I've definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is "smart" nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn't require any of that before.
What's some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.
Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone's dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.
And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.
So the search engine wars began.
We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.
None of this was forced on you.
Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.
It's gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora's box.
It's all gone.
1993-2002ish was the golden age of the web. Now everybody just goes to the same handful of websites for everything. Even if you hate Spez, you still can't find any quality answers to anything without adding site:reddit.com to your searches. Everything else is SEO-optimized blogspam generated by a bot. There are no real personal webpages being run by a single person or a small entity anymore. Everything is corporate and centralized.
That's some rose tinted glasses, and misunderstands why we don't do that anymore, despite being perfectly able to.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry, they required the person to know how to host and code some basic HTML. Sure, it had more personality, but that barrier meant there was far less people who could do that. So then platforms like geocities came out, where instead you now needed just an account and to fill out some forms to create your own little site, you didn't even have to host anymore! That was the beginning of web2. Those people who now were creating pages on geocities didn't have a voice before, they could have posted their own websites but simply did not have the means to, nor should they be required to just so they can post online.
Well, now we're on geocities on crack, which the websites we post our content on have gotten much more advance, to the point that we are now. Those big internet monoliths exist because of web2, because people didn't want to handle their own self hosting stack just to post some stuff to the internet, so no wonder we've reached this point. People then gravitated to the best places to post their content, and to explore other's content. Because that's essentially what the internet is, exploring other's content.
That's not right and I'll tell you why. You're not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here's where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend's posts. I'm looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won't convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
That's not right and I'll tell you why.
This could be the tagline for the entire internet.
There's only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
Check out perplexity search engine. It's like having Google back the way it used to be
Are you talking about perplexity.ai ? because it looks like a shitty LLM answering questions instead of an actual search engine. It looks absolutely atrocious privacy-wise, too.
How so, isn't this just another AI search engine? How is that like old school Google in any way? It's like, literally the complete opposite lol.
Noise pollution and how comfortable people feel contributing to it. I’m mostly talking about people playing videos and listening to music in public (bars, restaurants, etc), but also the new “stereos” on motorcycles that are essentially just PA systems. Sometimes it feels like nowhere’s quiet anymore.
It seems like people are scared of silence after being raised on constant stimulation. They go everywhere with airpods and then blast the music when those aren't enough. Even nature trails aren't enough anymore because there's always some asshole blasting their music.
This is precisely why I don’t say anything when it happens. It doesn’t seem to bother others — for some odd reason — and I don’t want to get my ass beat if they end up being unreasonable.
yeah the whole dang teenagers and their bluetooth boxes always struck me as odd. I mean not that it's not dick behaviour but considering we allow sports cars to annoy everyone in like a 1 mile radius when the owner decides to compensate for whatever it feels odd that there's this focus on people listening to music
I don't mind touchscreens in cars; what I can't stand is when they put every important feature on there so you can't even adjust your A/C or turn up the music without taking your eyes off the road for several seconds.
They should be limited to things like displaying the song title, controlling things from your phone like maps, music, and calls. Showing the backup camera, extra info that doesn't fit on the dash, etc. Not replace every god damn function on the car.
My older brother used to have a Nissan Froniter, I can't remember the year but it was the first year that backup cameras became mandatory. It had a screen but it didn't have touch capability, it was pretty much as you described - only for song names, backup cam, and some other small things. As much as I hate screens in cars I thought that one made sense.
I once got a ride from someone who had an actual tv he watched while driving in his car
Playing train simulator while driving to work and dream about public transport
Ridiculously bright headlights on cars, in particular those the driver cannot control when they dim. I can't fucking see when driving at night against incoming traffic. Yet the majority of people seem to love them somehow.
That too, yes.
But it starts with the manufacturers, and with no proper research and regulations. I've heard of people disappointed that they can't control the brightness of their own car lights, apparently when purchasing it they never imagined it would be something 100% automatic.
I feel like every new comfort feature on a car is solved legally by still having the person at the wheel responsible and since now the computer does it (well enough maybe 60% of the time) you see way more of an increase in stuff like too bright lights, missing lights cause the rain detector isn't working and things of that nature because people just assume the car will take care of it
Doorbell cameras.
Let's turn the whole fucking planet into a surveillance state because some people like to jerk themselves off about (typically racialised) fears of petty urban crime.
Literally every single door on this street. Can't go anywhere without bezos and the cops with backdoors knowing.
Innovation is when you make every street a panopticon.
