Readit NewsI should probably talk to somebody about that…
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-a...
The first part of that article is an absolutely scathing, on-point criticism of mainstream social media. I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech". That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.
People and their governments seem to agree that modern social media is a problem. The difference is why. The people think it's a problem because it harms people; governments think it's a problem because they don't control it.
I think that the root cause of this shift to mass surveillance is that people in democratic countries still have a 20th-century concept of what authoritarianism looks like. Mass surveillance is like a novel disease that democracies don't yet have any immunity to; that's why you see all these "it's just like buying alcohol" style false equivalences, because an alarming number of people genuinely don't understand the difference between normal surveillance and mass surveillance.
It’s not Orwellian. If it were, then not allowing kids to vote or drink before they become adults would be Orwellian.
We are simply banning kids from a harmful activity until they are old enough to decide for themselves. The ban has to be at a social level decided by the democratic process, because there’s a coordination problem here: it’s not a harm that can be remedied at the level of the individual.
The real villains here are the social media companies that have profited from the misery and manipulation of children, to their ultimate harm.
I find it hard to believe anyone would argue in good faith against this ban. In tech circles there are a lot of vested interests that don’t want other governments to protect the children in their countries from harmful products. Shame on them.
Compared to PDF format, HTML format is much more accessible because of browsers. Basically I can reuse my browser extensions to do anything I like without hassle, like translation, note taking, sending texts to LLMs, and so on.
For now, arXiv offers two HTML services: the default one in https://arxiv.org/html/xxxx.xxxxx , and the alternative one in https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/xxxx.xxxxx , here 'x' is a placeholder for a number or digit.
The most glaring problem of the default HTML service is the coverage of papers. Sometimes it just doesn't work, e.g., https://arxiv.org/html/2505.06708 . The solution may be switch to alternative HTML service, e.g., https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2505.06708 .
Note that alternative HTML service also has coverage problem. Sometimes both HTML services fail, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22625 .
I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was a better life for humans.
It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress, because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful capitalists that rule the world.
But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what already is. We’re pretty good at anticipating and appreciating the new, but if it’s already there then, like a spoilt child living in a luxury home, we take it for granted.
I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in winter don’t use your heating or hot water. For me, it was travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful (at least for a while).
Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.
It is liable to suggest deregulation as the solution to everything. It is less likely to fabricate stories about Chinese human rights abuses.
Are you as a dev still going to pay for analytics and dashboards that you could have propped up by Claude in 5 minutes instead?
Generating code is one part of software engineering is a small part of SaaS.