My step sister came out of no where at a family gathering to swear Helen Keller was a fraud.
I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud"
Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up!
In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt.
But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person.
All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with.
I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.
> You want to decouple from them but you obsess about their politics.
It’s a transnational world, despite all that’s happened. Leftists in America obsess about Corbyn and Sheinbaum. Right-wingers supported Bolsonaro and now Milei. Liberals used to have the hots for Justin Trudeau. Everyone thinks the grass is greener, they just disagree on where.
Telling what? STEM academics are busier than Pokémon fans to contribute to Wikipedia? Or they care less about the cause of Wikipedia? That as a society we produce more of the latter than the former? There’s no definitive rationale to be told simply by that observation.
I think the distaste is more against feature bloat. This sub-thread is reacting to dedicated e-readers succumbing to becoming full-fledged app-running devices. Is the refresh rate on an e-ink display even suitable for general computing?
Plus, isn't it fairly old hat to get root access on a Linux consumer device and then running whatever you want on it? Oh, it makes for a neat party trick you could make an Action Retro YouTube video out of. But perhaps people are just jaded since they've seen it done on a million types of devices by now. Maybe there are more interesting ways, and things, to hack.
"Bloat" people strike me as similar to wikipedia "notability" concerned people. It's a whole realm of thinking focused on deleting. Which yeah, sometimes that's important too! That's a great way to assess architectures. But this feels like such a general field, of so much, and to be immediately putting up fences around what we will and will not consider: I'm not here for it. Worthless, anti-worth finding exercise. Just why?
That's their point though. The hacker ethos doesn't ask "should I do this" it asks "can I do this", and that's kind of beautiful when it's not scaled up to a corporate level.
I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general.
Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world.
Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.
Google was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer.
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