TikTok and YouTube shorts are brain-rotting garbage, and if you use them regularly you need to stop now. Yes, even if you claim you only watch educational stuff.
Also giving a child under the age of 8 or 9 a personal internet-connected device should be seen on a similar level as neglect if not full-on abuse.
We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don’t realize how much they are missing.
The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.
This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.
This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don’t actually deserve our collective attention.
And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.
Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:
If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.
How to learn this? The way it’s taught is so people don’t know they don’t know. What are good starting resources?
I am not a professional educator, but in general I think it is worth to start with basic computer literacy: identifying parts of a PC, being able to explain their overall functions, difference between hardware and software, and what kinds of software a computer can run (firmwares, operating systems, user utilities etc.). This would also be a perfect time to develop practical skills, e.g. (assuming you are a normatively-abled person) learning to touch-type and perform basic electronics maintenance, like opening your machine up to clean it and replace old thermal compounds.
After that taking something like “Operating systems fundamentals” on Coursera would be a great way to go on.
It really depends on your goals, resources and personal traits, as well as how much time and energy you can spare, and how do you like to learn. You can sacrifice and old machine, boot Ubuntu and break it a bunch of times. You can learn how to use virtualization and try a new thing every evening. You can get into ricing and redesign your entire OS GUI to your liking. You can get a single-board computer like RaspberryPi and try out home automation.
Copyright is far too long and should only last at most 20 years.
Actually, George Washington would agree with me if he was still alive. He and the other founding fathers created the notion of copyright, which was to last 14 years. Then big corporations changed the laws in their favor.
health insurance != healthcare
health insurance profits only exist at the expense of human suffering.
but lets make sure everyone has insurance but not care
Myers Briggs is posh astrology.
There’s no public debt crisis. People don’t understand how government debt works. One casualty of this is the slow green transition which will cost us dearly in the future.
The vast majority of humans are actually nice, altruistic and not selfish if you treat them with respect. And hence anarchism would not resolve in everyone killing each other.
Problem is you need more than the “vast majority” to be nice before you feel safe.
Not in my experience.
Leadership has the capacity and capability to change things for the better and continue to fail to do so because true leadership means making decisions that at times may hurt and may not be universally liked.
This is as true in politics as it is in business.
In short our leaders are not leading out of the fear of repercussions of leading.
Teachers should be paid 50% more. If you want good teachers to stay, you have to walk the walk, otherwise you’ll get a perpetual cycle of overwhelmed grads being bossed around by rusted-on bottom teer heads.
Religions are mostly just popularized conspiracy theories. Believing in God is about as realistic as believing the world is flat.
Believing in God is about as realistic as believing the world is flat.
That is a bad comparison IMO. We have piles and piles of hard evidence the Earth is round. Saying the Earth is flat is just factually incorrect at this point.
But the existence of God. I would argue we have no hard evidence of God’s existence nor do we have hard evidence that God doesn’t exist. As far as science is concerned it is still a theory.
On top of that what makes a god a God there are multiple definitions of a God. If simulation theory is correct and we are all just in a simulation would be people outside of the simulation be our Gods? Or if an extremely advanced civilization existed would they be Gods to us? Or If we as humans advanced enough could we become Gods our self.
But it’s not about that for many people. For many people, being religious is more about finding strength and peace in that kind of guided spirituality
And explaining what happens when you die. Which by its very definition nobody alive can know
False peace through a false god
Believe is a powerful thing I would ague even if what you belief is wrong if that belief brings you peace it is not a false peace.
I agree with the first sentence, seriously disagree with the second. The shape of the Earth is a testable hypothesis, we have the technology to just go look.
As you go down the rabbit hole of consciousness and existence itself, with a purely rational and materialist mindset, the most reasonable and conservative hypotheses approach the descriptions of deity. Certainly the more specific claims of various religions are as you described, conspiracy theories, but the entire concept? Wholesale dismissal of the generalized God hypothesis strikes me as evidence of rationality applied incompletely, arbitrarily cut short.
Here’s one of them there conspiracy theorists I was talking about.
What a superb example of hypocrisy. Bro agrees with you, explains, however, that scientifically speaking your analogy is incorrect, and then you proceed to go against precisely the science you were idolizing earlier.
I am an atheist. My mother is Catholic. She is Catholic, because sometimes she needs mental comfort. Religion can be very therapeutic, a community and someone/-thing to prey to are things that comfort most humans. Note, my mother does not believe what it says in the Bible word-for-word, she believes in metaphors. Don’t be a jack-ass to these people, they have not harmed you. Be a jack-ass to the people who start spouting entitled crap and try to murder people.
His believe that science points towards a diety is of conspiracy level bullshit to me sure maybe there is some chance but its not overwhelmingly true. If there is a god it likely does not follow the fables written in any religious text.
It’s an opinion he has based on no or misguided facts just like many conspiracy theories. Yes there is a key difference in that you can disprove that the earth is flat but there are other conspiracies that are not easily disproven similar to how it’s hard to disprove the existence of a god, I put them into the same box, they and I am assuming you don’t put them in the same box. Sure I could have probably made a larger explanation but I was probably busy in the moment or otherwise didn’t feel like it.
Conscience is not limited to Humans, Humans are not special. Why would that ever point to there being a god?
Here’s one of those who arbitrarily stops using rationality I was talking about. What is consciousness made of?
Nuerons, and the small electrical signals that pass between them. Also religion and there being a god are two different things. The Bible can be easily disproven just like flat earth.
Notice the top comment compared belief in god specifically to flat earth theory, hence the structure of my response.
As to your hypothesis, I didn’t ask about brain activity, I asked about consciousness itself, the subjective experience. It’s still very much an open question.
Oh yeah I forgot the good old adage that everything that can’t be clearly explained must be a God’s work.
There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. Labor is labor, specially if someone else has to do it even if you don’t want to.
Not a single one of the Marvel movies are good. They just use dopaminergic techniques to teach brains to enjoy them.
Have you watched the first two Raimi-directed Spiderman movies? I think they stand alone well even for someone that doesn’t typically watch superhero movies.
Can you elaborate on your second sentence? Not trying to be ignorant, but it genuinely sounds like “ice cream doesn’t taste good, it just has ingredients that makes your taste buds act favorable towards it”
Gosh, now I want ice cream!
“Andor” is the best Star Wars series.
Humanity cannot and will not change its practices fast enough to avoid running out of resources we keep ourselves dependent on because it’s “profitable.” We are a doomed species and won’t be around for very much longer. We are likely living in the flash of bright before the long dark. I don’t think the world my grandchildren live in will be remotely like the one we have now.
I’m perfectly fine hedging my bets and living life normally, but I think our longevity is an uncomfortable truth most people don’t want to face.
What we’re currently calling AI isn’t AI but just a language processing system that takes its best guess at a response from it’s database of information they pilfered from the internet like a more sophisticated Google.
It can’t really think for itself and it’s answers can be completely wrong. There’s nothing intelligent about it.
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