giaour

> We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks

This is not true. There are innumerable cryptography libraries whose primary reason for existence was to replace or offer an alternative to a library with the same affordances but with primitives that were too easy to use incorrectly. “Maybe we should redesign this knife so it’s hard to slice a finger off” is not unique to web dev

> This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation"

Some people say they want more “food,” but did you know that consuming calories can lead to obesity?! The existence of fat people is an inconvenient reminder for people who claim to be “malnourished” or “wasting away.”

Google (and other search engines) gave you an easy and reliable way to opt-out of having your content indexed and linked to. People did in fact object pretty loudly every time Google attempted to surface the information on google.com rather than sending traffic to the source.

Well, the government can use Flock camera footage, and YouTubers can film with personal devices on public property. So I guess their capabilities are already pretty different

Yeah! Nobody should be able to track your movements along public roads.

> It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.

The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.

No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.

I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.

There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)

But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)

People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.

There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.

I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.

Where exactly is the imminent threat of deadly force in that example?

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

5G towers are typically much smaller and less conspicuous than the towers they are replacing. One of 5G's hallmarks is its "small cell" architecture.

The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.