Here's a story.
Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it.
Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness.
And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table.
And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything.
You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle.
You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...
I like to read what people tell me, obliquely or not, to not read. Here are some of the deeply uncomfortable, yet edifying reads:
Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber" -- A Harvard-educated mathematician terrorist presents a lucid neo-Luddite manifesto. It doesn't take a cool-headed logician to appreciate this work. Draws heavily from the works of Jacques Ellul, but presents Ellul's ideas in a quintessentially American manner, without the obfuscation required of French philosophy. Yes, he's a convicted murderer, yes, he was a subject of MKULTRA, but even so, the perspective of a Harvard-educated psychedelic terrorist should alone be worthy of a lookover (he doesn't receive any proceeds from sales). If you prefer French philosophy or a pacifistic author, replace this with The Technological Society and Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes, both by Jacques Ellul, tackling the same subjects (mostly).
Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass by Abu Bakr Naji -- This is the playbook that was used for establishing the Islamic State. Its philosophy isn't unique to Wahhabist Islam, however. It's like the anti-Embrace-Extend-Extinguish philosophy. It's disruptive innovation for religion. In short, it has three stages: first, destroy the social contract and return to a Hobbesian state of nature. Second, reestablish the social contract with your team in control. Third, use this island of order to expand outwards until your goal is reached (in this case an Islamic Caliphate).
Suicide Note by Mitchell Heismann -- Mitchell Heisman shot himself on September 18, 2010 in Harvard Yard as ”Experimental Elimination of Self-Preservation,” according to this work that he published posthumously. Possibly, along with Kaczysnki, the best illustrator of G.K. Chesterton's assertion that "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. [...] The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." This is his, nominally rational, defense of suicide against what Heismann terms viviocentrism. It is an experience, if nothing else.
Two picks that dovetail together exceptionally well and equally magisterial in their respective wheel-houses:
First, the Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist -- Why is the brain divided? What if modern consciousness as we know it only emerged during the Axial Age? The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing. The first half is pure neuroscience, the latter half teased-out implications of the former. It is a brilliant work.
Second, Debt: the First 5000 Years by the late David Graeber -- What is the historical relationship of debt with social institutions such as barter, marriage, friendship, slavery, law, religion, war and government? Why do we keep debts fuzzy with friends, but settle them immediately with strangers? What exactly is money?
I imagine that the processes noticed by both McGilchrist and Graeber are interrelated in profound ways (i.e. the dual advent of physical currencies and complex civilizations incentivized profound shifts in cognition, arguably in favor of disembodied abstraction and decontextualization, creating in its wake what is termed "mental illness").
And why not? A final choice: The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy -- "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." When Jesus says to turn the other cheek, Tolstoy asserts that he meant to abolish violence, period. A favorite quote: "The attitude of the ruling classes to the laborers is that of a man who has felled his adversary to the earth and holds him down, not so much because he wants to hold him down, as because he knows that if he let him go, even for a second, he would himself be stabbed, for his adversary is infuriated and has a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether their conscience is tender or the reverse, our rich men cannot enjoy the wealth they have filched from the poor as the ancients did who believed in their right to it. Their whole life and all their enjoyments are embittered either by the stings of conscience or by terror."
The scope to which I was responding was the assertion that 50kbp/s is not enough to transfer more than a handful of bytes.
You are correct that images, encryption, and blockchains are outside the scope of what a constrained connection can sustain, but that's a bit like saying "We can't power an industrial economy on consumer-owned 100 watt solar panels" which while true, misses the point.
Yes, if you're using court etiquette protocols to transmit data, you're going to incur very large amounts of overhead.
If you're using insecure low-sophistication protocols in sparsely populated areas (e.g. flyover America), then the possibilities are much more expansive. Yes, the latter by definition isn't commercially nor urbanely (viz. pertaining to densely populated cities) viable, but for certain demographics that's a feature, not a bug.
50kbp/s is equivalent to dial-up speed. 3G was only four times faster at 200kbp/s. I wouldn't say that LoraWAN's speed is the limiting factor.
A single second of transmission (i.e. ~6kb) is about 1,500 characters in UTF8, assuming no overhead. With an average of 6 characters per word, that's still 250 words per second, more than ample for human communication.
To makes Emacs popular again, the core team needs to realize that their actual competitors are desktop environments, window managers, and automation tools rather than text editors and IDEs at this point. Programmers know what they want in an editor--the general populace doesn't (beyond a bare minimum of having it work like Google Docs or Microsoft Word). Emacs doesn't need to change at all, it just needs tools that go a few levels deeper in its philosophy. That is to say, first make Emacs capable of controlling non-Emacs GUIs and piloting web browsers. Second, improve automation tooling that so that individuals can make and share no-code macros for simple tasks. EXWM, an Emacs-based window manager has already taken a great first step towards accomplishing this.
