I mean, you're a real person that wrote this, and I'm a real person replying to you. No one of this is not real. The image that I might make of you in my head and that you might make of me in your head are illusions, but so are the ones we make in "meatspace". Feel free to call the internet "siliconspace" or something like that, but it won't make it not real.
> Feel free to call the internet "siliconspace" or something like that
I think the word you're looking for is "cyberspace".
> but it won't make it not real
If I'm corresponding with someone via mail, are we inhabiting a postspace that is a real place? If I'm on the phone with someone are we inhabiting a voicespace that is a real place? If I'm reading a book, are the author and I in a space?
These are not places. These are media. It's communication as a phenomenon within real life, but to say any of these or the internet constitutes a place of equal primacy as the real world is just silly.
> I think the word you're looking for is "cyberspace".
That's the one, thanks
> These are not places. These are media.
I think that's just different ways to view things. I see HN as a place, and I go to it like I would go to the local pub or something. I see the discord server than I share with my friend as the same thing, a place. On the other hand, if I'm talking to someone on the phone, there's no "space". I think a good way to put it would be that if there's still something while no one is actively using it, I see it as a space.
A mail conversation would be more like a trail of letters, so not a place. I don't really know why, that's just how I see things. For a book, sometimes picking up a book (often with fiction) feels like going back to a certain place.
> to say any of these or the internet constitutes a place of equal primacy as the real world is just silly
I don't really understand why. There are lots of places in the world that are less important than HN. Of course you can go to the forest and touch a tree, but that doesn't make this tree more important than HN just because you can physically touch it.
There is a space of sorts with the phone, but it did take awhile to develop. My understanding of the early history of the telephone is that people conceived of it as like talking to someone in the other room. You can hear them, but not see them—but they’re there with you.
Now we do have very distinct telephone habits, a telephone style of speaking, etc. Try using phone inflection in person sometime; it’s very jarring. “Hey. Yeah. It’s Matthew. I’m sorry, one sec, I need to…”
In an abstractly similar way, a lot of HN comments share some qualities, even from different people (including this one).
Of course it's not real. This is Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation in practice. When you cannot tell the difference between a real person represented in the simulacra (i.e. a site like HN) and the simulacra being generated at will by a malicious actor (i.e. a simulation, fake accounts developing a history of posts, bots, guerilla marketing, etc.) then the smart person will recognize it for the un-reality that it truly is.
Just because it isn't real, though, doesn't mean that it can't be fun :)
I don't really see how this is specific to the internet. Sure, automated bots makes this worse, but is there a big difference between a bot and someone parroting opinions that they've heard and don't really understand? I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot. These people exists in the meatspace, that doesn't make it less real.
> I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot.
That's precisely one of the reasons why it's not real. Conversing in "meatspace" makes it more difficult to just tune out the other side, a "real" conversation is one where leaving the conversation is either tacitly permitted by the other side (by not following the person leaving) and at least bookended by simple social ritual ("I gotta go", "Nice meeting you", etc.). Baudrillard's point is that the simulacra (the discussion online) is no longer showing you that reality, but that too many people have lost the ability to differentiate between reality and what is a convincing simulation of reality.
> I mean, you're a real person that wrote this, and I'm a real person replying to you. No one of this is not real.
I agree that it's all real, but I do say: there is so much less basis of experience gained from interacting with one another on the internet today are much smaller. I would say our experiences gained are very much "less real" because of that. We're not going to recognize one another the next time we cross paths, in all chance, we're not going to have anywhere near the visual or auditory recognition or pattern matching an in-the-world encounter would have brought. The internet is real, people on it are real, but our experiences here are extremely glancing, only the most bare, stripped down contacts, and most of us interact with each other on a near-effectively-anonymous basis, as though everyone were wearing masks & using text-to-speech systems, wearing the same plain clothes. The bandwidth of experience we have with one another in these interactions is extremely tiny.
The internet & online communications is real, it is not an illusion. But nearly everything that happens here comes almost entirely out of context. It relies on us to access our pre-established bits of context to understand & discern meaning. The receiver here has far far far more power than the sender, and the sender has very few signals or images at their disposal to establish themselves, comparatively.
The internet today really feels like a forest in which the inhabitants, almost universally, remain in the dark.
Sure, it's real. Real electricity; cause and effect of pressing our fingers down and moving these tiny invisible machines.
I would love to express the emotion that I feel when I read the term "meatspace," but for all the machinations that I can dream up, I fear that the meaning would be lost as each of my futile attempts travel by wire.
