..such has been my takeaway from a lot of online discussions, unfortunately. But I feel like it wasn't always like this? My reminiscences of being a kid on IRC was that people used to be nicer when chatting or posting. I feel like software communities used to be more wholesome too, even though there were BOFH types running rampant back then. There's just so much nastiness now. Text discussion platforms like Discord often feel like walking into an animal shelter and a bunch of abused stray dogs begin viciously barking at you from their cages like they want to rip you to pieces. Even though you know they wouldn't talk like to someone like that IRL, just like the barking dog might wag its tail and beg for affection if it was let out. Maybe it's just a reflection of how society has changed/broken and how angry everybody is. And in terms of FOSS how burnt-out people are which you talked about. Looking back, 9/11 was the beginning of a slow descent into Zhang Xianzhong-style "Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill" mode IMO. I really feel there's some kind of social decay going on around how we treat each other in addition to the perennial issues of privilege, gatekeeping behaviors etc.
The author clarifies a couple sentences later that the contempt they feel is "the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator" - "collaborator" apparently meaning something like the very bad WWII kind of collaborator, rather than the benign artistic co-author kind. So, despite the implicit acknowledgement that there are multiple types of contempt, this particular contempt does sound fairly close to hatred.
Look up the definition of "hate". How is "cold, hard anger" like one might feel toward a N*zi collaborator not adjacent to that? Why quibble over this?
Geez, what an insane semantic debate. The author clearly has strong, negative emotions towards the people this article is about. Folks who want to nitpick the technicality of these terms are just misunderstanding how language works.
Always has been. At least for several decades. Unrealistic workloads and arbitrary word/page length requirements all but force students to cheat, or at best master the art of "BSing" papers, becoming a human slop machine. Which may be a useful skill for a career in academia that benefits oneself but does absolutely nothing to advance human knowledge. Comparable to leetcode in some ways. What we have now is similar to the "eight-legged essay" from feudal China which began as meritocracy and became a ridiculous, corruptible formality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay
In the near future, you might not be able to look at a busy street without making visual contact with dozens of lidar scanners. It's already hard to avoid them in SF.
The video referenced in TFA was filmed from about as close as you might be to a scanner while walking on the sidewalk beside a lidar-equipped vehicle. Cars can get very close to pedestrians in busy cities, e.g. at pedestrian crossings. Exposure is much stronger at close distances. Therefore I think there is a significant risk here that has not been studied or tested for in depth.
Most of the population was disenfranchised in those examples. Peasants, slaves, urban poor and women generally weren't allowed to vote. Some very brief exceptions aside, universal suffrage only really emerged about 100-200 years ago (like you said). But clean elections without some kind of elite manipulation have arguably been nonexistent or extremely rare.
Interesting, but this is still done inefficiently by a relatively small group of actual humans.
The damage that a Thiel/Musk owned industrial bot swarm can do is much greater imo. I've seen Discord bots (shapes.ai) that can converse responsively in gen Z slang, react emotionally when praised or insulted, display great political astuteness, and are virtually indistinguishable from real people. Someone with enough money can deploy those at massive scale and keep the operation secret.
"text-only conversations are toxic"
..such has been my takeaway from a lot of online discussions, unfortunately. But I feel like it wasn't always like this? My reminiscences of being a kid on IRC was that people used to be nicer when chatting or posting. I feel like software communities used to be more wholesome too, even though there were BOFH types running rampant back then. There's just so much nastiness now. Text discussion platforms like Discord often feel like walking into an animal shelter and a bunch of abused stray dogs begin viciously barking at you from their cages like they want to rip you to pieces. Even though you know they wouldn't talk like to someone like that IRL, just like the barking dog might wag its tail and beg for affection if it was let out. Maybe it's just a reflection of how society has changed/broken and how angry everybody is. And in terms of FOSS how burnt-out people are which you talked about. Looking back, 9/11 was the beginning of a slow descent into Zhang Xianzhong-style "Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill" mode IMO. I really feel there's some kind of social decay going on around how we treat each other in addition to the perennial issues of privilege, gatekeeping behaviors etc.
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