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Actually if you don’t read the whole thing, and just read the TL;DR; it makes more sense.
PS.: I think that we should collectively stop reading posts with clickbaity titles.
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This is amazing and I love it but it begs the (perhaps rhetorical) question: why has it taken us so long to get here? After all, agriculture is the backbone of our species historically speaking.
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Automation is not of course a new idea, but offering it as an easy-to-use garden option directly to the consumer of agricultural products you get much more efficient than driving all these tractors around. Scale is assured by distributing the means, so basically consumer becomes the producer. Which also means that you get close to zero environmental footprint by reducing shipping, logistics, refrigeration etc. This could have huge impact on how economy works, if it’s applied correctly that is.
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Scale is assured by distributing the means,
There is almost no scale in the production of agricultural produce with these machines. One machine can only cover a tiny plot of land and can only grow shrubs. The amount of capital per land area would be insanely high which means production/capital investment would be very low.
so basically consumer becomes the producer.
Just like subsistence farming. We stopped doing that for a reason, specialisation = maximising comparative advantage.
Which also means that you get close to zero environmental footprint by reducing shipping, logistics, refrigeration etc.
Easily offset by the embedded footprint of the machinery itself.
This is a cool idea for home gardener. But it will not solve any agricultural problem. It’s a toy for people who are into DIY/gardening.
ps. i was literally thinking about something like this 2 days ago, about how cool it would be for recreational gardener/DIYer and its utility in some resource constrained application like a Mars colony. You can get plenty of calorie with sweet potatoes which don’t grow very tall. But of course somebody already thought about it and even better, made it happen. In the future with cheaper energy cost you could have a warehouse sized system with a moving crane and artificial lightning so you can stack them vertically. It’s nice to think about.
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There is almost no scale in the production of agricultural produce with these machines. One machine can only cover a tiny plot of land and can only grow shrubs. The amount of capital per land area would be insanely high which means production/capital investment would be very low.
That’s not entirely true though, I could imagine the beds to be stackable in the future. Vertical farming is the future either because as you said we’re running out of space. But the amount of space we use right now it’s not optimized. By distributing the production to the consumer, it’s more efficient because demand can directly dictate the volumes of productions. Wasting food is a very big problem and needs to be more efficient.
Just like subsistence farming. We stopped doing that for a reason, specialisation = maximising comparative advantage.
We stopped farming because it was a lot of effort, but now we got robots.
Easily offset by the embedded footprint of the machinery itself.
You can use rain water and renewable source of energy, I think it’s really low-energy device though.
Of course, it’s not perfect but it’s a great start to see what’s coming down the road.
P.S.: Great thought-provoking remarks, thanks!
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Vertical farming is the future either because as you said we’re running out of space
I’m not sure we are running out of space.
The real problem is inefficiencies in use: on the “living” front, we aren’t driving population density. This problem is starting to correct itself, though - people are starting to move into cities.
On the agricultural front, one quarter of ice-free land is used for livestock grazing, and 33% of grain crops are used for livestock feed. The best improvement we can get here is to further drive density - and, oh yeah, eat less meat!
By distributing the production to the consumer, it’s more efficient because demand can directly dictate the volumes of productions.
Worrying about vertical farming and a pull-driven model is great, but those are solutions Q and R to the problem. The best bang for our buck is to drive population density up and meat consumption down.
Some raw density data to look at: http://www.fao.org/Ag/againfo/resources/en/glw/GLW_dens.html
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Erethon
2 years ago
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Rogue Access Points (why running your own WiFi at conferences is bad)
Failing that, we will shut off power to your area until you come forward or a neighbour rats you out.
What a nice and friendly atmosphere they’re trying to create!
For an event that has EM on its name, this seem pretty absurd. Events like this are perfect for testing out p2p networks, creating ad-hoc LANs with friends, random LANs for gaming/file sharing and what not. In contrast, CCC and Defcon have a big number of ‘third-party’ networks online, without major issues.
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Based on the event’s name and that it’s on a campground, I briefly thought they were trying to keep spectrum clear for actual experiments. That would have changed how I felt.
But that appears not to be the case, so yes, I agree with you that however reasonable the position, it’s creating an unfriendly atmosphere.
Whether it’s justified for this conference and what it’s trying to be is a more complicated question. :/
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Your argument is invalid because you’re comparing apples and oranges. Shoes are not a medium of free communication, and you can walk without them.
A more appropriate analogy imo would be a shoe conference that you would have to enter barefoot
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they’re imposing this situation on themselves as I see it.
