I think when most people say something like “technology is making the world worse” they mean the technology as it actually exists and as it is actually developing, not the abstract sense of possible futures that technology could feasibly deliver.

That is clearly what the author of the piece meant.

If the main focus of people who develop most technology is getting people more addicted to their devices so they are easier to exploit then technology sucks. If the main focus is to generate immoral levels of waste to scam venture capitalists and idiots on the internet then technology sucks. If the main focus is to use technology to monetize every aspect of someone’s existence, then I think it is fair to say that technology, at this point in history, sucks.

Saying “technology is neutral” is not super insightful if, in the present moment, the trend in technological development and its central applications are mostly evil.

Saying “technology is neutral” is worse than unhelpful if, in the present moment, the people who want to use technology to harm others are also using that cliche to justify their antisocial behavior.

I’m no economist, but this seems like a really bad idea.

Federal Agencies make their own rules. That is how the Federal government works. Congress makes a law, usually with enough ambiguity that the federal agency charged with enforcing the law has to make specific interpretations. They make those interpretations, usually under some process that requires public notice and comment, and that interpretation becomes the law in effect. That interpretation can be challenged through a lawsuit, at which point a Judge could overrule the interpretation establishing a new interpretation through judicial review. Until recently, the courts gave a lot of deference to the agency’s rule making process because rules are usually written by a combination of lawyers at the agency, and subject matter experts. So, for example if a new law regulating factory safety was passed, and the enforcement of the law was delegated to OSHA, then OSHA lawyers and subject matter experts (like doctors or engineers working for the agency) would make a rule and solicit public comment.

Nothing about this EO can, or pretends to. usurp the power of the judicial system. The AG can make any interpretation they like, it can still be challenged in a Court. And after the Chevron court case, these rulings are easier than ever to challenge.

This does not extend to the Judicial branch. It only applies to the Executive branch. You can read the EO yourself to see that fact.

This is bad because it is trying to exert control over independent agencies, and pretty stupid because there is something like 5000 final rules and proposed rules in the Federal Register last year, so if this were seriously implemented, the AG and POTUS would just sit in teams meetings for the rest of their terms while potential rules get discussed.

This is bad because it undermines the independence of federal agencies, it does not actually impact the Judicial system however.

Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.

I wish they’d offer an llm free version with no cap on searches. Their products are too expensive and it feels like it is mostly to pay for the llms. I can’t justify paying that much for a product I am never going to use.

Not a youtube channel, but there is a podcast called serious trouble that covers legal events and provides a sober, detailed analysis of the law that is relevant to the cases they cover. They mostly focus on legal cases surrounding politics, but are also following the Drake/Lamar defamation case. I like it because a lot of the coverage of Trump’s legal troubles is characterized by hand wringing or wild speculation and serious trouble stays focused more on the facts and likely outcomes of cases.

Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.

Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.

I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:

A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called “political hobbyists”. These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and “rub the glass” to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won’t change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.

Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being “not exciting” or someone they are “not passionate about” as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. “The Democrats need to do X!” Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn’t reading these threads right?

If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren’t you lobbying the party? Why aren’t you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren’t you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don’t know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?

The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn’t do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?

I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh’s book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.

Not the op, but an obvious example is that in any post covering current events, there are always half a dozen comments complaining about “late stage capitalism” or denouncing the elites. Those comments don’t really add anything to the discussion and kinda just reduce a thread to a boring whinge-fest.

This is not that funny but I was amused watching it happen. One time I was at the DMV in a college town and a kid was at the counter trying to get his license renewed. From what I could gather he had it revoked because he was underage and had a DUI. Lady at the counter bounced the kid and a few minutes later, the kid came back in with his father and they were apparently from a rich family. Or at least rich by Ohio standards. When the lady at the counter explained that he could not have his license renewed because he had a court order against him, the father started in on the “Do you know who I am? I will buy this whole town!” routine, but the DMV lady was not having any of it. Both the kid and the father insisted that the judge did not have any right to take his license away from him and that it would be over turned on appeal so the DMV lady had to give him his license, because dad would make sure she got fired if he didn’t. But the DMV lady would not relent and issue a license. The father and kid were getting pretty animated, so finally the lady picked up the phone and said something to the effect of “Your kid lied on this form and is probably violating his probation, we can call the court right now and see what your judge thinks about that.” Which at that point caused them to sheepishly leave. When I got to the counter she told me that was not the first time in her career someone tried to do that to her.

