> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle.
In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.
Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).
The one line you've pulled out is a quote from someone else and not the words of the authors of this paper, to be clear.
Here's the full context:
1 Overview
The culture of AI is imperialist and seeks to expand the kingdom of the machine. The AI community is well organized and well funded, and its culture fits its dreams: it has high priests, its greedy businessmen, its canny politicians. The U.S. Department of Defense is behind it all the way. And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all.
Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (1985, pp. 13–14)
This paper sets out our expert position on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies permeating the higher education sector, demonstrating how this directly erodes our ability to function (see also our Open Letter, Guest, van Rooij, et al. 2025).
(the rest elided)
If you aren’t familiar with the term, you might want to consider reading about the “AI winter”. To me, it’s not surprising at all that the quote would come from 1985.
Athanasiou, Tom (1985). “Artificial intelligence: cleverly disguised politics”. In: Compulsive technology: computers as culture. Ed. by Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow. Free Association Books, pp. 13–35
I just had a conversation with free chatgpt about when a sports game started. Chatgpt got it hilariously wrong, like a time it couldn't possibly be given the other things I know about the game. I just didn't want to trawl through search results to find out, so thought AI could be a nice shortcut. Mistake, I guess. Then I tried to tell it how and why it was wrong, with further hilariously wrong attempts to respond from the AI. I couldn't help but give a few more pointless clarifying replies, even though I knew I would get nothing out of it and the AI would learn nothing. I seem to do this every month or so and then get frustrated with how useless it is and then swear off it for another month.
Did you ask it to search the Internet as a part of your request? It is still extremely imperfect, but that typically helps it get basic details correct. At least for me at any rate.
Wow it's just as stupid and ahistorical in context! Every revolution's fighters believed in it despite the utter catastrophe that came about afterwards. The only reason to point to that instead of, idk, Belgium's capitalist turn leading to the crimes against humanity in the Congo, is to score points with credulous burgers.
"just like the bad-thing-doers of old, today's bad-thing-doers believe what they're doing is actually good" is a keen insight in itself when broadly applied, but useless for distinguishing bad things from good things.
When people say communists you can safely just skim over it, its a meaningless word shaped by 50+ years of the most expansive propaganda project in human history. It is just a synonym that means "bad people" it has no substance beyond that.
It is not meaningless for me, who was born into a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party which proudly called itself as such.
If I wanted to be cheeky, that's your privilege showing :) There are likely some people in your proximity (if you are American, then mostly Cubans and some Russians) who have lost some family member to actual Communism.
I am wary of their misuse for production of really slick propaganda. One of the weaker spots of the old regimes was that their propaganda was becoming unbelievable. The contrast between glorious posters of the classless future and shabby, decrepit exteriors of the cities that were falling into dysrepair was huge.
AI can probably produce better propaganda than mediocre party hacks.
That's more like explicit propaganda by some ancestors of cuban landlords that felt the stick after the revolution, what I meant is politically uneducated normies randomly throwing in the term in an unrelated article.
a. You probably mean descendants. The ancestors are long dead.
b. "felt the stick", what an euphemism for large-scale human rights violations, and not limited to "landlords".
Friends, from a survivor (a favorite word of the American left, ain't it?): actual Communist rule is very bad, most nations abandoned it in the very moment that it was possible to do so, and in the places where it can't be done, people at least try to flee.
That is why you have so many Cubans and Venezuelans in that horrible capitalist America, but not one American risks his/her life trying to swim or sail into those working class paradises.
Even in Europe the old Iron Curtain worked in one way only, to prevent people from escaping their working class paradises, although in the GDR it was called "anti-fascist protective wall".
I really don't care about your victor narrative of history, its all meaningless at this point, all this propaganda only purpose nowadays is purely to justify why we can't have the most basic social democratic reforms, it has nothing to do with anything even remotely marxist.
For 200€, you can get yourself an old Thinkpad, flash it with some coreboot variation, install a GNU/Linux distribution and in process you will learn more things and it is not an RGB keyboard; it is really an "all-in-one PC".
"For that price, you can just use an old laptop" has been true ever since the OG Raspberry Pi showed up ~13 years ago.
And that's great, and stuff, if what a person wants is the most compute they can get for the fewest dollars possible.
