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Owlofcreamcheese posted:[irrelevant wall of text]
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Mar 10, 2022 15:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like there is still clearly people excited about technology. Pop science "I fuckin love science" type stuff is huge right now. Like a ton of top youtube channels are like, graphics card reviews. Half this thread is boiling angry that electric cars have a "fandom". People CLEARLY are still excited by technology, one guy saying he used to be excited and now is sad, might just might have it be that he changed, instead of some downfall of civilization they invented capitalism in 2010 type thing. Yeah agreed, there's plenty to be excited about when it comes to technology. This thread basically exists to criticize tech, so of course it's going to attract folks who are uncomfortable with innovation.
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Mar 10, 2022 15:48
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0konner posted:It is kind of dumb to say “there was a lot less capitalism back in my day” unless you’re Chinese or from a former Warsaw Pact country. So according to you a society can't be more or less capitalist, it's all the same to you regardless of wheter it's the 19th century, post-ww2 era or modern day.
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Mar 10, 2022 15:51
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His Divine Shadow posted:So according to you a society can't be more or less capitalist, it's all the same to you regardless of wheter it's the 19th century, post-ww2 era or modern day. Hypothetically sure A society could be more or less capitalist but in terms of your examples: fundamentally, yes. Which is an entirely standard Marxist perspective.
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Mar 10, 2022 15:54
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His Divine Shadow posted:So according to you a society can't be more or less capitalist, it's all the same to you regardless of wheter it's the 19th century, post-ww2 era or modern day. Well, are you from the 19th century or world war II? With a lexx fandom screen name I'm gonna guess you are from the 1980s and were early 20s in the early 2000s. You weren't born in some pre-capitalist world where tech used to be good but capitalism ruined it. You were just 12. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 10, 2022 15:59
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0konner posted:It is kind of dumb to say “there was a lot less capitalism back in my day” unless you’re Chinese or from a former Warsaw Pact country. Look up the New Deal and its history.
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Mar 10, 2022 16:47
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The part I find fascinating about this conversation right now (the parts of it that aren't just petty sniping) is how utterly devoid of context it is. There's no references to specific technologies or trends. Aside from the mentions of specific years and historical eras as everyone projects their own views on the extremely vague initial argument, this whole conversation probably could have traveled through time from 150 years ago. Speaking seriously, whenever your feeling about something changes and you don't have hard data to back it up, that usually means that what really changed was what kind of information you were exposed to (usually via the media). If you felt like there used to be lots of good technology and now there's lots of bad technology, that probably has less to do with the actual technology trends, and more to do with you outgrowing relentlessly idealistic media like Popular Mechanics and starting to read more cynical media like whatever the modern equivalent of Valleywag is. I'd love an actual serious retrospective about what you think has changed since the 50s when corporations paid a lot of taxes. Because one of the defining trends of that era, at least in the US, was a rise of massive consumerism in the economic prosperity following WWII. BiggerBoat posted:Or even read the thread. The TECH NIGHTMARES thread Tech almost always makes things more convenient...but that someone isn't always the ordinary consumer! For example, cryptocurrencies are notoriously inconvenient to use for normal economic purposes, but they've made things incredibly convenient for scammers and fraudsters.
