Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 7 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.

    There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web

    Arguably, that’s not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.

    A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it’s not evil, exactly.







  • Usually instinctive tool use is excluded. What scientists are interested in - and what engineers can’t replicate - is a creature understanding it’s environment well enough to use it against itself (so to speak) in a novel, creative way.

    I know from our everyday perspective itching with a stick isn’t a giant intellectual leap, but how solids work, how limbs work and the type of contact required to itch would be difficult as hell if you put it in mathematical terms. And then on top of that, you have to put it together in the correct order to be a solution. The cow could just as easily have grabbed grass instead of wood, or used the short side of the stick.