Every “big data” data source I have ever worked with is already filled to the brim with low-quality, obviously wrong data. I have to think that is also true of the data scraped or collected by the big companies. I don’t think it matters that the personal data they collect is wrong, so long as they can convince ad buyers that it is accurate.

One of my big beefs with ML/AL is that these tools can be used to wrap bad ideas in what I will call “Machine legitimacy”. Which is another way of saying that there are many cases where these models are built up around a bunch of unrealistic assumptions, or trained on data that is not actually generalizable to the applied situation but will still spit out a value. That value becomes the truth because it came from some automated process. People cant critically interrogate it because the bad assumptions are hidden behind automation.

When bad people do good things they are generally seen as sinister, as if they are concealing a horrible action behind a facade of good will. So if you believe the government is fundamentally evil, and you see it trying to do something good (which is the whole purpose of FEMA) then its actions are going to look sinister to you. So stories about FEMA having camps (at their core, these are stories about the government using the facade of aid and assistance to hide something evil) will make sense to you because they are consistent with your sentiments about the what the government is. So too would stories about FEMA using disasters as a pretext for land snatching or stories about FEMA ignoring people in peril because these are all stories about an evil government. To the extent that they are consistent with your sentiments about the government, they are easy to accept as true, even if they contradict each other.

I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.

What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.

Former CEO of the river poisoning company says there is no way to meet our river poison reduction goals, so we might as well build bigger river poisoning machines because they might help us figure out how to stop poisoning the river. /s

I feel like there was a time when the tech folks in silicon valley had a lot of credibility, and we are now living in a period where most of the world sees them as a joke but that fact has not yet entered into the culture of silicon valley.

Used get my haircut at one of those “no appointment needed” haircut chains. Then they got an app, and every time I went it was “Why aren’t you using the app? You need to use the app. Next time use the app. Download the app on your phone. It’s gonna be an hour wait because you didn’t use the app.”

Now I just go to a local place.

Even if you accept the claim that they were duped at face value, what does that say about them? These folk’s whole pretense is that they can “see through the media’s lies” and that they are able to tell what is really going on. But they were not smart enough to recognize that they were part of a propaganda campaign? They want you to believe they have a sophisticated ability to recognize media manipulation but also now want you to believe that they were hapless stooges that were tricked into participating in a media manipulation campaign.

I went to one for a candidate for the House district I lived in a few election cycles ago, It was mostly stump speeches and other “rah rah we’re gonna win!” style pontificating. But one thing I did not expect and I actually found interesting was the house candidate spent a lot of time introducing other local politicians that were in down ballot races in the district. City council seats, education board seats etc. That turned out to be really useful, because it meant I got to meet/ hear from candidates who I either had no idea existed or who were just a name of a flyer before then. I suppose that experience may not transfer to a national candidate rally though.

The court concluded that the POTUS has presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts–those that fall within in the outer perimeter of his duties-- or acts is that are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.”

The court goes on to say that if the government wants to prosecute the POTUS for a crime, they have the burden of proving that the prosecution would "pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Such a ruling seriously hamstrings any effort to hold a criminal POTUS accountable since much of the evidence for criminal conduct is going to involve interactions with government officials.

It is just wrong to say that this ruling does not immunize the POTUS from criminal acts, that is exactly what it does. As it stands now, the president can order parts of the executive branch to engage in criminal behavior, like murdering political rivals or seizing voting machines, and he would be immune from prosecution because his actions (giving an order to executive officers) are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” All he would need to do, as the law stands now, is come up with some argument about how his prosecution for a crime interferes with executive function. An extremely low bar.

Also, this is new law. Most of the cites you give deal with civil immunity, not criminal immunity, this law immunizes the POTUS from crimes.