In the sense that they’re the ones who are trying to run an outdoor conference of nearly 2k attendees while providing them with good WiFi, I suppose that’s true. If you mean something other than that, not really - as per the linked page, it’s mostly a consequence of how WiFi works.
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Picked a link somewhat at random to read more about it.
Facebook censored an ACLU post about censorship. https://www.aclu.org/blog/naked-statue-reveals-one-thing-facebook-censorship-needs-better-appeals-process
Yes, it is narrowly true that a post about censorship was censored, but that’s because it had a picture of boobs, not because of the message.
Verdict: Misleading and disingenuous.
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It’s controversial art, it’s not a picture of boobs. Half of world’s museums should be empty by these standards.
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And if it were the government imposing this rule on all websites accessible by the public, I’d agree. But for the purposes of who decides what’s appropriate content, Facebook is functioning as a private website.
Like if I run a coffe shop, that’s a “public space” in the sense that people can come and gather and discuss. If I want to decorate the space with naked mannequins, that’s cool too. But if I hold an open mike night, I can still kick people off the stage if I don’t like them.
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With great power should come some responsibility, whether the entity is defined as a government or not. So if you own all coffee shops in town, you shouldn’t be allowed to ban a person from all of them without due process. Yes, the law says otherwise, but ideally you shouldn’t be.
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Yes, no, maybe?
Let’s say I happen to own all the coffee shops and ban slant rhymes because ugh. Even so, edgy poets can still recite in other places. Or even open coffee shops that allow slant rhymes. If those other shops are under attended, that’s not necessarily because I’m doing anything wrong. Maybe the public doesn’t like slant rhymes either and prefers to attend readings they know will be slant free. Requiring that I permit slant rhymes is contrary to both my wishes as the proprietor and the majority of my customers.
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Well, coffee shops are not the best analogy here, so I can’t really argue that you have to carry darjeeling if all you want to sell is assam, and poets can go to bars instead anyway. (EDIT: there’s also a fine difference between “no reading slam poetry into the mic” and “no slam poets allowed inside”, which is what I meant by “banning a person”.) But if you’re the only cell phone provider in the area, saying “you can’t recite modern poetry on the phone, and if you disagree, open your own cell phone company” would not be OK. Likewise, if Google and Facebook have been so successful in inserting themselves into the majority of human communication, they should, ideally, bear some responsibility before these humans.
Sure, the line between the two is quite blurry, but life is full of blurry lines.
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Indeed. I think incomplete analogies at least help us refine the question. For instance, Facebook is banning pictures of breast feeding, not women who breast feed. That’s a distinction often lost, but resurfaces when we discuss whether it’s poets or poetry being banned by the coffee shop.
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Here’s a story illustrating a somewhat better analogy.
The Sony Center in Berlin is a privately owned group of buildings with a common roof and no entry barriers, looking like this from the inside. Some time ago a private event involving politicians was held in one of the restaurants there, and a small group of people (8 or so) decided to protest against it and notified the police about it. When they opened their banners, the restaurant owner called a security guard, who told the protesters that it’s a private place and therefore he has the right to tell them to leave. The police, however, told everyone involved that the right to political speech trumps ownership rights, and assisted the protesters in finding a space where they could stand without obstructing the flow of people while still being visible to anyone entring the restaurant.
It seems to me that Facebook is more like a privately owned public space where anyone can open their coffee shop, hold their private events or just come wave some banners.
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It seems to me that Facebook is more like a privately owned public space where anyone can open their coffee shop, hold their private events or just come wave some banners.
But Facebook does have barriers - kids under 13 can’t open a coffee shop or wave a banner. Neither someone who doesn’t have an email address, or won’t share it. Same for their real name, though that one is harder to verify. And certain classes of criminals - including registered sex offenders - are turned away at the door as well.
And if we decide not to get our membership, we are free to peek through the windows, no more.
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But Facebook does have barriers - kids under 13 can’t open a coffee shop or wave a banner.
Kids under 18 (or whatever) can’t open a coffee shop in a real-life mall either. They can’t enter a dance club or a bar, but these are still considered semi-public spaces. And they can always get a free e-mail address and lie about their age. Though I partly agree with you: the analogy is not perfect.
And if we decide not to get our membership, we are free to peek through the windows, no more.
But that’s akin to saying, “if you decide not to get a cell phone…”.
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Owning a cell phone has not exposed me to nearly as much unpleasantness as having a Facebook account did, when I had one. Even if I accepted that all of the ways Facebook excludes people are just, it’s still unreasonable to suggest everyone who isn’t in one of those categories is only punishing themselves by not participating.