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Mar 10, 2022 17:02
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the proliferation of ads is due to technology and capitalism utilizing technology to make everything worse so yes it is getting worse something like smartphone addiction is a clear change from what, 15 years ago? edit: vvvv also this
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Mar 10, 2022 17:18
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PLEASE stop engaging with oocc
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Mar 10, 2022 17:18
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Actually I'd still call myself a techno-optimist despite the last few posts. I have high hopes for the future of medical technology, better medicines, new cures and hopefully prosthetic limbs will make some leaps soon, I am hopeful about space exploration (James webb is gonna rule) and physics is going new places at the moment. But I'm also more negative about the way technology in other areas closer to every day life seems to be developing. As for what I find different about today from back then... It's difficult to pin down what exactly, when it's such a gigantic societal change from the 1980s (my reference point, in Finland btw), how do you get that across without like writing a whole book? I don't have the energy to write a book and I am a bad writer to boot. I could try to point out some examples, like the deregulation of the financial markets, resulting in a credit boom and the worsening housing situation, the GATT treaty blowing the feet of western labour and removing our governments abilities to control private interests and the flow of capital, resulting in a race to the bottom. And then there's social media which turned out to be a nice facilitator of conspiracy theories and reactionary movements. I dunno it looks like I am nitpicking, that's the problem with trying to get specific, gives the impression that hey things are all right on the whole, just these few things. Capitalism and technology has combined to do some crazy bad poo poo IMO... I dunno what you guys think, I think the world changed a lot for the worse since the 1980s politically speaking, the world since the 1980s looks to me like the total victory of capitalism and the fallout of that... Funnily enough though... in a way you could say only the progress of technology has been able to hide that downwards trend, but now it seems even technology is being turned against us in ever more ways. It's not really possibly to say in a black and white statement that technology = bad and that's not really what I was trying to say either, I guess I was just blowing of some frustration at the state of the modern world. I hope this rambling wall of text did something but waste peoples time. I am not good at expressing myself.
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Mar 10, 2022 17:49
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Main Paineframe posted:Tech almost always makes things more convenient...but that someone isn't always the ordinary consumer! For example, cryptocurrencies are notoriously inconvenient to use for normal economic purposes, but they've made things incredibly convenient for scammers and fraudsters. What keeps surprising everyone is what ends up being made more convenient beyond the intended purpose or scope. Anything that touches financial or content creation seems to have the most knock-on effects as adoption spreads among the marketing/sales class.
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Mar 10, 2022 18:14
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uggy posted:the proliferation of ads is due to technology and capitalism utilizing technology to make everything worse so yes it is getting worse The proliferation of ads is primarily due to the rise of consumerism that accompanied industrialization, though the rise of new forms of mass media (like radio and TV) gave advertisers more places to stick their ads. Tech played a big part in both, of course, but industrialization dates back to the 19th century and TV predates WWII, so it's hardly a new development. For my whole life, boomers have been complaining about kids being addicted to telephones or TV or videogames or computers or whatever the current newfangled entertainment device was. All smartphones really did was put all those things into a pocket-portable device you can use anywhere, which made pursuit of entertainment more accessible and also made it more visible (since the behavior being complained about is no longer confined to the living room). Now, that's not to say that nothing's changed. But I'm interested in how little those changes have actually come up. For example, technological development has certainly had an impact on advertisers - not because there's more ads, but because it gave them the dream of individually-targeted ads, creating an endless hunger for data. It's a trend that really dates back to the late 90s or so, but it's been extremely well suited to the rise of the internet. Similarly, rather than smartphone addiction itself, I'm more concerned about the rise of gambling mechanics in games (especially phone games), and the way that easy one-touch purchases have built the foundation for having digital casino games in your pocket 24/7.
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Mar 10, 2022 18:23
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the big difference with smartphones is that it becomes difficult to escape the attention-grabbing properties of the screen. like you used to be able to shoo children away from the tv or the video game by banishing them to outside, now the screen lives in your pocket. recently i went to a live entertainment show for the first time in a couple years, and even with a very distracting and entertaining show on stage it was wild how many people were looking at their phones in the middle of the show
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Mar 10, 2022 18:40
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The biggest change is probably the increase in transfer and availability of information (i.e, news media and social media). You can access everything at all times now - it's like the impact of the 24-hour news cycle, but applied universally. The idea of being able to pull up live footage of people being bombed in Ukraine while I'm riding the bus to the grocery store, and then immediately switch over to what basically amounts to a global forum of discussion about it so I can argue with someone about whether or not calling Ukraine a "power bottom" is inappropriate would probably blow someone from fifty years ago away. There's also the modern understanding of the personal as political, which gets merged with the fact that, because you have access to everything happening everywhere all the time, everything feels personal, which is then further agitated by the skinner-box-style manipulation of social media companies. That manipulation is also pretty key, and manipulation via media has always been present, but you experience so much more exposure to it when you're on your phone on the bus and in line at the store and on the toilet and in bed and between calls at work, etc.