One time I was walking down a street and this woman rushed out of her house and starts yelling that she knows what I've done and she's got it all recorded on her doorbell camera. To this day, I still don't know what I was supposed to have done.
One guy was so paranoid that he had a camera in his yard (out in a well-off suburban neighborhood) pointing at a public path that strobed and vocally warned you that you were being recorded. Totally unhinged
Let us see that same opinion once you have been the victim of a burglary. I have replaced two back doors to the tune of a few thousand quid. I spent years with higher home insurance because of the claims. Yet they never even got in. My cameras only record when my property line is breeched.
"Oh you don't like the idea of always on cameras monitoring every street at all times? Guess you want burglaries to happen all the time."
This study found that they actually increase the risk of being targeted by burglars
All the while you are sticking a camera with a history of shoddy cybersecurity to your home.
Look at this case of harassment that involved the use of a doorbell camera and try to pretend my concerns aren't valid.
Edit: also I don't understand the assertion that if I'd been burgled I'd agree with you. I've had to deal with multiple attempted break-ins, one time I scared a bloke off while he was trying to crowbar the back door open. It still didn't make me want slap cameras on everything.
Microplastics showing up in our organ tissue and managing to pass the blood brain barrier. We're going to cure Alzhemers just in time for Plazhemer's to take us down.
But how will you make money curing Alzheimer’s? Old people have Medicaid and the government won’t shell out for the goods so they’d have to sell it cheap
Might be a controversial take, but I'm concerned about people letting themselves shape sweeping, negative views on things that are (keyword: relatively) minor or just don't fully know the story behind. For example, EA was voted "Worst Company in America" multiple years in a row, when it's really just a software company whose worst sins would probably amount to gross overworking/general poor treatment of their employees. That's bad, but I feel like it's pretty inarguably better than chocolate companies who use child labor to harvest cocoa beans.
It's especially concerning when it extends to global/political issues (this is why I said this might be controversial). We don't tend to realize that we share much more in common with people in other countries than we realize, probably helped by the fact that most news sites tend to leave out details or exaggerate bad parts when talking about governments other than their own (a notorious example is the reporting on North Korea . Here's a good vid about it (CW: very graphic) Not saying it's a wonderful place to live, just that it's exaggerated.) Part of the reason political conversations feel so toxic is because so many of us just don't know a lot of what's going on or what each other is talking about, so we're rarely on the same page. Reading a quick Wikipedia summary and/or article can go a long way
Declared pronouns from any instance are always a sign of a good post ahead of me, you didn't disappoint. Good post.
Ngl, I kind of hope that pronouns don't become mandatory on Lemmy, bcs rn it functions as a way to just immediately see who isn't a bigot and probably has good opinions
It's especially concerning when it extends to global/political issues (this is why I said this might be controversial). Reading a quick Wikipedia summary and/or article can go a long way
One of my favorite examples of people getting things embarrassingly wrong is the "Taiwan is not part of China" crowd. Both sides historically disagree with this. Taiwan being a part of China is not some point that has been in dispute until very recently.
The disagreement has historically been over which is the "rightful government". Sure sentiments in Taiwan have been changing but even this year there was a former Taiwanese president saying this explicitly
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/we-are-all-chinese-former-taiwan-president-says-while-visiting-china-2023-03-28/
Any of the dumbass Americans who proudly declare "Taiwan is not and never has been a part of China" can be easily dismissed.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What point were you trying to make with that quote at the end? I don’t think it worked lol
The centralisation of all web browsing in the hands of a handful of aggregated front ends that basically monopolise on content provided by other people. Goodbye websites and independent communities.
Hello auto generated websites that exist to push ads and optimise SEO.
squints in to the depths of the internet at the fractional population of Lemmy
Yeah... Yeah. I always feel kinda hopeless about this stuff because I'm not the sort of person that has the social clout to migrate my communities onto platforms.
I've theorized (and I'm sure I'm not the first one) that there is a narrow window of people who grew up in the late 90s and early 00s that are in the tech sweet spot in that if they used a lot of technology they had to learn how to troubleshoot it because it didn't just work. Today things are so stable it's reasonable to rarely need to learn how things work.
As a 98 baby I feel this. I tried to get my hands on any piece of tech I could growing up and everything evolved so fast (but wasn't always reliable)
But I got friends not much younger than me who will throw out perfectly good phones/laptops/etc over simple errors that couldn't be fixed by rebooting...
