- Mar 2021
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freddiedeboer.substack.com freddiedeboer.substack.com
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protecting minority groups from psychic harms
This feels like bit of a misdirection; psychic harm, i.e. terrorizing the vulnerable is only the first-order effect of allowing the expressions of hate to proliferate; the secondary, and more important effect, is that the attitudes they express, if unchallenged, become viewed as commonplace, which is a signal not just to those being targeted, but importantly to the rest of the population holding these views, shifting the window of hateful expressions that are viewed as acceptable.
It's not difficult to see how this is far from limited to psychic harm.
(For the record, this should not read as a defense of censorship, but rather as a clarification of what I believe is at stake. Also, this is obviously not limited to the classic example of minorities and hate speech; analogous arguments also came from the right during the whole milkshake debacle.)
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trying to present a more compelling and attractive vision than the fascists.
The counter to this argument usually goes along the lines of "you can't debate fascists" which only partly misses the mark.
The degree to which an alternative to fascism is compelling or attractive relies not on the rhetoric or imaginative skills of its proponents, but ultimately on a set of values that exist outside of the plane of this idealized competition of ideas. In other (and quite arguably the author's) words, fascism is always going to be attractive to a certain segment of the population, which is never going away - no matter whether you're trying to minimize it by censoring it out of public places, or by trying to convince people why fascism is bad.
What is left then?
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- Feb 2021
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thesecretweapon.org thesecretweapon.org
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you can clip a cornbread recipe from the web on your Mac, read it on your iPhone when you’re at the grocery store buying the ingredients and look it up from your friend’s Windows PC when you’re at his house preparing to bake the cornbread.
Echoes of The Over-engaged Knowledge Worker.
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- Jan 2021
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martin.kleppmann.com martin.kleppmann.com
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AI/machine learning to flag potentially abusive material
This doesn't seem like the way forward - consider Facebook's perpetually traumatized human moderators, or the by and large inappropriate disclaimers on Twitter.
Granted, Twitter only seems to do simple string matching, but I do not think this because of lack of effort - if AI moderation were effective, it would have been in use.
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pile.sdbs.cz pile.sdbs.cz
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And precisely the attraction of the Net like that of thePress in Kierkegaard's time, would inhibit that final plunge.
???
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Thus Kierkegaard is right, thePress and the Internet are the ultimate enemy of the unconditionalcommitment which is the basis of Christianity.
:(
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IV. The Public Sphere vs. the Religious Sphere:Making One Unconditional Commitment
Suddenly, the 4th section is very rushed and simplistic: suddenly, the internet is a very monolithic/unitary force & xtianity the only salvation?
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but it is highly un-likely
???
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The ethical thus breaks down because the power to makecommitments undermines itself.
This whole segment feels like it refers to Kierkegaard's larger preoccupation w/ commitments (?)
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commitments
?
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very ease of making commit-ments would further the inevitable breakdown of the ethical sphere
slacktivism, Facebook's "Interested", etc...
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The person in the aestheticsphere keeps open all possibilities and has no fixed identity thatcould be threatened by disappointment, humiliation or loss
Only true for the more anonymous identity-modes?
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Indeed, the very ubiquity of theNet generally makes any such local stand seem irrelevant
namefags vs. anons on 4ch
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passionless and reflective character of the age
Was this, then, not a consequence of the Press? What's being referred to?
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ubiquitous commentatorswho deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out ofwhich specific issues grow
echoes the leveling of expertise; the only valuable insight is that which is explicitly universal
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elite public
such elites are nowadays usually decried, regardless of their actual influence/effects on the discourse...
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abandons itself to the idea that everything that anyone does is done in order to give it [the Public] something to gossip about
twitter's "main characters of the day"
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www.gnosis.org www.gnosis.org
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Look then at his words and all the writings which have been completed. Give heed then, you hearers and you also, the angels and those who have been sent, and you spirits who have arisen from the dead. For I am the one who alone exists, and I have no one who will judge me. For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins, and incontinencies, and disgraceful passions, and fleeting pleasures, which (men) embrace until they become sober and go up to their resting place. And they will find me there, and they will live, and they will not die again.
Apparently, this may have been a xtian interpolation added later
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- Dec 2020
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www.linkingyourthinking.com www.linkingyourthinking.com
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But the problem with onlyusing links is how claustrophobic it can feel… It's like navigating Mirkwood Forest at night—with only a torch. Sure it’s adventurous, but sometimes you want the birds-eye view.