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Mar 10, 2022 18:43
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One area where it feels like there's more captialism is around the Hustle Mindset/Rise and Grind bullshit. People used to be able to just have and enjoy hobbies. Now there's a significant amount of social pressure to monetize your leisure time by streaming it or selling it.
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Mar 10, 2022 18:51
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His Divine Shadow posted:Why isn't technology used for good anymore? I remember when I used to be excited for the newest stuff, now it just fills me with dread and despair. The Boomers massively changed things wrt tech. They stopped believing in science and forced lower funding of science research at many different levels of government interaction. It figures that the worst generation would end up lording over a time period where tech becomes increasingly terrifying. The effect of government funding for science going down is private companies dictating what is researched and unsurprisingly it's a massively horrible outcome. The Sean fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 18:52
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Main Paineframe posted:If you felt like there used to be lots of good technology and now there's lots of bad technology, that probably has less to do with the actual technology trends, and more to do with you outgrowing relentlessly idealistic media like Popular Mechanics and starting to read more cynical media like whatever the modern equivalent of Valleywag is. This seems like it's based on the idea that the grumpy cynical media is the right one and the happy optimistic one was the childhood lie. How do you know it's not the opposite? Looking around the world it seems like the bigger issue in media is the outlets selling old people on the idea that everything used to be good when they were young at the peak of civilization and now it's all corrupt and in decline. It's not like you wake up at 65 and suddenly start being outraged people have pronouns now, you get there by years of growing more inflexible and afraid of the world that is changing around you.
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Mar 10, 2022 19:39
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greazeball posted:One area where it feels like there's more captialism is around the Hustle Mindset/Rise and Grind bullshit. People used to be able to just have and enjoy hobbies. Now there's a significant amount of social pressure to monetize your leisure time by streaming it or selling it. You can still just have hobbies, that's what the vast majority of people with hobbies do. The number of people streaming their hobbies is infinitesimal compared to the number of people with hobbies. On the other hand being able to make money from streaming your hobbies if you want to seems like a net positive.
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Mar 10, 2022 20:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This seems like it's based on the idea that the grumpy cynical media is the right one and the happy optimistic one was the childhood lie. How do you know it's not the opposite? Looking around the world it seems like the bigger issue in media is the outlets selling old people on the idea that everything used to be good when they were young at the peak of civilization and now it's all corrupt and in decline. It's not like you wake up at 65 and suddenly start being outraged people have pronouns now, you get there by years of growing more inflexible and afraid of the world that is changing around you. It's neither. Technology brings both good and bad, and trying to read an overall trend out of 150 years or so of rapid technological development (or even just the 75 years following WWII, or even just the 30 years of widely available internet) is something that would take quite a bit of serious academic research to do for real. What's far more likely is that both you and His Divine Shadow have blinkered and limited views of technology based on your preexisting convictions, the information you're exposed to or choose to expose yourself to, your predisposition to trust society and the various systems we operate under, and so on. An idealistic "technology getting better" and a cynical "technology getting worse" are both childishly simplistic views of a very complex subject, driven by gut-instinct perceptions rather than a measured analysis of the industry.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:41
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Relevant clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvT98ny5lc0
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Mar 11, 2022 00:38
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Pretty meta 
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Mar 11, 2022 01:14
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Yeah I had to use a VPN to get on a UK server. Also who is LDS? I don't imagine it's Mormons.