My little brother has been glued to his tablet since he was 3. He goes to the same elementary school I used to go to, but they no longer use Windows desktop pc and instead they use Chromebooks. I remember learned how to use computers back in 4th and 5th grade, I learned how to use a browser, how to use a search engine, how to use a database, and how to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
We had a bus that taught you how to touch type. I think it had a bunch of laptops in it
Yes, absolutely. As of right now I have zero friends either online or offline. It's been that way for a while now.
Do you live in the US? If so, what region? Wanna go to a movie sometime and then get pancakes & talk about said movie?
I wouldn't say that I have zero friends, but I certainly don't have the social circle I wish I had. That worries me for my own future. I'm gonna die someday, and I don't want to slip into the abyss feeling totally alone.
And the fact that I don't seem to be an outlier makes me worried for the future health and resiliency of entire communities.
Well, we're a few thousand miles apart, so the pancakes bit might not be feasible lol. On any fun discord servers?
Anti-space/science rhetoric on the left.
A lot of it comes from people who are anti-Elon and are against everything he touches. So they become anti SpaceX. Then they become anti-aerospace.
They don't understand, or even want to understand, the science and importance behind it's advances. The thought process just goes Musk Bad>SpaceX Bad>Aerospace Bad.
Remember how in Interstellar, there's that teacher who was casually teaching that the moon landings were fake? Like, society had reached a point where they cared so little for space, that they actively turned a blind eye towards its accomplishments or just straight up dismissed them? I feel like that's the path we're on. Because of people's blind hatred towards a rich douche, an entire EXTREMELY IMPORTANT industry is becoming reviled through sheer ignorance.
Depending on what you mean by "left", i think its more of a "whitey's on the moon" position, than Musk. Space exploration has led to many scientific advances, the USSR's space program and the modern day PRC's shows the left has been and still is commited to space exploration.
But in the US in particular its another example of money going to anything but dealing with the ravages of capitalism in the population: homelessness, hunger, lack of medical care, poor education, etc.
We're going to make ourselves go extinct, outer space exploration fantasies can go on hold.
No, they are making us go extinct (while ironically living their outer space exploration fantasies)
Communists love tech, Soviet culture was dominated by futurists and despite being destroyed 3 decades ago still hold the world record for most space launches.
The disgust towards SpaceX is also based on a love of technology. Mediocre Internet isn't worth rendering our observatories useless and polluting prime orbital lanes.
Chinese socialism is also obsessed with tech, megaprojects everywhere, highly resilient public GMO crops massive investments in green energy and novel production techniques. Most of the CPC leadership have engineering degrees. Xi specifically engineered an off-grid bioreactor for winter heating (using animal waste no less) during his volunteer service at the countryside, he was in his 20s and almost got blown up while repairing it.
For anyone here looking for "anti-Musks", here's a list:
- Peter Rawlinson: the founder of Lucid and the chief engineer for the Tesla model S. He's a capitalist
, but at least he isn't Elongated Muskrat.
-Zhang Kejian: the current directior of China's National Space Administration
-
Li Yue: The president of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
-
Xi Jinping to some extent, who's trained as a chemical engineer
-
Lê Thị Thu Thuỷ: CEO of the Vietnamese EV company VinFast
Chemical Engineer is the new poet in terms of world leadership lol Merkel was a research chemist.
- Peter Rawlinson: the founder of Lucid and the chief engineer for the Tesla model S. He's a capitalist
I don't think it's just Musk, there was a lot of pushback towards the moon landings in the 1960s-70s as well. People then felt that funds used in these programs would have been better spent on stuff like social programs and improving infrastructure, criticisms that fit pretty well today too. But we could probably have been to mars and back twice if NASA had like even a quarter of the military's budget too 💀
This is also the root of why leftists hate bazinga solutions for climate change, it's seen as a dead end and the obvious fix is at the production level, the root cause of climate change. Communists have a focus on means of production, the hammer and sickle right on the flags are means of production.
Drives me wild that all these lefties have those dumb signs that say "I believe in science" but balk when the science doesn't agree with whatever political slogan they parrot around says.
If you believe in science, it means you believe in the process of science, and are open minded enough to change your ideas or beliefs if the science goes against that. It also means it's possible for current results to be proven otherwise in the future
I have a feeling the "lefties" you're talking about aren't actually leftists in any real sense.
Who knows anymore. Everyone uses the same words and mean completely different things.
Anyone who supports capitalism is not left, it’s pretty simple
What "political slogan" might you be talking about? You a climate change denier or an "only 2 gender" transphobe? Because odds are that you are based on your rhetoric.