But when someone instead wants a quite small computer that is actually friendly to hardware tinkering, and they want to buy it new, then a used Thinkpad will not scratch that itch -- but a new Raspberry Pi will.
(It's a bad comparison. It always has been a bad comparison.)
13 years ago, we only had the Raspberry Pi Model B at $35 (about $50 in today's money -- same as a 2GB Pi 5), and just as today we still needed to get all of the accoutrements in-place to make it work: A power supply that it actually works with, a case, an SD card, perhaps a wifi adapter...
$150 is plenty to buy a used PC system here in 2025 that still works, just as $100 was plenty to buy a working used system in 2012.
As a point of reference: The last used system I bought was a little Lenovo M600. It was $50, delivered, a couple of years ago.
As another point of reference: My daily-driver laptop is a Thinkpad T530 that was ~$200 (I paid a little extra for a disturbingly-clean example that included a discrete GPU and the fanciest of the screens that could be equipped).
Anyway: I saw these same discussions about pricing back when the first Pi was still new -- just on Slashdot instead of HN. People have been comparing the prices of used PC hardware to the prices of new Raspberry Pis for as long as we've had Raspberry Pis.
(And to be clear, I'm not trying to fanboy anything. This isn't Highlander: There can be more than one. I've got Raspberry Pis that do stuff, and I also have PC hardware that does stuff, and I'm OK with this.)
This really comes down to a matter of preferences, but I've never used the GPIO either. The reason is that a microcontroller board makes a much better GPIO for my use. Then I can unplug it and put it away when I'm done, use it with any PC -- desktop or laptop -- give it away, and carry it into the room where my soldering station is. A microcontroller also opens up the whole world of stand-alone gadgets.
Naturally software / firmware support is an issue. If the stuff you want to do is easy to code on your preferred platform, that's a reason to keep using it.
A lot of hardware startups/projects use Raspberry Pis. You program in a real Linux environment and still have access to I2C, SPI, and serial ports, which lets you talk to all kinds of chips out there.
I am aware. But I don't program, I have no interest in hardware hackery like this, and one of the things I most like about the Pi range is that I can run OSes that are not Linux. I think two of my Pis currently run RISC OS. I could also run NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, Windows IoT, or Inferno. I do not know of any other SBC with so many options.
I am not saying these things are not valid, but they are not unique selling points -- other Pi-style SBCs offer them too.
However, the Pi has other merits that other SBCs don't: price, range of OSes, long-term OS support, a vast range of special-purpose distros for everything from server to dedicated special-purpose client stuff.
What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..
This is all about destroying free software and allowing "open source" to take over, nothing with memory safety whatsoever. This can sound conspiracy but the main idea is to push permissive licenses, so companies can exploit your work without even mentioning your name. I believe the goal of Canonical and similar companies is to create a fully alternative Linux+GNU environment without GPL/AGPL, push it with embrace, extend, extinguish tactics and eventually create a developer culture that contributing to permissive license parallel project is a better alternative than original copyleft one.
How does it prevent you from licensing code you write any way you want? If those companies pay for a GPL-free linux distribution (kernel excepted i suppose), what's the problem? they paid for the work, they should be able to license it the way they want, and nothing prevents others from using and writing GPL'd software...i'm having trouble seeing the evil here...
That doesn't just sound conspiracy, that is a conspiracy theory. Permissive licenses are a perfectly valid free software option that some people prefer. They are not some kind of shadowy attempt to undermine free software.
When I was a kid, every month I was waiting to get the demo CDs of the Turkish gaming magazine "Level". It was such fun times. I remember in one of those magazines, they had a small tutorials for C++ to make games and it was the first time that I tried programming with games magazine actually.
Licensing is not a simple semantic problem. It is a legal problem that have strong ramifications, especially things are on their way to standardize. What Facebook is trying to do with their "open source" models is to exhaust possibility of fully open source models to be industry standarts. and create an alternative monopoly to Microsoft/OpenAI. Think of it as if an entity had right to ISO standards, they would be extremely rich. Eventually researchers will release pretty advance ML models that are fully open source(from dataset to training code) and Facebook is trying to block them even before start to prevent of the possibility of this models to be standard. This is a complementary tactic of the industry to closed source rivals and should not be understood as challenging to them.
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
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