America Inc. fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 01:30
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Main Paineframe posted:What's far more likely is that both you and His Divine Shadow have blinkered and limited views of technology based on your preexisting convictions, the information you're exposed to or choose to expose yourself to, your predisposition to trust society and the various systems we operate under, and so on. Like I said, I don't consider myself a technophobe despite what I wrote (maybe my post there should be interpreted more as venting and not taken too literally). And my negativity towards technological progression mainly stems from developments I see getting their genesis with the neoliberal revolution and how that has resulted in new technology being used for purposes that are harmful to society and harmful to peoples psychic health as well. Social media for instance, I see as having been a negative for society and it just keeps getting worse. But there has also been positive things. Youtube for example is such a fount of useful knowledge, as are classical forums, there's so much I learned from these two sources on anything from welding, woodworking to electronics that would not have been possible before the internet. It's a difficult question with no clear black & white divisions, youtube itself has lots of problems as well. Also I do at least knowledge my views are limited and biased based on my lived experience as well my personal values and not objective facts. Does anyone else do that I wonder sometimes, or does everyone live in the comforting certainty their views are correct and objective? I guess it doesn't matter because even though I know mine aren't, that doesn't seem to cause them to change any. Maybe I am still techno-optimistic, but with a big dose of cynicism nowadays... His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 09:00
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How long before employers start using this to monitor your computer time?quote:https://www.vice.com/en/article/93b8v8/eye-tracking-tech-is-another-reason-the-metaverse-will-suck
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Mar 11, 2022 14:41
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BiggerBoat posted:How long before employers start using this to monitor your computer time? Not sure, but a few seconds after that we'll all be putting tape over our cameras. My Dell monitor physically retracts the camera when it's not in use and those little plastic sliders are everywhere now. Reminds me of a bit in, I think, Snowcrash, where it described a series of metrics used by a company to determine if an employee read an email correctly. My Alienware R13 from years ago had something called Tobii EyeTracker. It was supposed to work with Elite: Dangerous to let you "look" around...never worked and Tobii would continually flash a red LED by the camera to let you know when it was actively not working. Very annoying and completely pointless.
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Mar 11, 2022 14:50
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I've become much more cynical about technology now that I'm creating it. I'm the one behind the curtain now and it's a mess back here.
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Mar 11, 2022 14:56
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raifield posted:Reminds me of a bit in, I think, Snowcrash, where it described a series of metrics used by a company to determine if an employee read an email correctly. quote:Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
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Mar 11, 2022 16:36
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Which is really loving fantastic when you stop and think about how companies don't want you wasting time. So let's just flush 20 minutes of employee time down the toilet for no reason rather than help a customer, actually work on a job or whatever since the consultants and middle managers need something to do in order to justify their existence. The last job I had prided itself on being a model of efficiency with an online job entry system (Corebridge FWIW) with messages and all the usual poo poo. Except we had messages within the system itself, personal email accounts in Gmail, departmental gmail accounts, Google alerts, calendars and reminders, as well as company poo poo on our personal phones and a regular old landline voicemail. It was total overkill and we spent more time tending to this poo poo than we did working. I felt like a hockey goalie facing an opposing team skating with 5 pucks. Almost 75% of my time felt to me like I was trying to clear all these in boxes, moving jobs through different categories and production stages and also correcting errors (THIS message says the job is 4 feet wide, this one says it's 5 feet wide and BTW this is really important because the material listed to use is only 54"). So you just chase information, eventually get up and head over to someone's desk to clear it up, correct things in the system and then get more messages and poo poo informing you the of the correction, the size change or whatever. Then you come in the next day and have 25 more updates while a boss at the production meeting asks you wtf you did for 8 hours yesterday or why you didn't get to x, y or z. On top of this, you're obviously getting the usual messages and texts unrelated to your job on your personal cell phone, which are often no allowed in some companies, so you get off work, clear THAT inbox, then get home and clear your personal email inbox. It's all too much. This stuff is supposed to simplify our lives as I understand it.
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Mar 11, 2022 16:55
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BiggerBoat posted:How long before employers start using this to monitor your computer time? Use WHAT though? eye tracking already exists since like the 60s. This is saying basically "VR avatars look bad, because the dead eyes don't move, so a company is making a model for how eyes normally move in different situations to fake it" then mentions facebook doesn't actually use this system, but could. It's specifically saying it's a thing to get more realistic eye movement for game characters for VR without eye tracking, like meta's current headset. Work is going to track your computer time by first tracking your entire arms and head in 3D but not your eyes then calculate if you are working by looking if the animated model is looking at work?
