theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml

I write about technology at theluddite.org

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348

Joined

2 yr. ago

The point of the post is to talk about it because I care about the internet and don't want it to be filled with generated trash.

lol I've always been bad at titles.

I am the dude. Fair enough, but your summary misses the point. The original website was a useful tool that people use, but it didn't qualify for adsense. I draw an analogy to recipes. Recipe sites used to be useful, but now you have to scroll through tons of blogspam to even get to the recipe. Google has a monopoly on ads, and like it or not, ad revenue is how people who make websites get paid. Google's policies for what qualifies for AdSense have a huge impact on the internet.

The point of the post is to show how direct that relationship is, using an existing and useful website.

Things might not be fine. Throughout human history, on scales big and small, many people were not fine. Living in a crumbling empire can be a very ugly business.

You can't use ChatGPT to rebut an argument made by an expert who just wrote an entire book about the topic. He even explains in that article why this isn't right, which the person you're replying to quoted in their comment:

Take medieval windmills, a very transformative technology. It changed the organization of textile manufacturing, but especially agriculture. But you didn’t see much improvement in the conditions of the peasants. The windmills were controlled by landowners and churches. This narrow elite collected the gains. [emphasis added] They decided who could use the windmills. They killed off competition

This is what I mean when I say it's going to end up being a circular argument.

Both the maxim gun and nuclear weapons had the biggest possible impacts possible on the economy. The maxim gun (and other war technologies) were hugely important in the viability of colonial administration. Nuclear weapons made the US one of two superpowers, which defined 20th century economic debate.

High fructose corn syrup has had a paramount impact on the entire American food system, probably the single most important part of an economy, from our agriculture to our food processing.

Plastics have so transformed our economy that we rely on it to get basically any physical good to the consumer, and the resulting trash now exists in every part of Earth, including our own bodies.

Nuclear weapons, the maxim gun, lead paint, lead gasoline, basically all lead-based products, thalidomide, CFCs, the electric chair, agent orange, asbestos, oxycodone, zyklon b, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, disposable plastics, cigarettes, trans fats, ...

I think @PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com is doing a great job of pointing to the actual substance of the argument, so I'll leave that to them, but it's actually really easy to come up with a long list of technological horrors that absolutely did not benefit most people but had huge impacts on our economy.

I do think "impact on our economy" is a pretty squishy phrase that'll give you some wiggle room, but many of these nightmare technologies are inextricably and inseparably tied to the way we've structured our economy. Likewise, I think it's easy to define "technology" in convenient ways for these kinds of arguments, but also ends up being circular pretty quick.

Welcome aboard!

The username, profile pic, and even that last paragraph are all taken from my site, where I write about things just like this, if you're into that kind of thing :D

I've submitted apps to both stores many times.

I hesitate to use the word "rigorous," but Apple's process is certainly more involved, though I'd say it's also bureaucratic and even arbitrary. Their primary concern is clearly maintaining their tight control over their users' phones, which is an extremely lucrative monopoly. The play process, by comparison, is definitely lighter, though I don't know if I'd be comfortable saying it's less well vetted.

Philosophically, relying on either of the duopolies to screen the software we use for safety is ultimately a bad system, especially since they are creating this problem. Until very recently, the internet existed on websites. They are pushing us to use mobile apps because it is more lucrative for them. Apple takes something like a 20% cut of every single transaction that happens on any iPhone app. They don't even allow non-apple-webkit browsers on iOS, meaning that the iphone's chrome, firefox, etc. are actually different than Android's. They do this specifically to hamstring mobile browser development.

They've managed to align the incentives here by offering tech companies more advertising revenue through the mobile platform. Basically, if you make a mobile app, Apple takes a huge cut each time your users pay you, but companies also get to spy on you more, meaning more lucrative advertising.

Anyone who quotes Ashby et al gets an upvote from me! I'm always so excited to see cybernetic thinking in the wild.

is it even feasible to feed everyone if we stop meat production?

This is a difficult question to answer because since the green revolution in the mid 20th century, it seems we have absolutely no idea how to farm at scale without petrochemicals as fuel but also as inputs like fertilizer.

There do exist various studies on the organic carrying capacity if the earth, and those usually give numbers lower than the current human population. So, in a way, you could argue that the current situation is already infeasible, and this is where your question comes in. afaik there's no organic farming without animals. Animals are an essential part of rotation and management schemes. Medieval peasants used the famous three field system, for example, as a long term sustainable rotation system.

To be clear, current CAFOs and meat consumption are an inefficient, unsustainable, petrochemical-fueled cruelty factory for which each and every one of us should feel shame, but if you want to imagine a solarpunk organic utopia, I'm not sure if it can be vegan.

Americans would rather start a digital surveillance program for boobs than fix our healthcare system.

I can do whatever I want, with or without guns, whenever I want, preferably in a giant truck, and if gas is over 4 USD/gallon, that is communism.

Yet another technological antisolution. I've posted it before but it's just a perennial concept.

This is how most of the tech industry thinks -- looking at the existing process and trying to see which parts can be automated -- but I'd argue that it's actually not that great of a framework for finding good uses for technology. It's an artifact of a VC-funded industry, which sees technology primarily as a way to save costs on labor.

In this particular case, I do think LLMs would be great at lowering labor costs associated with writing summaries, but you'd end up with a lot of cluttered, mediocre summaries clogging up your notes, just like all the other bloatware that most of our jobs now force us to deal with.

I think zoning is a related and secondary issue, but so long as the housing market is a market, and a few people have almost all the money, all zoning changes can do for housing prices is temporarily alleviate the problem. People with money are always looking for places to park their capital and collect rent. There's no better vessel for that than real estate.

Obviously, we need to gut literally every aspect of American urban planning for a million other reasons too, but on this specific issue, I think it's second order.

Having had the misfortune of interacting with venture capitalists for many years, I'd argue that VCs aren't really in it for the money. They would definitely disagree with that statement, but it's definitely a power and prestige thing. They want to have called the next Uber or whatever so much more than they want to maximize returns. Investing in index funds isn't sexy. Disrupting(tm) some industry is.

Exactly this, and it's because capitalism uses computers backwards.