Well documented in hypertext theory as the "disorientation problem", "navigation problem" or the "lost-in-hypertext phenomenon".
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www.schneier.com www.schneier.com
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The power dynamics of persuasive technologies are changing. Access to tools and technologies of persuasion is not egalitarian.
It never was, since the advent of mass-media...
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level of manipulation so great it effectively takes agency away from those targeted
Key point; this really is likely unprecedented: engineered moral super-stimuli.
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emotional thinking threatens to undermine the very legitimacy of the system, as voters are essentially provoked to move in whatever direction someone with power and money wants
Interesting point, given that choice through emotional thinking is the rule, rather than the norm; and likely always was, which is also one of the points of this article.
What then, is different now?
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www.ianbicking.org www.ianbicking.org
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they aren’t “breaks”, they are manufactured to hold onto attention
A problem with Pomodoro techniques...
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thedorkweb.substack.com thedorkweb.substack.com
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USB connectors won’t stand a chance on our timelines.
I'll give you USB-C's ungodly amount of connections, but what's wrong with USB-A?
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www.xml.com www.xml.com
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counted
?
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entities, connections and co-presence logic
I'd assume this is elaborated somewhere in Literary Machines?
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three-layer model
The current Web also has a "three-layer" model of sorts - HTML, CSS, JS. But even here, we're embedding CSS in HTML, and CSS in JS...
Why's that? What's the driving reason for this coagulation?
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But the sequentiality of words and old-fashioned writing have until now compromised that representation, requiring authors to force sequence on their material, and curtail its interconnections.
I like this sort of characterization because still permits linear textual formats to retain their usefulness - just not as the sole format of representing information/thought
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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the fact that we need to layer abstraction upon abstractions says more about what we see the need to abstract from than where we are abstracting towards
Yet, the tendency to layer a relatively great amount of relatively dumb abstractions persists... (See Service Worker spec.)
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Commentary
!!!
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Another good example for institutional limitations would be the creation process of find(1)’s peculiar command line options.
?
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pic (a drawing language)
Text really is kind of versatile in this manner... Is the current text-dominance in programming part of UNIX "heritage"?
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non-hierarchical control flow
pipes seem straightforwardly hierarchical?
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words or lines
Lines are a much more frequent and stronger constraint in UNIX than words are though; just see
cut
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Rewriting History
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Local file Local file
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To some extent, this describes the difference between highlightingor underlining on the one hand, and marginal comments on the other
Certainly to "some extent", but in my experience the only real difference is in how much effort is put into the clear articulation; if I were to make this note for my eyes only, I would have only put something like "internal/external difference only in language" - but still made a marginal comment
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An asterisk that a student pens next to a passage describing events that led up to the French Revolution, material that he believes will be covered on the final exam, is qualitatively different than the exclamation point that a reviewer marks beside a claim she doesn’t believe in a paper she is reviewing for an academic journal.
Is it, though? It seems that only the intent is different, but cannot both be handled in an equal way?
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visual
???
A visual language would probably not involve the same processing as textual language anyway, no?
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because of the parallels between coding and language, language skills might be more relevant
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www.nngroup.com www.nngroup.com
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the agent automatically decides to search further and display subsequent articles with links to the original article
24 years later, still sounds like the future...
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A computer environment in which both humans and computer-based agents have active roles
Kinda sorta implemented in Trello's AI assistant, I think? Can't think of many other truly user-agent interactions.
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concepts not available with a see-and-point interface
Are there other (effective) forms of language other than textual?
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We can be easily overwhelmed by all the capabilities of a large application, but if the application discreetly rearranges the interface from time to time to offer us only the features of current interest to us, we can get the feeling that everything we need is easy to find and readily at hand.
Is a workshop better if it reorganizes itself while we're away? There's value in breaking most other constraints, even if hypothetical, but everything in this paragraph just feels like the exact things hated about current UIs.
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in designing Sun's home page we decided we needed to change it drastically every month to keep the users' interest
horrifying
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flexible in the amount of feedback it provides
Good idea! Current UIs generally only have two levels (if even): "progress bar" and "show more details". Why not more granularity?
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Real expressive power comes from the combination of language, examples, and pointing.
Key point!
Somewhat realized in spreadsheets?
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With a little understanding of the language
There's no over-arching "language" for manipulation; each program has its own vocabulary (e.g. a set of unix flags), essentially making the user an eternal "tourist" - hence why see-and-point (weak, but discoverable) interfaces still dominate.
Such a language is not impossible, see Smalltalk for inspiration.
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