scalio

As I said below, and without knowing if this is applicable to all models, mic and camera can be physically disconnected from the mainboard.

You can open the macbook and unplug the camera and mic connectors from the mainboard.

You're not alone, I feel you. The pendulum will swing back. Let's hope it does so quickly.

It drives me up the walls when some kind of list or collection touch UI doesn't offer any kind of batching, and most don't.

Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.

Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.

/rant over

And there's the problem.

What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?

The solution to a problem is never to ignore it, lock it away, out of sight where it will just fester. The people who produce bullshit (maybe for a living, maybe as a hobby) don't just disappear.

Aggressive filtering of what people see in their feeds is not a solution. What do all those able to discern bullshit from factual content have in common? Exercise for the reader as I don't have a definitive answer. A proper education can be thrown away or ignored when convenient; some people just seem to have a good nose for bs. I dunno.

What civilization are you talking about? The US, western Europe, capitalism, formally educated people? Who is 'they'? There's enough people who just want to watch the world burn, and they're very much part of society, paying taxes and going to clubs and shopping malls. For instance, all those highly capable developers and mathematicians on adtech payrolls. How is one supposed to concentrate on separating the wheat from the chaff when things engineered to distract and capture attention do exactly that?

You should check out what happened less than a century ago. Among other things, it started this whole digital conundrum.

It's naive to think that concentrating so much power over so many people in the hands of so few people can go any sort of well. What happens when the regulators, or the ones charged of overseeing them, want in on the fun? What if they're coerced, which suddenly is trivial to do?

Progress comes from individuals, as such, individuals should be empowered by great tools to make the most of their data. Wanting corporations to solve all the problems is another case of pushing off personal responsibility.

Now here's a reason why I disable js.

The problem is that the same crops are grown globally, so once a disease grabs hold, it can spread very quickly, eradicating yields globally.

I recently read Biodiversos by Stefano Mancuso and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the slow food movement. It's basically a discussion between the two where they lay out the big problems with our production and consumption of food.

For instance, concentrating on making single kinds as productive as possible instead of cultivating variety is extremely dangerous, as shown by this event. The great Irish famine is maybe the most striking example. Humanity does exactly that with wheat, cows, almost everything. The very basis of most of the globe's food comes from a handful of species. In my mind, this is one of the great ticking bombs of our close future.

Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects.

> The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

How so?