• 7 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • anything on reddit gets shit on by 13 year olds who don’t know anything besides constant adaption to change.

    That comment and this thread reminds me of this line from Cory Doctorow’s book Walkaway:

    Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re 30 is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

    The tracking, the crap algorithms—they’re bad for user experience and they’re bad for society as a whole. But there is good stuff, too. I think that things like RSS (something old that is still amazingly supported but not consciously used enough), ActivityPub, and others can empower us to break free from the bad stuff while embracing the good.

    Separate the content from how the content is viewed and we’ll change the incentives for (and power held by) for those who have turned it to such garbage.







  • About 15-20 years ago, a friend of mine who teaches communication at a university told me of a study that I think of every time I’m in a store and see vague sustainability messaging on a product. The study had two types of milk containers, each with the same milk from the same producer, but one had a standard label and cap, while the other had green-coloured labelling and a meaningless phrase along the lines of “for a better tomorrow”. The milk in the green, meaningless labels outsold the other one, even without making any actual claims. I think years of greenwashing BS have made people not trust claims of sustainability or eco-friendliness.

    Another issue is hyperbolic discounting. Even if a more sustainable option saves money of the long run, people are generally bad at factoring in future savings.









  • Yeah, I was thinking tools for a more local level that enable collaboration, knowledge sharing, and tracking (rather than allocating) resource use. For higher-level coordination, something that could flag emerging conflicts over resources would be useful to spot problems on the horizon and then enable groups to work things out rather than impose a solution.

    I worked on a project earlier this year to build an AI system that would share knowledge about performance and best practices to match communities up with solutions to their problems, as well as modules to help them implement, manage, and track them, all of which could then be fed back into the system. Enterprise tools for grassroots groups, so to speak. Unfortunately, it didn’t get off the ground.