I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method.
This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story.
In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you.
The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.
Author here. I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the major problems. More so if the platforms don't even allow me to revert to chronological feeds, or make it really user unfriendly.
Of course the cultural context has changed, but I think your view is quite cynical. I do believe that AI could, in theory, be a good steward and curator of news feeds (think Google News), but I haven't seen an implementation that would be open and customizable enough. I do not like the idea that someone could be manipulating what I'm being presented, or what reaches me and what doesn't.
Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)
> I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the major problems.
We're more on the same page than I assumed then just based on the post. I do also think it's a (very) significant issue, and I do think there'd be a lot of merit to gain better control of it. I often apply chronological sorting where possible too, or will at least curate my feed using the available features. I've just also come to think that people are "clearly" a lot less nice than I thought, and that maybe we're getting a bit too interconnected and a bit too well.
> Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)
That's kind of my point. I simply think there's a lot more to why social media posts run afoul so often on the internet (and why mass media posts are so distorted) than just the recommendation algorithms.
I address this under your other reply more, but the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation's goal is something actually desirable to me (and to most everyone, I believe). And for that, this is at most a stepping stone, rather than the solution (if such a thing even exists - who knows, I might be living in a dream world). It is under that interpretation that this post read like "misguided tech-nostalgia".
In case you're asking more literally though, what I meant is that the general vibe I caught from this all is that this old-school-ish thing from when everything was better (a while ago), if you switch to it now, things will be better again. And so due to the everchanging social context, I disagree with that - hence the "undropping a mug" example. That is, even if I consider recommendation algorithms as not only just a significant issue but e.g. where things went wrong outright, removing them alone is imo not going to be enough to undo the damage.
I admit I do have a little bit of old web nostalgia, but I know that we live in a very different world now and web platforms and the types of interactions we have online are much more complex now.
That said, specifically for the type of information you'd typically subscribe to in an RSS reader, I still think the web 1.0 approach has its place. I do believe that if you have something to say, standing up a blog with an RSS feed, writing posts there and then potentially linking on social media is the best way. It's also been trivially easy to set up a blog for years.
Likewise with news - I don't think there's anything better to get them than reading a news site or perhaps subscribing to a video channel. All very RSS-friendly.
I'm mostly interested in longer form content, not shorter or ephemeral types of content. And even there, platforms like Mastodon support RSS feeds natively.
But yeah, as we clarified below, the angle for writing the article was the delivery channel for content and whether it is curated by someone or not. For the quality and provenance of the information, that's still on you and that's a very hard problem with no clear solution - and arguably one that will get better with more AI generated content.
I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input (questioning the presented information because it was constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a wider context etc)
I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from.
With some other systems, this is not the case.
Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you.
I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.
Betrayal of trust is indeed serious, and a hard lesson for many of us. Consider also that progress is made one step at a time, over a long time. While a desire for sudden, wholesale changes is understandable, it may be counterproductive. YMMV
That is not what I'm advocating for, nor are incremental steps something I'm advocating against.
What I'm advocating for is for people to not lose sight of the prize. And what I'm advocating against is misleading claims, which is what I consider the title and the proclaimed motivation of the post to be.
I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it). Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
> I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it).
That's my issue, yes.
Now, I don't want to do the Twitter thing where I present my headcanon interpretation as some sort of deliberate messaging on your part, I 100% expect that this understanding of your words hasn't even crossed your mind, and maybe even reads like a gross twisting of what you intended to convey.
That is indeed how I read it though, even if I then recognized it as ambiguous (between those two). I then also made the guess that if I can take the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation away from this so easily, someone who's also as inattentive as me or perhaps even biased to interpret it that way, this may very well make them get the wrong idea. So I figured I should place it into the perspective this topic usually comes up in (and present it from the angle it usually comes up through).
> Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
Yup, that much is all clear. Nothing to contest on that one. It just also didn't run explicitly contrary to the "feeds of controlled information", because, well, it legitimately just wasn't the perspective you were writing from then. I was coming from an angle where I was feeling the absence of such a clarification.
Understood! I know the onus for how the words are interpreted are primarily on the author, so that's all fair for you to raise and I'm glad for that feedback.
Is there even such a thing? You're at the mercy of the platform you're running on. And Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and iOS are not realtime to begin with.
I guess if you're running on a realtime platform but in a VM like JS does, you can then take that property away, downgrading the "language" from being realtime. I wouldn't call that a language property still though, maybe my VM implementation doesn't make that downgrade after all.
I don't work with physical servers, so this is a gap in my knowledge. Isn't it the entire purpose of BMCs to allow for remote management?
So you'd definitely have to have it connected to the internet somehow, even if very indirectly, and in an independent manner (different network with no direct routes).
Of course a network can be offline. I believe that is what you describe, a network with no routes is not connected to anything else, and certainly not to the Internet?
It is common to keep admin and backup functions on separate network interfaces, on a disconnected network. You have to physically connect to the network in a secure location to use it.
No, that is not common. Management networks are almost never air gapped, they're just segregated from publicly-accessible or higher-exposure networks (DMZ, and hopefully prod). Requiring a (role-restricted) VPN connection is the most common way to control access to management networks.
Yes, you need some way to connect to the BMC. That is never going to be something like "eh just throw it on the public internet" or similar. It's going on a separate, isolated network with strict access controls.
There are others here more qualified to comment, but I do have some old rack mount enterprise servers making a racket in my basement, so I can provide some sort of half-informed opinion here--
Besides the security issue with the BMC here, it sounds like SuperMicro _also_ has absolutely insane defaults.
