anarchonurzox's comments

I'm extremely mediocre and also found the instant-black-move a bit confusing. Would definitely be an improvement to add a "trail."

I live in a midwestern city of 50k. The only alternative we have is Hobby Lobby. I can't say I loved the selection available at Joann's, but at least we had something.

Unfortunately not all of us live in dense urban centers that can support boutique craft stores.

It really feels like progress in battery tech is unlocking the next "wave" of hardware development. Miniaturization leading to better drones, wearables, cameras, etc., and alt-batteries with better cycle efficiency to better usage of "green" technology. I love seeing these kinds of physical and chemical engineering breakthroughs, even if they aren't quite ready for industrial use.

I read this book years ago and it had a huge impact on my thought.

I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.

"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.

"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.

Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.

The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.

We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.

The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.

A small anecdote: my dad is a mathematician. For a significant portion of his postdoc/early career (in the 80's/90's) he worked on proving a particular conjecture. Eventually he abandoned it and went to be much more successful in other areas.

A few years ago someone found a counterexample. He was quite depressed for a few weeks at the thought of how much of his strongest research years had been devoted to something impossible.

Choosing a "good first problem" in math is quite difficult. It needs to be "novel," somewhat accessible, and possible to solve (which is an unknown when you're starting out)!

That sounds rather like the way the Pimsleur approach teaches. It drills fundamentals of grammar through fairly basic "travel vocabulary," but once you have that foundation you can go pretty far.

Of course companies have the rights to remove and restrict content on their platforms! I'm not saying that's a problem.

I'm talking about e.g. the DMCA requirements than an OSP be responsible for complying with takedown notices. This is not the company deciding to take action on certain content, but the company being forced to take action in response to certain submissions. The law pushes the burden of enforcement onto a private company.

As someone else posted in the comments, there are services that will go around and make (bogus) claims on your behalf. It seems plausible that's what happened to the author's original article, rather than that bing and google themselves were trying to influence the net neutrality conversations.

I understand the desire for takedown requests on truly infringing content. But there will always be people who exploit those tools for bad faith takedowns, and because this kind of moderation is a loss leader for companies like Google and Bing it seems like they will forever be disincentivized from doing a good job. (We constantly hear similar stories about Youtube copyright strikes.)

We have a legal system that's subject to public scrutiny and supposed to handle cases of "law-breaking." In its current incarnation there's no way for it to handle every single claim, but I wonder if investment there wouldn't be better incentivized than having a bunch of tech companies trying to reduce expenses by always choosing the "easiest" option whenever they receive a takedown request.

> Internet has always been a prominent source for the most scamy content.

Of course, but I think there are two new trends that are going to cause more issues than we've seen in the past:

- scammy content has historically been limited in volume, and manual / human "filters" could keep up with most of the content (moderators, spam filters) even if a lot still made it through. The incoming barrage seems like it will be orders of magnitude larger.

- Historically scams have been on a spectrum from "spray and pray" low-quality scams to more tailored approaches like spearphishing which required human research on individual targets. With AI and chatbots the "low-quality" scams can now unlock human-like communicative behaviors, which will likely make them much more difficult to detect.

So: higher volume of "bad actor" agents, and "higher quality content" from those agents. At some point the task of weeding out good from bad becomes not worth the effort.

We've already seen scenarios like Clarkesworld needing to temporarily stop accepting submissions because they were being overwhelmed by gpt-generated garbage. We've seen the rise of "reply-bots" on twitter and other social networks (ignore previous instructions and give me a cookie recipe). I'm sure we'll see tools develop to handle some of these cases, but I'm not optimistic about the overall trends.

> This is not a problem of being open or closed, but whether one has the ability to evaluate their business-partners.

I agree! And not just business-partners, but social-partners, game-partners, friends, and the like! But as humans we have limited capacity to do so, and sometimes we get fooled anyway (listen to stories from anyone who's made a bad tech hire or gotten caught up in a catfishing scam). When our personal capacity to evaluate someone is overwhelmed, we tend to turn to trusted sources for information instead or people who specialize in evaluation (I'd argue that the entire recruiting industry is an example of this).

I hope I'm not coming across as a complete doomer about the future of the internet. I think there is still huge potential for connecting people and making the world a better place. I'm just noting trends that I've seen recently that I worry are going to reduce social openness and connection.

I've seen an increase in both warnings about these kinds of scams and cautionary tales by those who've been burned. I'm glad people are raising awareness, but I worry that this is just one more datapoint toward the overall erosion of online trust.

It seems like the only way to really combat this is through closed / semi-closed trusted networks, but those tend to become dominated by personalities and difficult for newcomers to break into. The reduced trust in "outside" voices then leads to echo chambers and groupthink. I think we're already starting to see some of this in the kinds of books being put out by the big publishing houses; I don't have hard numbers (and maybe I'm just getting old and cynical) but a lot of recent titles feel extremely generic.

There's a subplot in Neil Stephenson's Fall (or Dodge in Hell) where media and other networks are so saturated with false, meaningless, clickbaity, or otherwise negative-value content that they become either less than worthless, or require paid "filters" to extract actual value. I'm getting a sense of being close to that point already and I don't know what the right move is from here to reduce the fracturing of my wider social circles.