I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Even just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
lol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
its a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away.
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
Misery week might greatly increase happiness during the week itself. An unheated room with an outdoor toilet, no running water, limited food options, and hard work is basically going camping.
Fully agree that programming for me brings along "a kind of brain rot". Hard to describe, but working deep in code just shifts the mind to a state that's ... less open, more focused, more obsessive ... and seeps into daily life.
Vernor Vinge's concept of "focus" in "A deepness in the sky" really clicked with me and put into words what I'd always had at the back of my mind. A highly recommended read.
I read it because Elon Musk mentioned it as a favorite. It’s a good book and you can see how the concept of controlling ubiquitous tech is a thing he tries to do
True, and here's an interesting twist: as you wrote, this is mainly happening due to "I think", so it's primarily on a memetic level. Humans also pass on lots of thought/behavioral aspects to their children (memes). Therefore I'd expect that selection on the behavioral level is happening much faster than on a genetic level.
Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.
Could also well be that natural selection will rear it's ugly head again first. I previously thought that people rejecting the evolutionary theory (creationists etc) were just backwards and anti-science. But I've realized since that this is a too simple judgement. The ethical implications of evolution are dark. Humans have had a word for selection since the dawn of language - "death".
A bit sad that paraphrasing Paul Watzlawick in this context fits very well: one cannot not participate in evolution.
> my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.
The sociologist Eric Kaufmann wrote a book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, arguing that traditionalist religious groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish) will become demographically dominant in the long-term (decades and centuries) due to their greater fertility and high retention rates (>80% of their children stay in the group as adults)
I think the possiblities that a minority can leave the group is an important escape valve for them. Now assume that in the future they are going to be not such a minority anymore like today, then what happens? Maybe some oscillation like for Lotka-Volterra situation, perhaps a bit different?
The possibility of defection to mainstream society actually increases the selective pressure against defection-promoting alleles/memes, compared to if that possibility didn’t exist; the mainstream acts as a genetic/memetic sink to absorb those alleles/memes, reducing their prevalence in the next generation.
I think the fact that in e.g. the United States there are multiple such high fertility traditionalist religious minority groups coexisting makes it unlikely any one of them will end up completely dominant in coming centuries. More likely, I think, conservative religious groups will ally together across confessional boundaries to attain shared policy objectives (e.g. government funding of private religious schools). As such, I don’t think the possibility of defection to secular society will disappear; secular people will still exist, just numerically and politically weakened compared to today.
If you've accidentally become a persona non grata, then obviously because you've not exercised sufficient self-censorship.
This is real already. Recently saw a petition for EU to rein in big tech (there are several initiatives advocating this). Had this nagging voice at the back of my head ... what if signing that gets your Google Account terminated.
I'll leave it open to you whether I signed it.
For developers relying on any type of Google services, you'd be in for lots of pain.
If you are wrongly charged a significant amount by either Google or Apple and their service is of no help, what would you do?
Most people would weigh the options, then just eat the cost than anger them with a chargeback and lose their email/phone access. That's self-censorship financially too.
What if Google reinstates their old G+ and YouTube real name policy for its accounts. We would protest but give them the proof grudgingly and it can position itself as one of the core part of online ID verification push currently going on.
I was in that situation a few years ago. I started a hemp related business in 2019 and Ad Sense didn't like my ads and gave me an error message saying I couldn't run my ads because of certain keywords being banned. I forgot about it until a couple of years later when I saw a $300 charge on my credit card bill. Google changed their policy as CBD/hemp had become more mainstream and started running my ads. By this time my business had already failed so I did not want those ads running. I couldn't figure out how to contact a human, so I ended up just paying because I didn't want to risk getting my account closed.
> What if Google reinstates their old G+ and YouTube real name policy for its accounts.
G+ was a failure; people refused to provide real names. Even Facebook's "real name policy" wasn't (and still isn't AFAIK) enforced at all. At one point, I had multiple phantom Google and Facebook accounts. Now I just self-host and eschew social media.
>Google had Don’t be evil motto just between 2000 and 2018.
this is popping up a lot today for some reason. "don't be evil" is still in the code of conduct, as it always has been. it just isn't in the preface anymore after the restructuring under alphabet.
Pretty much the same here. A happy Ubuntu user for 4 years now. Here and there, there's still minor issues, but nothing a quick search or AI can't help you with. And we're hackers here after all.
For me that was already with the original DALL-e. It was utterly mindblowing, I was like "oh shit, AI is here".
"Draw a picture of a unicorn on the moon". And it did that. The model really "understood" what you told it.
After that, it was "oh, AI improved, again".
The farewell to Stack Overflow is not welcome. So many kind people shared their knowledge there. I answered a few questions as well, so not just a lurker.
It's a prelude of what's has already begun - the collapse of human-to-human communication.
In Białystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39.
In Vigo, Spain, it's at 13:46, .
Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it and then some.
Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to pretty severe.
That sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization. Having the same timezone in Poland and Spain possibly made sense 30 years ago, but now that all communication goes through computers of one kind or another, time conversion is seamless.
For those companies that have offices in both countries, and for which the synchronicity matters, it is not that difficult to just have special office hours.
> [The same timezone in Poland and Spain] sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization.
Well, if you look up the histories of the time zones in the respective countries ("Time in Poland" and "Time in Spain" on Wikipedia, I have no reason to doubt their accuracy) you'll see that both settled on CET, with or without daylight savings, long before the EU was even an idea.
TCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.