years ago, I was pretty junior at a very big company that you’ve all heard of. We had a feature coming out that I had entirely developed almost by myself, from conception to prototype to production, and it was getting coverage in some relatively well-known trade magazine or blog or something (I don’t remember) that was coming out the next Monday. But that week, I introduced a bug in the data pipeline code such that, while I don’t remember the details, instead of adding the day’s data, it removed some small amount of data. No one noticed that the feature was losing all its data all week because it still worked (mostly) fine, but by Monday, when the article came out, it looked like it would work, but when you pressed the thing, nothing happened. It was thankfully pretty easy to fix but I went from being congratulated to yelled at so fast.





  • Maybe this is a hot take, but it’s really unfortunate that only the unhinged conservative lunatics are willing to have this discussion. I actually think that it’d be really healthy in a democracy to come together and exercise some agency in how we allow tech companies to access our children, if at all, but American liberals seem committed to some very broken notions of technocratic progress paired with free speech, while American conservatives are happy to throw all that away in order to have total control over their children, arriving closer to the right place for very dangerous reasons.