theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml

I write about technology at theluddite.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Ha, thank you. Fortunately for me, I'm a dual citizen, with family happy to have me anytime. I suspect that day will come, though I really , really love the life and community I've built where I am and will be devastated to leave it.

I wish you many years of good health, friend!

We are usually not given a good example of how bad things actually happen. We imagine the barbarians storming the gate, raping and pillaging. That does happen, but more often, things getting worse is more complicated, and it affects different people at different times.

For the one in five (!!) children facing hunger, our society has failed. For a poor person with diabetes and no medical insurance, our society has already failed. For an uber driver with no family support whose car broke down and missed rent, facing an eviction, society is about to break down for them. I'm a dude in my mid thirties that writes code, so for me, things are fine, but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and lose the ability to use my hands, society will probably fail for me.

More and more people are experiencing that failure. Most of us are fine, but our being fine is becoming incredibly fucking precarious. More often than not, society collapsing looks like a daily constitution saving throw that becomes harder and harder to pass, and more and more of us who have a stroke of bad luck here or there fail.

Understanding society this way is important, and it's why solidarity is the foundation of leftist politics. I march for people without healthcare because I care about them, and also, because there but for the grace of god go I. Bakunin put this beautifully almost 200 years ago:

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

lmao thank you. That's slightly strange but extremely nice to read.

I was in tears of laughter while making it. I couldn't believe when they accepted it except part of me always totally expected it because they're fucking clowns.

Hey thanks so much friend. You should submit a hall of shame entry! We rarely get submissions and I agree it's such a fun part of the site.

What client are you on? There's a known bug in some lemmy clients that break some URLs.

If you paste the URL into a browser it should work fine: https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads

It's not that this article is bad, but it is what frustrates me about tech journalism, and why I started writing about tech. None of these people have any idea how the internet actually works. They've never written a line of code, or set up a server, or published an app, or even done SEO, so they end up turning everything into a human interest piece, where they interview the people involved and some experts, but report it with that famous "view from nowhere."

Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Let me answer that definitively: it's google, in multiple ways, one of which isn't even search, which I know because I actually do make things on the internet. SEO people aren't helping, for sure, but I've seen many journalists and others talk about how blogspam is the result of SEO, and maybe that's the origin story, but at this point, it is actually the result of google's monopoly on advertising, not search. I've posted this before on this community, but google forces you to turn your website into blogspam in order to monetize it. Cluttering the internet with bullshit content is their explicit content policy. It's actually very direct and straightforward. It's widely and openly discussed on internet forums about monetizing websites.

A delicious example (pun intended) of what I call a technological antisolution

1 fast 1 furious

Yet another program that supposedly helps the poor by giving money to the rich.

third peg of the program will see the federal government draw up a public list of buildings it owns that could be made available for sale to help bolster development.

Jesus Christ. If the government wants to build housing, then it should build fucking housing. Selling publicly owned buildings to private developers to turn into rentals for poor people is trickle down neoliberal bullshit.

Sorta.... the second does some pretty thin analysis, and the refers right back to the same report, of which i am skeptical considering they were just caught bending the truth in their favor.

We need a robust and publicly accountable third party investigation. I fear we don't have the political and institutional infrastructure to do that, and it's going to be like how even just 50 years ago the FDA regularly was letting dangerous shit fly that they absolutely should've caught and that companies were straight up lying about.

Both of those links rely on the same self-reported data by Cruise... We'll see, I suppose! Happy to be proven wrong. I live on a frozen hilly dirt road, so realistically, for me, it's not going to happen.

As far as I know, there doesn’t exist a single shred of actual, empirical evidence that we can make self driving cars actually better than humans, outside of our faith in technological improvement. Companies used to publish their data on simulated injury rates for their internal testing, and they were way way way worse than professional human drivers, like taxi drivers, which is what Cruise is trying to replace.

I don't want to be right. I want self-driving cars that work. It'd be personally very convenient for me, so much so that I would buy a brand new car for the first time in my life (I'm in my mid thirties) if I had actual, robust, empirical reason to believe that they work as advertised.

A bold argument to make on a thread about a car dragging a woman stuck under it for 20 feet and then the company covering it up. The one story contains both the technical problems that people like me have been warning about since day one (bad at edge cases) and the structural and political problem of corporate control over infrastructure.

Honestly they'll probably figure out a way :(

I was being a luddite

As we all should be. Oppose capitalist control over technology!

This is completely contentless. Not one new idea or insight. I'm pretty sure chatgpt wrote it. It even has the short sections with header titles and the repetitive conclusion. Trust me on this one, because if anyone here would know about clogging up the Internet with LLM generated blog spam, it's me.

found it very difficult to find an objective injury rate for driverless cars. Probably because there are five levels of automation, and many of them allow human error to come into play. Also they are self reported by the driver companies.

This is an important point but I think you're interpreting it backwards. The current system relies on companies with a profit motive to do the testing internally, and the rest of us to trust their honesty and openness working with regularity authorities to make that rollout safe. They violated that trust,.

Also fwiw companies used to publish their data on injury rates for their internal testing, and by and large they were way worse than humans. In the last couple years, they've mostly stopped reporting them. Afaik there doesn't exist a single shred of actual, empirical evidence that we can make self driving cars actually better than humans outside of faith in technological improvement. Maybe that faith is warranted, maybe it's not (I think it's not), but either way, safety must be the number one priority. If these companies can't be trusted to work collaboratively with safety authorities then we should pull the plug hard and fast.

Remember when the NYT collaborated with the Bush administration to invade Iraq? I remember. It's a reactionary, war-mongering rag, owned by the same family since the 19th century. Their editorial board ran the story "Israel is Fighting to Defend a Society That Values Human Life" just a couple of days into a series of cut-and-dry, textbook war crimes. War crime apologia is the absolute lowest form of writing.

I wish I could find it again, but when this new Sulzberger inherited the paper a while back, I saw a youtube compilation of a bunch of very famous and prestigious NYT reporters discussing how seriously the Sulzbergers took their role as guardians of the news in our democracy or whatever. It was the most tedious, noblesse oblige, aristocratic boot-licking bullshit.

Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent came out in 1988 -- fully 35 years ago! -- and it should've put an end to the paper's reputation. It's not specifically about the NYT, but it does use the NYT very often as an example, and the case studies are comprehensive and damning. If we cared about media literacy, we'd make it required reading in high school.

Ah that does slightly complicate things. Still frustrating that none of these outlets even looked into his relationship with the DSA (or lack thereof) before uncritically repeating his statements, but that does excuse it slightly.