It was snowing. I scraped the windshield of my car. When I was done, I turned the key - and the battery was dead. I shrugged, gathered my belongings and was about to go back into my apartment building. But a woman who has just arrived in her car came up to me. And she asked, “Is your car not starting? You can use mine if you like.” I had needed seen here before. I took it. I returned it with a full tank in the evening. I’ve since had two other random strangers lend me their car, both in Germany and in the US. It’s something I wouldn’t have believed people would do. And it’s something I wouldn’t have accepted out of fear. But I had learned: Being kind and accepting kindness are two sides of the same coin. The one cannot exists without the other.
That’s what Elon’s vision was before he ended up buying Twitter. Keep a digital track record for journalists. He wanted to call it Pravda.
(And we do have that in real life. Just as, among friends, we do keep track of who is in whose debt, we also keep a mental map of whose voice we listen to. Old school journalism still had that, where people would be reading someone’s column over the course of decades. On the internet, we don’t have that, or we have it rarely.)
> Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
And what he left out of this book (and included in the memoir or in some interview) was that there was a scientific study of women in the area at the time which discovered that a very high percentage of women had birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.
Dying businesses like newspapers and local banks, who use it to save the money they used to spend on shutterstock images? That’s where I’ve seen it at least. Replacing one useless filler with another.
It must have been around 1998. I was editor of our school’s newspaper. We were using Corel Draw. At some point, I proposed that we start using HTML instead. In the end, we decided against it, and the reasons were the same that you can read here in the comments now.
So tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
> tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
Easy, most people fit that description actually. And that's fortunate because otherwise the world would collapse pretty quickly from lack of midwifes and gynecologists.
In fact, the neoliberal cult that neglects the human nature and pretends everything is shaped by monetary incentives is slowly destroying our societies…
Everyone need to pay their bills but that's a completely different thing from being “profit seeking”.
I'm pretty positive that very few of the women you know do prostitute themselves for a living despite it being the most profitable activity imaginable. Turns out most women aren't profit-seeking after all.
Reporting. I try to solve problems just to get them solved. I don't seek to enrich myself. By the way, living in your world of profit-seeking-at-all-costs maximalism is the cruelest fate imaginable, but assholes normalizing maximized greed are a dime a dozen, ruining things for everyone else.
It would be nice of them to diffuse the clickbait.
As it is, when a video has a catchy clickbait title, I screenshot the thumbnail and have ChatGPT give me the solution. Or I’ll copy the URL into a transcript fetcher and feed that into Gemini so I can ask specific questions.
He who clickbaits is demoted to the role of “Suggest a topic for me to ask ChatGPT about”.
You know... When I see something that crosses my threshold of clickbait on my YouTube feed, I just select "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Given the contrast between my usual logged-in Youtube feed, and the rampant sea of unfettered clickbait I see when I've been logged out on any particular device.
He who clickbaits is therefore demoted to the role of seldom or never being seen [by me] at all.
This makes sense: If the algorithm exists to increase viewership and engagement, then the algorithm therefore serves to show me stuff that I'll watch. It does not serve to present to me things that I will not watch.
And it works. I can't even find any clickbaity material right now to reference.
80% there. The next step would be to generate many more versions of that picture. Even if you go back into the 80s, the hairstyle should change. If you go back into the 1800s, you probably don’t have the bright colors in the shirt. If you go back earlier, it might not be cotton but hemp. Etc. I think with generative AI it should be possible to slowly morph the one person from today in today’s clothing all the way back to Lucy, one picture at a time. Then, the effort of scrolling would actually be worth it!
reply