Emacs is a keyboard macro editor stuck in a mouseless era where Lisp Enlightenment was still a thing. It's great, but it's niche. Most people don't actually want or need that (or to be more specific, they don't know that they need or want it).
The way to directly grow the user-base is to get the general population on board Emacs first, then evangelize for the idea underlying open software afterwards.
You do that by solving the problems that they already have more efficiently than their present solutions. Org-mode really nailed it in this department. I switched to Emacs for org-mode, but stayed for vanilla Emacs and EXWM. If Emacs were just Emacs, I'd probably be using a different editor. Without definitive hooks, Emacs is esoteric, opaque, and frightening to the general population, if they know about Emacs at all besides vim's evil rival. They just don't need Emacs in its current state.
What they do need is something that makes it trivial to automate the dumb and repetitive tasks that they have to do every day on a computer using a browser. This is no longer shell or plaintext processing for the majority of non-IT users. It's interfacing with GUIs. They need middleware to automate interfacing with kludgy enterprise software. They need middleware to speed up internet browsing.
If Emacs were a blank slate project today, fulfilling the same type of needs, I could see it being a mashup of EXWM, Selenium, and AutoIt. Its killer features would be a guarantee that the same controls (that the user selected from a common set e.g. Microsoft Word, Firefox, Vim, Emacs, etc.) worked functioned between applications. Having the ability to record mouse and keyboard macros without ever needing to see a line of code, but also providing the ability to drive using the DOM, OCR, or whatever niche smart interface is needed would be a second killer feature. These coupled with the already standard Emacs and EXWM features would attract a ton of new users that would actually have a compelling reason to learn how to use it and then later adopt to the Emacs paradigm.
EXWM is already 70% of the way for a minimum viable product for something like this. It just needs to be bundled with more mature macro tooling beyond 90s relics like xdotool and xautomation along with a distro with sane defaults. Having a single abstraction layer to control everything from userland on through web platforms would be a dream for accessibility and returning a semblance of control to users.
A larger tank (filling a 5lb tank off a 50lb tank) uses less time and money than exchanging 1lb canisters. It also has the ancillary benefit of supporting local welding supply companies and brewing stores than foreign corporations and big box stores.
My sister went from making $11/hr at a book store to $20/hr staying at home on unemployment. She didn't spend any of it on anything but rent and utilities (we were already providing food for her). She went from being in debt to having about $9k in the bank. She plans to live on this until it runs out and then return to work as a service worker. She moved in with my mother to make that runway longer--she figures she can make it last somewhere between a year or two.
I don't think she's unique in this. A lot of millenials were poorly educated with job skills and personal finance. Accordingly, they dug themselves into debt with student loans and credit cards that obligated them to take shitty service jobs with no prospects. COVID-19 and extended unemployment benefits let them dig themselves out of that hole by doing nothing, but they still don't have an internal motivation that money and assets are good things to acquire.
They work to live, not live to work. They won't go back into the workforce until their personal circumstances force them back into the workforce and I don't blame them at all.
I've been doing this for a while and have had great results. Even if you're not tee-totaling, it's still a fine investment for cocktails and DIY alcoholic seltzers.
If you're a self-interested min-maxing CEO that makes a disastrous or unpopular decision, hiding behind ethics or morality will not (immediately) result in charges of incompetence. This could just as easily be dishonest signalling by the CEO as it could be integrity.
In the current cultural climate, putting political messaging in your products creates an immediate double-bind: you immediately anger part of the total market, but if the messaging is then withdrawn, you anger another part that did want it, with residual anger from the original anti-part of the market (some of which won't return in any case). In this situation, if the pro-political market is bigger, then it's just more rational to stay the course and claim the high ground.
Regulations and criminal laws are like dams or levees; With predictable flows, artificial waterways can safely operate within reasonable tolerances assuming everything was done faithfully. With unpredictable flows, modifying the course of a waterway typically causes unanticipated problems downstream.
Regardless, it's still water and will still flow downstream. No dam or levee is going to change that, just as no regulation or criminal law will change the basic motivations facing corporate entities at any scale (i.e. min-maxing self-interest).
Here's a solution for $60/year, plus the cost of whatever budget Android device you want or have on hand:
A year of unlimited talk/text from Liberty Wireless (a T-Mobile MVNO) costs $60.^1 Then, use call barring/do not disturb to disable incoming calls and USSD codes^2 to turn off call forwarding. You now have a phone number that effectively only supports SMS.
I'd also recommend going with this plan if you are addicted to the Internet and just want a phone, but don't want to pay through the nose for something like the Punkt^3.
As far as only using SMS, sending/forwarding emails through SMS is doable (for now), so if your people's comms can be converted to email, you can use SMS for those as well.
Unfortunately, the naive solution of sending outgoing mail requires MMS (and therefore data), but you can send SMS to a Google Voice number, for example, which can be set up to forward a copy of the message to an email, which can then be used for triggering control events locally. YMMV.