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Sure, they’re not the same, and it’s possible to survive without either. I, for one, don’t use Google Search or Maps. But so many people use these services that it’s not unreasonable, in my opinion, to classify them as… “Infrastructure”? “Semi-essential”? I don’t know what the proper term would be, but hopefully you see what I’m trying to say.
EDIT: “Monopoly”, maybe?
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I get what you’re trying to say, yeah. I prefer to model it as: Any large online social venue has a responsibility to have sensible practices about content. I don’t think the “everyone has to use it” status is really where I’d draw the dividing line, and I’m not sure whether size is the criterion I’d use at all. How diverse the audience is, maybe?
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There are many fuzzy dividing lines here. A site like LinkedIn, but specific to embedded programmers in Belgium, would be smaller and less diverse but more essential than a site like Facebook with a highly diverse population, but with only 0.1% of world population. Hard to say.
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Yes. I think the rules are (or should be) somewhat different when the government or politicians are using private spaces. If you hold a government event, you have to accept the public. The government can’t use private spaces as a shield to circumvent other rules. But that has little bearing on private citizens using private spaces.
Somewhat relevant story: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2016/06/county-attorneys-deletion-of-constituents-facebook-comment-may-violate-first-amendment.htm
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If you hold a government event, you have to accept the public.
It was a private event, like negotiations or something, not one the public should be invited to. The protest, however, was political speech, but it occurred in the privately-owned space outside the restaurant, not in the venue itself.
It’s an interesting story you link to, thanks.
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Incomplete analogies are essentially sophism though, great educational tool but not useful when used in public discussions.
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As I said, it’s indeed useful for educational reasons and rhetoric, just not right to use it to prove a hypothesis in a public discourse, because it leads to logic fallacies.
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I don’t know. That was the only link I checked. I don’t really care about their real name policy, and I already know about it, so I skipped over them. Censorship sounded interesting, so I followed that link.
What I mean by “random” is that I didn’t exhaustively follow every link to find a single flaw. I picked one link that sounded interesting, then checked it out.
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I think you’re being uncharitable. They’re just links, not journalistic headlines and the links are meant to be followed, not taken at face value. Is seems like Stallman decided to relate the irony of the situation in the link name because it’s amusing; I don’t see that as disingenuous. After all linked blog post does share some unsettling info about censorship on facebook, and is still a good link to have on a that page.
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If it were anyone else but Richard Stallman, the appearance of that website would not look favourably on its credibility. All it would need is a little bit of CSS work, and it could look decently professional.
Now beyond that, a lot of the content is basically an aggregation of sources that is probably a good one stop shop for those that want to find evidence of less than kosher things they do.
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Neither of those things diminishes the immorality of Facebook’s practices.
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It’s actually decent CSS, with media queries for small resolutions and everything. Just very minimalist.
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I run Firefox both in Debian and OS X. The experience on Debian is really good, not a single problem since I installed Debian Jessie. But in OS X, Firefox is getting worse with each release. UI sluggish if even you switching to the next tab and performance drops if you open 6 apps or more. Even in Android, the experience is much smoother. This is a huge concern since users are constantly moving to OS X, especially in US and Europe.
If Mozilla wants leverage it needs to make the experience sublime for everyone, across platforms and device ranges.
P.S.: I don’t know how Firefox runs on Windows, but maybe some user can enlighten me.
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The worst part for me is, Firefox on OS X is currently sitting at 277.7 on the Energy Impact meter (in the background with one tab open) and Safari (the browser I’m posting this from) is 2.5. Firefox has zero extensions installed, Safari has three. That’s a massive difference, and I can feel it in the battery life. Safari gets me 8 hours easily, Firefox drops that to 6 at best.
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Important issues are raised in this article and the references it introduces to us. Unfortunately, most of software companies are dealing with the issue retroactively and without any clear strategy. This is not just a hiring process issue or malfunction though. As long as our society as a whole, hasn’t got the right conscience about the natural of such issues (eg. racism, sexism, classism), we won’t find solutions to these problems. Instead we will continue trying to right the wrongs by treating the symptoms with injections of political correctness on a regular basis.
Thanks for bringing my attention to this article, OP. Really eye-opening indeed.
These
I’ll give some thoughts on the matter. These are all just my opinion, and with that warning out of the way I’ll skip my normal niceties in tone and wording. These thoughts are about what Lobsters is to me, what I’ve learned in general, and how I think moderation should be shaped.