Neither. Climate change is real and gender and sex are two different things.
I think there's (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it's not even necessarily based on sect, I've seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won't even deny that I don't still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don't even think that they could be propagandized - that's a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!
And second, there's can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself "more of a leftist" regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don't do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you're that person, you might think "Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I'M the one who's more strictly obeying the scientific method!" Again, they're obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some "leftists".
IRL? Climate change. No one around me seem's to GAF. Of course, I know places like here share in my belief.
However, kid me when I first learned about the concept of evolution and now worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us. I worry about "inventing ourselves to extinction" basically and that's more or less my pet concern.
worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us
this is my pet concern as well and it's always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it'll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won't evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.
The inherent (and problematic) implication in this concern is that there's a 'good' way to evolve and a 'bad' way. While technology and medicine massively relieves biological pressures, some genetics diseases can be entirely managed, and more people are surviving to procreate, what we'll see in the medium-long term is a major uptick in genetic diversity, some people will be massively reliant on technology, some won't.
As we hopefully know by now, genetic diversity is a Good Thing (tm). As it increases, so will we as a species have more disease resistance, be able to fill more niches, we'll have a wider scope of bodies and brain patterns to have new and cool thoughts etc. I do think cultural and social pressures on sexual selection could be problematic, rather than a good thing, but that'll entirely depend on how society goes.
Though honestly, I think it's overwhelmingly certain that we'll have the capability to alter human genetics on a large scale before any of modern evolutionary pressures become relevant. If you accept that, then the whole discussion becomes rather moot.
No one seems to be to be too worried about how much bloodlust we're seeing from all sectors of the USA and Europe.
Missed the point, that's still encompassed in the initial list.
Countries all over the world are ramping this up. Yemen, Indonesia, Russia, everywhere.
Yemen
lol. lmao even.
Unless you mean the Saudi genocide there, in which case, "that's still encompassed in the initial list."
Laws that aren't intended to be actually enforced, but serve as cover for a search or whatever other cop activity. Seat belt, drug, and helmet laws for example. I don't think it's even about tickets it's just reason to pull you over and brow beat you for a while.
You're telling me the state that doesn't give a fuck if I die from gesticulates generally around suddenly cares whether I make a personal decision about my own safety?
This is coming from someone who wears his seat belt 100% of the time and gets car sick if I don't, who has been ticketed for not wearing one even though I was.
The way I heard it the insurance companies lobbied for seatbelt laws.
Something about if you die in an accident the payout could be larger than if you survived.
Opposite for motorcycles and helmets. On a bike you aren't eligible for the same death payout as someone in a car so it's cheaper if you die.
Again this is just how I heard it and I've never cared enough to actually look into any of this at all but on the surface and seems plausible.
Something about if you die in an accident the payout could be larger than if you survived.
It's not that. It's that they can deny the payout if you broke the law.
To add to this, I feel this with recent updated road laws here to make them more "cycling friendly", a trend that laws keep getting written that are either impossible to enforce the way they're written or nobody gives a shit either. Basically just making the question of liablity easier after the fact. Which seems sort of like a very shit proposition for road laws to me
Not exactly a trend, but I'm really worried about this next generation of kids that's coming up. During COVID they were locked down for a bit, which I think has caused some of them some socialization problems, and then they were just dumped back into school and there were no vaccines for kids so a lot of them just sort of got COVID freely.
We still have no idea what's going on with long COVID (and it seems to sometimes do something to the brain - people losing their taste and smell, brain fog etc.) so between missing out on key social milestones and a potential plethora of long-term and poorly understood health issues, I'm worried we're gonna have a really weird generation of people coming up in the next couple of decades.
Generations grew up breathing in lead from gasoline and everything turned out fi…..shit.
I think a lot of kids, especially junior high and high schoolers, were not as dumb as people took them for and knew how they were being screwed over for political points. I know it's a complex subject, and feelings are probably conflicted (like wanting to be back with friends while also knowing how they couldn't be), but I think they do know that they were used as pawns to win political fights, and that their safety was put at risk because of it. "We need to open schools again for the kids". I think that's going to have an effect when voting age comes around
problem is, the democrats are the ones who declared the pandemic over. there's nobody who's actually pro public health to vote for
I've seen this talked about in some small subreddits, they were pushing back against the "kids are resilient" mantra. Sadly, I don't think much will be done to address the issue and we'll keep chugging along as business as usual.
Yep, a bit weird. Can't wait to see what they vote for when they are on their 50's