It does a good job of distinguishing “reality” from “virtuality”. The Philip K Dick reference to “reality being something that exists when you stop believing in it” is better but a lot more verbose.
For me, reality is wherever I can communicate with other people. Reality is the inter-subjective (that is, the social constructs that people create and believe in together).
Incidentally, this is a major theme of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, which is what inspired me to think about the topic.
What a user-hostile design. You buy a $350 device, then you have to buy proprietary nail polish capsules until the day the company inevitably goes down? And after that you’re stuck with a nail Juicero?
There was a tabletop dishwasher not too long ago that had proprietary capsules. A dude bought industrial detergent and filled them up with a syringe for 100x cheaper.
Ironically they do, internally everything is around a Facebook profile (granted this was true when I was last there years ago). I imagine it’s still the same.
Is it public profile or professional profile. My company gave me an Id which is used for anything, but I consider it as company property and not my personal id.
Sadly, I have first hand exeperience working on software where the devs clearly 1) did not use the software they created, 2) did not fully understand the purpose of the software
At my first job I built a system to track charitable donations by local bank branches for the banks lawyers. I couldn't even understand most of the status drop downs I built as they were just line numbers in IRS forms (eg 1040 13b). The PM on the project was barely doing any better.
But when we were done the lawyers all agreed that it was 1000 times better than the Excel spreadsheet that the lawyers themselves had built and were passing around between offices.
Would it have turned out better if I'd been a tax attorney before taking on the gig, I'm sure. But you can still get results without the deep domain knowledge residing in the programmer's head.
At my first job we built a .Net application for a client. There where some pretty detailed specification regarding how the thing was suppose to work, but not what it was actually used for.
We had an extremely happy client, who used this thing extensively in his own consulting business. None of the developers could tell you how the software was to be used, beyond: “It stores data in a tree like structure with three node types”.
I think "most" is way too broad. I don't think I have one program on my system that is like that. I find this is typically found when a company with no internal dev uses a lowest bidder to offshore software.
Do you think that devs from FAANG, MS, Adobe, open-source projects, etc really have no idea what they are programming? Unless software dev is like an iceberg where there is much much more unseen than seen???
I don't know. I suspect most software is actually internal or proprietary. I don't think that developpers working on some custom widgets factory optimization software actually use it to optimize their mini-factory at home. Or that many developers run their own telecom on the side and need all kinds of software to route calls. Same is probably true of FAANG developpers too: how many adwords engineers actually run their own advertising campaign? Or have a personal need to store massive amounts of data in their own bigtable?
I’m at a loss to understand why your statement means this person, or anyone who increases the suffering of others in the pursuit of their own personal wealth, shouldn’t feel bad about doing so.
What do you do afterwards ? All good jobs eventually end up in a handful of mega corporations. The startups will either be acquired by one or become one.
you're making the incorrect assumption that both sides of the discourse have valid positions.
1. what is a non-racist person supposed to say to a racist person to change their views?
2. why is it the non-racist person's responsibility to talk to the racist person? in the words of office space, "why should I change? he's the one who sucks."
The 1960s and 1970s saw a reckoning in the USA that while not complete, did result in a number of people with substantially incorrect views eventually coming about to a more sensible position.
Similar victories have been achieved with respect to drug legalization and "gay marriage".
None of these victories are or ever will be complete but a combination of discussion and social pressure did make significant social progress possible.
Facebook makes far too much money showing ads to their "more conservative user base" to do anything more than token gestures to stop racism and calls to violence.
What Russian conspiracy hoax are you referring to? I do hope you are not calling the well-understood interference by Russia in the democratic affairs of other nations a hoax but instead referring to something else. The Russian plan to destabilise the west is published in a book since 1997.
the fact that then you sell them 0 subscriptions? It's not like "the government has said it'll do this, so now it has to do it at all costs", and governments of larger countries do have options to make a publishers life difficult if they are unreasonable, so there is some interest on both sides to negotiate.
I have a side project that didn't make money, then did, and now effectively does not.
I write novels: I've published 10 so far. I didn't make any money for a while, but all in all I've sold about 80,000 copies. I haven't published anything new since 2018 and my sales have since dried up completely.
Fiction is a product market fit game first: if you don't write what people want to read, they won't read it. After that, it is a quantity game. New books come out every day, if you don't keep releasing more stories, people will forget you.
Facebook doesn’t exist in its current form without their tireless efforts.