rottingleaf

People want to be openly racist again. That’s what MAGA really means.

And on this one should think a bit further and realize that any action causes a reaction.

Maybe outright socially punishing racism shouldn't have been the focus, and instead more effort should have been spent making sure more people know how, well, genetics work and also dream of stuff not involving racial difference, like future space travel or peaceful united humanity, that kind of thing. So that they'd make their own conclusions and have their own wishes.

So - they are tired of "the establishment" not making anything better, and that means they are also tired of some rules of public decency associated with that establishment. One of the reasons MAGA activism looks so gross - they want it to look gross. Because "gross" is not like that picture of "respectable politics", so already better.

In general studying psychology of people who are your opponents is beneficial. And especially hard when you can't make yourself respect them.

And it wasn't intended to be eaten with them from the beginning. The dry fat rim is for holding it.

In Russia it was impolite, actually, to eat chicken not with your hands. Can't say why, maybe it's the possibility of bones splitting and flying away, and maybe it's that some of the meat remains on the bones, so some visible food gets thrown out. As a kid I would sometimes get looks (making my hands oiled and dirty I don't like, being autistic and just because it's inconvenient).

In any case I'm not sure someone's eating habits affect their politics, unless demonstrating lack of basic hygiene or involving cannibalism.

I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some "Zen" in computer UIs and that "Zen" is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of "you don't understand it". Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well.

And also another idea of "you dummy talking about ergonomics can't be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit".

So -

1. pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked,
2. almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that,
3. blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications,
4. objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that's why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.

It's not a glitch.

People have spent billions to build systems where such dissemination of crowd emotion is the main difference from the real web (what was on geocities or even LJ, and a bit of that exists in Telegram, because it's a Russian honeypot to collect intelligence, and Russia could care a bit less about keeping the line that American social media corps, in its effort to make the honeypot actually attractive to use).

Then spent billions to advertise them. Billions to kill competition.

Then they've lost billions from that, and yet doubled down on it.

That just doesn't happen by accident, it's a whole era of humanity's history now. Like 20s-50s (the "bad" kind of change, with goosestepping, cult of strong people, attempts to save empires, preparations for a nuclear war, all that) and 60s-90s (the "good" kind of change, with space race, hippies in the west, Soviet official ideology being peace and unification of humanity - BTW, it's funny how the western politicians of that time freeloaded on that, never denying such a goal, but also never accepting it, thus getting the good parts without the hard ones) and then what we have.

No, the opposite. To have a normal Linux and an open hardware system. And no Broadcom.

Actually a reimagining of olden ThinkPads with proper screen ratios and keyboards and everything would be nice too.

Refurbished ones have a few downsides.

Well. Not very different from "opening up" to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn't think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it's our job to root out our time's weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

Which means that nice world doesn't survive evolution.

No, I don't mean anything like "climate change", I mean the looming promise of full-blown Orwellian world, that is most beneficial for people in power when it's not visible or felt, but they can't prevent it. So over time more and more people will realize that we are already there.

It's not about less expensive, it's about not too expensive to try. Say, most Linux phones I can think of start a bit higher than I'd wish.

I think we'll see a time the general public becomes more conscious of the risks. The world is changing, and has already changed enough.

I'd lower the bar TBH.

No need to have something powerful. No need to have three cameras almost good enough for professional purposes.

Hardware development is not that extremely expensive in this case, it's not an iPad, we need to fit something like RPi with Linux and Gnome into a box with a battery, a few antennae and peripheral devices. Make microphone and camera with a hardware switch. Maybe even a GPS antenna with that.

It has to be marketed accordingly, as something less. The box shouldn't be thinner than an iPad or cooler than an iPad, just convenient enough to hold. Ergonomic tests are not that hard. I mean, hiring people to do them costs something, yes.

What matters in marketing when you're the underdog - is being precise. When you're the overlord, you are teaching the consumers what to expect, so you can misposition a product. Here, I think, you can't.

So if you can't compete in the same niche, make a slightly (but clearly) different niche and make it clear that you are aiming for that, and make a device for that.

And make (like Apple does) a few scripted ways of using the device. Thoroughly checked to be workable.

I guess this adds up to some expense, but not nearly what those companies spend trying to make their things thin, sleek and hard to repair, and appealing to blonde girls.

Telegram

There is corporate interest to that, but I don't understand how it isn't profitable to make a device killing it.

An ARM PC in tablet form with Linux and Gnome, with open everything, receiving updates.

BTW, ecosystem is an interesting word. It means a stable system with a hierarchical food chain. Specifically designed to extract value again and again for the same service which isn't even unique, in a controllable and predictable way. Maybe the Matrix with human farms was more of a prophecy than people tend to think.