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.
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.
Religions are mostly just popularized conspiracy theories. Believing in God is about as realistic as believing the world is flat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not in my experience.
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.
Myers Briggs is posh astrology.
“Andor” is the best Star Wars series.
health insurance != healthcare
health insurance profits only exist at the expense of human suffering.
but lets make sure everyone has insurance but not care
People are crazy when they promote closed-source AI (okay, okay, generative model) projects like ChatGPT, Bard etc.
This is literally one of the most important technologies of the future, and after all the times technology companies screwed them (us) up big time and monopolized the Internet, they go into the same trap again and again.
First they surrendered the free Internet, now they surrender the new frontiers.
Wake up, people. Go HuggingFace, advocate for free AI, and ideally - for a GPL one. We cannot afford for this part of our future to be taken away from us.
I pointedly avoid ChatGPT for that reason. When the NovelAI leak happened, it was amazing, and the open ecosystem flourished in response. I just can’t believe they call themselves OpenAi.
Ah, that name was left from when they’ve been open-source, which us why I advocate for the emergence of GPL-licensed projects.
The open-source license for GPT model was very relaxed, which OpenAI took advantage of and, once it could afford their own programmer staff, closed the code with all the contributions all the programmers from all over the world have made.
It’s an extremely dick move, and it was repeated by Google, too.
Air fryers are only popular because Americans have been using microwaves to cook for decades, which are possibly the worst cooking devices ever created.
If they had decent fan ovens during that time, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular
Conversely, air fryers are seen to be popular in the UK, because nobody will admit they fell for the advertising, and now only use them for chips
Piracy equals culture preservation in an age of subscription services.
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.
