Psst, hey: hackers are not tech bros. The vast majority of hackers never become tech bros. The ethics of hacking runs completely counter to that of tech bros.

Hackers make hardware do things they weren’t intended to do. They circumvent barriers. They string together contraptions that repurpose old stuff to do new things. Hackers aren’t that interested in money; they’re more interested in showing off their skills. They love to learn and make demos and create and share free tech that other hackers then build upon. All they want is acknoweledgement and the respect of their peers.

Tech bros are parasites. They’re greedy bastards who love to erect barriers between people and tech. They extract, addict, monetize. They turn everything fun and useful into a transaction, a dopamine trap, a subscription, a surveillance tool, an advertising outlet, and a vector to extract money from labor and suppliers.

Please don’t get them mixed up.

• #opinion

I just finished Tom Nichols’ book “The Death of Expertise”. I feel like Nichols is one of those old-school conservatives (he clearly despises the Trumpist version of conservatism) who is worth listening to. Despite many rough spots in the book in which he comes across as curmudgeonly and condescending, the book’s central message is solid, in my opinion.

And that message is: experts know more about their topic of expertise than the vast majority of people, therefore you should give their opinion on that topic more authority than the layperson’s. This assertion is plainly true, but is perceived as deeply insulting by most USians today;“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” may well be the tenet many people today cling on to.

Nichols wrote this book in 2017 and eerily predicted what would happen if we continued in this trajectory: a takeover by politicians who coddle and promote the ignorance of the uninformed masses at the expense of the prestige of expertise.

Read more…

• #opinion
• #books

Every time I see a Ghibli AI picture, my heart dies a little. Every time an image is made, we are all impoverished a tiny bit. A small shred of respect is lost for an old man and his crew toiling months at a time on seconds of animation, to tell stories of beauty, empathy, and humanity, a man who loathed AI from its earliest days as an affront to life itself.

Every time a cartoon facsimile is generated and used for a lark, a token bit of our common heritage is stolen, ground up, repackaged, and regurgitated like so much chewing gum, boiling gallons of water and spewing carbon to entertain someone for a moment with images as vapid and forgettable as the next.

Every time I see one of those images, I scroll past and shake my head a little.

• #opinion
• #AI

Everyone needs a safe space. Conservatives have turned the phrase into a derogatory term (as they tend to do with all manner of empathy-based language), but I think a safe space is a requirement for human growth.

Learning, self-expression, and study can only happen when there is sufficient safe space for someone to drop their guard and focus their intellect on a problem. Flow state cannot occur when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, watching your language, or censoring your output.

I found that my pace of learning new skills has slowed in the past decade. I’m sure some of it is due to age, but I bet a lot of it is due to the erosion of psychological safety at large, and a (well-founded) suspicion that some portion of those I meet are actually OK if I or my loved ones were to suffer, and they are ever more bold about it.

Without a safe space, there is no trust, no play, no creativity, no growth. It’s imperative that we curate and defend our safe spaces.

PS: I know I’m conflating psychological safety with safe spaces, but to me they are the same thing; the differences lie in whether you’re invoking safe spaces as a slur, i.e. to refer to a space where no one can be criticized, which is really a straw man argument.

• #opinion

Do your best to resist cynicism, because cynicism destroys nuance, and almost everything valuable in life exists inside nuance.

Resist saying cynical things like “who cares about privacy; your data is already out there”, “who cares about stopping climate change; it’s already too late”, “who cares about voting; we don’t have a functioning democracy any more”, and any number of similarly simplistic, thought-destroying defeatisms.

Cynicism is often faux-intellectualism: it’s attempting to impress people with rational-sounding generalizations that lead to absurd, self-harming behavior; it’s a claim of “being real” while no longer wanting think through the problem; it’s feeling superior by kicking a table on which someone else is doing their homework.

Cynicism can often be a way to cope with continuing trauma: trying to make a change but getting beaten down; recognizing systems of injustice yet not seeing any positive change. But cynicism blinds you to opportunities for change that may arise—however rare—and has you surrender before the next fight has even begun. Worse, it risks turning you into an agent of defeat who prevents others from doing their good work.

Cynicism destroys nuance, and nuance is necessary for perspective.

Nuance exists even during a crisis—it’s arguably even more important then. Things can always get worse, and things can always get better. Working to make things better is always worth doing. Telling people to give up is not; it’s a defeatist’s easy way out.

• #opinion