It's strange that the author makes partisan shots, when everything the untethered wings of the body politic believe and act upon are direct antitheses to her written ethos.
Some quotes from Weil:
"The Great Beast^1 is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.
"It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence, my fellow man as an end, since he is my fellow. Nor can I take a material thing, because matter is still less capable of having finality conferred upon it than human beings are.
"Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective."
"The power of the social element. Agreement between several men brings with it a feeling of reality. It brings with it also a sense of duty. Divergence, where this agreement is concerned, appears as a sin. Hence all returns to the fold are possible. The state of conformity is an imitation of grace."
"The social order is irreducibly that of the prince of this world. Our only duty with regard to the social is to try to limit the evil of it."
"The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition."
---
1 - The Great Beast is a reference to Plato's Republic, Book VI, establishing the epistemological problem of socially derived consensus reality:
"I might compare them to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him--he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes [...]"
Amazon isn't doing anything that Chinese manufacturers haven't been doing for years except Amazon is now directly grabbing a piece of the IP infringement pie rather than sponsoring it in the third party marketplaces.
If consumers prefer buying a $30 bag over a $150 bag, well, that's unfortunate for Peak Design, but that's what the mass consumer actually wants.
Regardless, no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.
If money-conscious consumers want a cheaper version of a desired product, they can get it. If status-conscious consumers want to buy value-added context for their very Authentic and Fancy product, then they have that option, too. If Amazon (or any other cheap IP poacher) can snipe that much market share, it's not the quality of the product that people are buying.
This is pretty tangential, but I don't understand why there isn't a roguelike framework available for Emacs. It seems like the perfect roguelike platform for playtesting and hacking on and would on-board a lot of new people into the Emacsen ecology without any real difficulty. The standard roguelike library libtocd has bindings for every other language--why not elisp?
While I'm sympathetic to the argument that the rise of social media has contributed to the absolute degeneration of public discourse, blaming social media as the cause rather than the means strikes me as particularly hollow when measured by previous historical periods of civil unrest. Whatever the actual causes--nascent technological catalysis, changing property relations or elite culture, or whatever the God's-eye picture of its real etiology--this phenomena is recurring throughout human history. Sometimes mobs (viz. mass-movements, factions, parties) form and mobs, like houses, cannot stand divided. Competing mobs become one mob or destroy each other.
Consider this letter from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Rutledge in 1797:
"The passions are too high at present to be cooled in our day. You and I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other, and separate the business of the senate from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hat. This may do for young men, with whom passion is enjoiment. But it is afflicting to peaceable minds."^1
Or Jefferson's retrospective of the 1800 election:
"we suffered ourselves, as you so well expressed it, to be the passive subjects of public discussions. and these discussions, whether relating to men, measures, or opinions, were conducted by the parties with an animosity, a bitterness, and an indecency, which had never been exceeded. All the resources of reason, and of wrath, were exhausted by each party in support of its own, and to prostrate the adversary opinions. one was upbraided with recieving the Antifederalists, the other the old tories & refugees into their bosom. of this acrimony the public papers of the day exhibit ample testimony in the debates of Congress, of state legislatures, of stump-orators, in addresses, answers, and newspaper essays. and to these without question may be added, the private correspondence of individuals; and the less guarded in these, because not meant for the public eye, not restrained by the respect due to that; but poured forth from the overflowings of the heart into the bosom of a friend, as a momentary easement of our feelings. in this way, and in answers to addresses, you & I could indulge ourselves. we have probably done it, sometimes with warmth, often with prejudice, but always, as we believed, adhering to truth. I have not examined my letters of that day. I have no stomach to revive the memory of it’s feelings."^2
This is not unique to America or even to modernity. A broad reading of history shows that any human society, given enough time, will encounter periods when the stars align and there's a general degradation of civility, sometimes erupting in bloodshed, sometimes being remembered as a generally unpleasant time not to be spoken about.
The problems with American culture in particular being reduced to increasingly hostile and superficial tribal allegiances have antecedents dating back decades, well before AOL was even a thing.^4 The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985 enabled one-sided echo chambers to emerge via all extant communications media (notable in particular is the emergence of conservative talk radio like Rush Limbaugh).^5
"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been."^6
It's a shame that an escalation in civilian deaths is viewed as an evil, but that there are civilian deaths to escalate is viewed as a necessity of foreign policy.
I'd recommend the 2019 pseudo-blacklisted documentary Salafistes^1 (released as Jihadists in the US) if you want an unvarnished view of Salafist Islam.
My only experience with ombudsmen is ignored emails until top stakeholders face the pain, then immediate action to resolve their and only their issues.
Good on NYT for coming clean, but this is precisely why I don't trust institutions to vet their own product. "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is a mission statement for pathological organizations to get away with gambling on the market and socializing their failures.