> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.
Oof. There are two pieces to this story. One is great and one his heartbreaking.
The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve the problem is a great thing. It's the goal. The more we do it the better we are making the world for humans.
... the fact that people need to work to eat or provide anything above a subsistence quality of life is not only tragic, it's increasingly abhorrent in a world where automation and simplification via machines has freed up this much raw resource and free time.
If we're pitting LLMs against people's ability to provide for their families, we have lost the thread on why we're doing any of this.
Those resources are being redirected to create entertainment areas for the rich like golf courses, 7 star luxury hotels and villas. This is the modern predicament.
Not he automation, but the way... we gone farther since agricultural and energy domestication... but the profit as main director is less than suboptimal, it is tragical. Having known about many accidents in complex systems is a madness to see things at this point in the most complex of systems that is society.
You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:
> Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."
There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.
One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.
The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.
I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.
The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.
To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!
Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.
Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.
The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.
Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.
Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.
The only silver lining I can see in this is that if they replace their existing tooling with AI integration, we might actually get search and confluence that works.
I've lost count of how many times I search for a keyword and get no relevant results, but the document I'm looking for, which contains the keyword, is in my automatic pop-up of recent documents visited.
I soft of feel like every five years someone comes along and tries to re-invent cancellable threads and immediately arrives back at the same conclusion: the problem of what it means to "cancel" a thread is so domain-specific that you never save anything trying to "support" it in your threading framework; you try and save people the effort of doing something ad-hoc to simulate cancellation and build something at least as complicated as what they would build ad-hoc, because thread cancellation is too intimately tied to the problem domain the threads are operating on to generalize it.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
Or be a lot uglier. See: Microsoft replacing its own API surfaces with binary-compatible representations to workaround companies like Adobe adding perf improvements like bypassing the kernel-provided kernel object constructors because it saved them a few cycles to just hard-code the objects they wanted and memcpy them into existence.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.