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Mar 11, 2022 20:06
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Eye-tracking to monitor computer work is only really possible if the system running the algorithm already knows exactly what you're supposed to be doing at any time. And if it already knows that, then why bother with the eye tracking? It can just track the computer's inputs. If you're not typing and you're not clicking things, you're probably not doing anything. A more likely use for eye-tracking has already been invented: remember how the new Moviepass owners want to use eye-tracking to make sure you watch ads? I can see advertisers going wild with this kind of data, especially since they're already extremely interested in AR and VR (which have legit reasons for eye-tracking). Imagine them being able to measure exactly how much attention people pay to each and every ad, and using that to drive targeting of further ads? The technology described in the article, though, isn't eye-tracking. It's something a bit more novel. Apparently, it's difficult to gather the massive eye-tracking datasets necessary to train eye-tracking algorithms. So some researchers dug through some cognitive science papers to try to determine exactly how the human eye is supposed to behave in various situations, and then use that info to create simulated eye data, which they intend to use to train machine learning systems. The reporter apparently didn't completely get that, and just used it as a jumping-off point for talking about eye tracking in general. Just because EyeSyn isn't eye tracking doesn't mean it's not worth bringing up here, though. Machine learning algorithms are touchy enough even with real, diverse, properly-labeled datasets. Feeding in small sets of fake generated data instead is a risky move - and one that's bound to have issues with things that have as many variations as human faces and human behavior.
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Mar 11, 2022 21:52
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I look forward to their sudden discovery that some people's eyes don't actually point together and what kind of weird data conclusions that leads them to draw before they realize.
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Mar 11, 2022 21:57
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Harold Fjord posted:I look forward to their sudden discovery that some people's eyes don't actually point together and what kind of weird data conclusions that leads them to draw before they realize. Only lazy workers have lazy eyes! Eye tracking is actually pretty neat stuff, since it shows that people specifically look around and not the ads that are poo poo all over the page rather than look at them.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:14
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BiggerBoat posted:This stuff is supposed to simplify our lives as I understand it. You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where you got the impression. The more common pitch would be improved efficiency rather than simplification, and if you're more efficient that means you can get more work done not have more time relaxing.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:50
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BiggerBoat posted:Which is really loving fantastic when you stop and think about how companies don't want you wasting time. I would love a Zoom plugin that would collect all of the attendee's salaries and display a time based tally of how much these meetings cost.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:06
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Irony.or.Death posted:You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where you got the impression. The more common pitch would be improved efficiency rather than simplification, and if you're more efficient that means you can get more work done not have more time relaxing. All right but to me that's a round about way of saying the same thing so maybe we're splitting hairs here. "Look how much faster, easier and more efficient this is" is how most of this poo poo is marketed. Every ad shows people sitting on the beach, laughing in a restaurant and tackling life's problems at the simple touch of a button so they can go watch TV and eat popcorn. I generally read that as "your life will be simpler if you do things this way" or buy tech product Z, but we can say "efficient" if that moves the conversation along. I don't think all those things my job put in place that I wrote about made me more efficient at my job at all. In fact, I think they made me less efficient and did my best to describe how and why.
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Mar 12, 2022 01:08
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Main Paineframe posted:A more likely use for eye-tracking has already been invented: remember how the new Moviepass owners want to use eye-tracking to make sure you watch ads? I can see advertisers going wild with this kind of data, especially since they're already extremely interested in AR and VR (which have legit reasons for eye-tracking). Imagine them being able to measure exactly how much attention people pay to each and every ad, and using that to drive targeting of further ads?
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Mar 12, 2022 01:12
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BiggerBoat posted:All right but to me that's a round about way of saying the same thing so maybe we're splitting hairs here. I thought we were on the topic of forced return to office and thought this was a weird argument to make but huh.
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Mar 12, 2022 01:14
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It really all comes down to how all the power and utility for tech is being focused on new ways for middle managers with nothing else to do to torture their employees.
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Mar 12, 2022 04:04
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I feel like everyone has seen the graphs where the last 50 years productivity has gone up hundreds of percent and pay has gone up like 10%. A specific business might be using tech weird and crazy to be worse but overall things like computers have allowed people to do infinity more. (But be paid the same as when they worked harder and did less).
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Mar 12, 2022 04:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like everyone has seen the graphs where the last 50 years productivity has gone up hundreds of percent and pay has gone up like 10%.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:15
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