obelix_

No idea what cost that comment refers too. If you are Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Amazon sure you need your five thousand man PAID army of content reviewers to keep the data clean cause the data is mostly useless. But if you are running Wikipedia search or Stackoverflow's search or the team at the library of congress please go and take a look at the size of these teams and their budgets and their growth rates.

Just temporary. Nature did not need to invent cloud computing to perform massive computation. The speed and data involved in computation going on in a cell or an ants brain show us how far we can still go on desktop. The breakthroughs will come.

In the meantime (unless you are dealing with video) most text and image datasets out there that avg Joe needs can easily be stored/processed entirely locally thanks to cheap terabyte drives/multicore chips these days. People just haven't realized there isn't that much useable textual data OR that local computing doesn't require all the overhead of handling millions of requests a second. This is Google problem not an avg Joe problem that is being solved with cloud compute.

It makes sense if you are handling millions of requests from all over the world per second and need failovers if machines go down.

But...if you just want to run your own personal search engine say...

Then for Wikipedia/Stackoverflow/Quora size datasets (50GB with with 10GB worth of every kind of index(regex/geo/full text etc) ) you can run real time indexing on live updates with all the advanced search options you see under their "advanced search" page one any random Dell or HP Desktop with about 6-8GB of RAM.

Lots of people do this on Wall Street. People don't get what is possible on desktop cause so much of it has moved to the cloud. It will come back to desktop imho.

You have to examine your own assumptions too -

1. You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years.

2. In 2013 the Washington post did an estimate on how much was being spent on the surveillance society in the US. Everyone reacted in disbelief. Do you know by how much that budget has increased in the last 5 years? Are these people just brain-dead to be spending this kind of cash? Ofcourse not.

The US has made its share of mistakes over valuing freedom and squandering potential. China is overvaluing control and will make its share of mistakes too. We have to learn from both sets of mistakes to arrive at the right balance of where society should go in high noise info saturation environments. These are very new environment that society hasnt been in before and the right path ahead is not as obvious as people think.

Just cheaper these days to buy them from India. You could fly there, get a top quality doc/audiologist to check you up. The same top of the line aids cost around 2-3K max. Do the touristy stuff and fly back all for less than what it costs to get an aid in the US. "Medical tourism" they call it.

This where I tell couples "it takes a village". In a healthy working "village" there is always someone around who will compensate for weaknesses in both partners that aren't easy to fix. Modern couples have this highly misguided notion that between themselves they can work their way through complex things they aren't trained to handle. The larger their support group (parents, in laws, family, kids, friends) the better the outcomes.

The fix is not complicated. I have no issue with my search data/post viewing history providing me better results or better ads.

The real damaging data to people and society at large is a different set of data. It's the publicly visible counts next to every thought and utterance reinforcing misguided beliefs and behaviour up and down the food chain constantly. Any experienced shrink, psycologist or educator, marketing/PR expert knows applying the right amount of feedback at the right time is critical to how people process info.

Remove/delay/reduce the visibility of like counts/view counts/upvotes/retweet counts that are displayed and the world will be a different place overnight.

I don't know about trust being the root. But the argument can be made that society is very different. And the Fred Rogers model won't have much of an impact given the environment of hyper stimulation/24x7 distraction that consumption culture creates.

Fred Rogers was critical of it even back then. Since then, consumption culture has exploded, objectification of women, violence, escapism whether it is in games, drugs or your social media, news streams is at an all time high. For a Fred Rogers type message to get through the volume dial on all this other stuff has to be dialed down. Otherwise the very valuable message gets lost in the noise.

Interesting data there probably for a social psychologists/sociologist to dig into. More interesting than the amount of cheaters in a population or whether thats a fixed amount is how many go on to win and influence gaming culture (both the player and the designer).

Once upon a time I could find blog posts of people reviewing things, travel, software, equipment etc. Now I just find pages and pages of review aggregators. The advantage of finding a blog was didn't take more than a few clicks to figure out if the blogger and me shared thinking, lifestyles, financial means etc. Now all that is gone. We just have ridiculous aggregation.

Much more than just personal privacy. When CEOs, politicians, judges and generals use the internet too do you really want to be the guy/a company that gives them that call? The incentives are all messed up.

Yup good move. TV news orgs need to do this too. Next too all their flashing banners and scrolls. Especially when the talking heads of both side are raging. I'd really like to know if Coke or Apple or whoever is footing the bill.

humanetech.com/take-control/

Give it some time.

Kim Kardashian has a 110 million followers. After the Russians (or whoever...maybe just that "400 pound dude in the basement") get her to become the next president I am waiting to see what boywonder shows up and says to Congress.

We know what he and his exec staff thought about fake news before the election. Now who here thinks fake imagery is not a thing? Just take a look at the content produced by the top 100 accounts.

There is going to be a special place in history for the damage boywonder has done. People will have to invent new terms to describe it. Nothing like it has happened ever before.

Cause handling people and their issues is about 5000 times harder than handling code. Your code doesn't get cancer, run away with a coworker, go bankrupt, have opinions, lie, steal, needs to be told how to use a restroom, needs protection when it's layoff season etc etc etc