Every system I have has a separate, dedicated NIC for the BMC. There is an _option_ which is disabled by default to instead have it share one of the other interfaces. So the only ways you're going to "accidentally" put the BMC on an insecure network are:
1. Rebooting the server, going into the BIOS configuration, going into the options for the BMC, and explicitly telling it which other network device to use.
2. Physically accessing the server, attaching an ethernet cable to a clearly labelled BMC port, and attaching the other end to an insecure network.
From what I'm reading here, SuperMicro's default approach is apparently more "eh, just use whatever happens to be plugged in at the time". So even if you do have it running on a separate, secure interface... if someone unplugs it, it's going to switch to using whatever other connection is available!
To connect to the BMC on my servers you first need to be on the internal network already. Then you connect via wireguard to the router on the rack. Then you can connect to it and given a username/password you can log in. I would be pretty pissed if a cable got unplugged and that meant that the server decided to instead throw the BMC _on the interface connected directly to the public friggin' internet_. And this is just equipment I use for play and hosting my own random junk!
When you're dealing with unix-y Git repositories for example.
If you mean more from a user perspective, it really depends. For registry keys for example, since they're interacted with programmatically for the most part, I was expecting them to be case-sensitive. They're case-insensitive though, so that was a bit of a whiplash.
As for what people are buying and not buying, according to statcounter [0], the smartphone market in the EU is a third Apple, a third Samsung, and then the final third is a scattershot of other Android devices, primarily Xiaomi.
This is in contrast with a 57.27% foothold in the US. It's a different world.
To put it into perhaps an even more grappling perspective, that whole green bubble vs blue bubble thing? I've first heard of it only just a few years ago from Marques Brownlee on YouTube. Never encountered it in real life prior or since.
Funny you're invoking that when the fact that someone chose to buy apple at all means they thought it was the best option, according to their opinion. By banning apple you're necessarily making those people buy a crappier phone.
It's clear from your posting, here and elsewhere in this comments thread, that you believe that the EU should back off of the pressure on Apple.
What is driving your motivated reasoning? Why are you so invested in the ability for Apple to continue to have the ability to keep their app store locked down? How do you benefit from this decision?
It's like the ok emoji being an "alt right hidden signal" all over again.
Came across a so-far hopefully untainted, different memetic phrase yesterday: "millenial grey".
The girl in her video [0] successfully identified that it is largely rooted in a 2023 media campaign. She then proceeded to feature two supposedly "completely average" friends of hers as definitely unbiased anchors, and held a community poll, also supposedly unbiased. Predictably, everyone knew what "millenial grey" was, and quickly agreed it was the worst thing ever.
She even made a fun little browser-based pixel art minigame where people could customize a room with a number of colorful options, and an extra bland rendition of "millenial grey". I especially appreciated the false implication that your choices in dressing up a pixel art room definitely translates to your taste in real-life house décor; just like watching gangbangs on pornhub means you'd be interested in taking part in one, of course.
Considering this was the very first time I've ever heard this phrase uttered, to see it being used as if it was something you learned after saying mum and dad as an infant, it was approximately the most living-in-a-bubble type thing I've ever laid my eyes upon. She somehow managed to socialize so perfectly tuned around this, she had absolutely zero chance of actually recognizing it for what she clocked otherwise immediately: a manufactured outrage over basically nothing.
But then I do also keep my own - so far, rather short - list of political dogwhistles, so maybe I'm just being uncharitable with my parallels.
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of.
Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially.
It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0].
But that means all we have is experiences and opinions about those experiences. Mix this with politics just being a group's opinion, and the fact that there's more than two people alive - what you get is that every opinion can be now considered a political opinion, and since all we have is opinions, "everything" is a political opinion, so "everything" is political [1].
I then find this stupid because it hard-misses the point of the colloquial usage of the word. By being overly universal, it functions either as just a useless segmentation, or as a pointless exercise in pedantry, a rhetorical sleight of hand. It also deals in a good amount of mind-reading, where those considering something a political opinion, rather than just a personal opinion, pretty much implicitly accuse the other person of groupthink, which is a really quite cheap accusation to make with no real argumentational benefit.
But maybe this is one of those rare cases where this definition does have its utility. Let's see.
> It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0].
It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.
And in regards to everything being political: Politics certainly informs a lot of stuff in how you perceive the world. But most things aren't political statements, unless you make it so. And I really don't enjoy interacting with people who make any one thing their whole personality, and that includes politics.
> It also fundamentally rejects there being an objective reality, which also rejects the possibility of disagreeing on something but still believing common ground to be possible to be found. Which I personally see as one of the biggest reasons why people become less and less willing to allow differing opinions to exist at all.
That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to. In the interpretation I was referencing, objective reality is assumed to exist, but people are bound to at best asymptotically approach understanding it, yet never be able to fully do so. This also does keep the door open for a common ground to be found, so much so that it even covers the possibility of that not yet existing.
I do identify problems with it though as well. For example, the mere idea of lying becomes fairly challenging to represent in this model (though I'd say not impossible). But yeah, this is the framing I identified to necessarily underpin this claim, if I want to give it any fighting chance at all.
> That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to.
Absolutely. I was just giving my own 2 cents. I am not that good at expressing my thoughts. And tbf, not everyone who goes "everything is political" thinks that there is no objective reality and vice versa. So my wording was definitely badly formulated. But I definitely experienced a decent overlap, and find it very hard to engage in a civil way with people who think everything is political + no objective reality existing.
Is that being up in arms about the usage of woks? I always knew it was a fairly controversial piece of kitchen equipment, but this is a concerning development.
This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story.
In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you.
The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.
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