What Lobsters IsLobsters is a wonderful discussion forum for people working in computer- and electronics-related fields to discuss ideas relevant to our industry practices and culture. It is a place to teach and learn, and a place to compare notes on how to do things.
In bullet form, Lobsters is a place:
For me, those are the core things Lobsters is.
What Lobsters is notThe thing’s Lobsters is not is even more important.
Lobsters is not a place:
Those are all things that have caused other communities to go to the dogs. HN, Reddit, Youtube comments–all are better places to get that information. News and product marketing tend to clog aggregators and disrupt things, and political stuff leads to unmoderatable echochambers.
ModerationSo, with that in mind, where does that leave moderation?
I think the old system worked pretty well. We could possibly do with another moderator–I don’t know what their perceived workload is right now.
We do need to, as a community, take responsibility for aggressively flagging content that doesn’t match Lobsters. We need to take responsibility for tolerating posts that we disagree with but that are civil and reasoned.
And we need to make sure to downvote posts that aren’t good and explain why they are not good or ask for clarification. Even @Zuu’s hilariously silly “feminazi” ranting could’ve been avoided had they taken up the opportunity to calmly and civilly explain why they had a problem–but since they couldn’t, downvotes let us fix it.
What we don’t need is mindless feelgood upvoting. Maybe upvoting should require an explanation too?
I have mixed feelings on this.
On the one hand, I really do like the idea of having a good site for technical + scientific topics that focuses on deeper and more interesting discussion. Issues of politics and inequality matter, but they end up causing two problems. The first is that on a personal level I’d rather this site be a place to go and hide from those things, rather than be constantly reminded of them (I get enough reminders in my own personal life…). And secondly, they tend to attract that certain type of tech bro who is extremely eager to argue about those topics and, to put it rather bluntly, shit up the entire site in the process. You can see this effect where certain political threads end up with a far higher comment-to-upvote ratio than anything else on the site.
I’ve always wanted a more “pure”, low-level, in-depth tech site, but inevitably, like you worry about, they’ve gotten ruined by political types and low quality posters (remember Slashdot?). We should probably try to avoid making Lobsters a site that seems attractive to people who are “looking for an argument”.
On the other hand, it’s tricky because everything has politics in it. Everything we do affects other people, and affects society. Where do you draw the line? Do other people agree with you on where that line is? And so forth. Is it possible to reasonably come up with a line at all?
And perhaps as engineers shying away from the social consequences of our technical choices isn’t always the best idea.
That’s something I’ve trying to find for a long time. A site without the derisive “why,” no billion dollar startup valuations, just people enthusiastic about the things they’re building/learning/exploring/doing.
I agree. It’s a site distinguished by the quality of technical submissions and commentary. It’s better to keep political threads off of here. Sites that do that are like a breath of fresh air to someone just wanting tech instead of political nonsense.
I mostly agree, except that the effects of technology on society are interesting to me, and such topics will always touch on politics. So i do think those kinds of articles have their place here.
I love all of this, and agree wholeheartedly. I don’t come to Lobsters to hear about new apps or businesses, or to hear about tech news. I can get all of that elsewhere. I come to Lobsters for deep and thoughtful technical discussions on things both inside and way-outside my area of expertise.
I rarely comment on meta posts, but here goes a crazy idea:
I think we should just get rid of “votes” altogether (I can see you enraging already, but stay with me), because they are badly defined. An upvote on a joke comment might mean “funny”. Or maybe someone took it seriously(!). An upvote on a thoughtful comment might mean “I agree”. Or maybe “I disagree but your comment is thoughtful and helps discussion” or something. Nobody really knows. Worse for downvotes.
I propose we replace them with Github style “emotions” instead. They inherently carry meaning. I know this will be seen quite controversially, and you might have started typing “why add ugly orange lightbulbs to Lobsters' clean UI”, but I don’t mean we should copy the same funky UI as is. We just need a way to let people express their state of mind after reading a comment without writing it out as a reply, since we want to reserve comment area for material discussion and not “omg I completely agree!”.
That’s an interesting point. I was initially skeptical of it when I saw Facebook do it. I reserved judgment to watch it play out. The results were quite like you said: many BS comments shifted to emotional reactions that I could ignore or observe for curiosity of impact of the post on diverse audience. There were still nonsense comments. They just seemed lower in number. Facebook should run one of their mass studies on the comment data before and after that to give us an idea of what the technique achieves.
I heartily agree too. Also, I’ve noticed over the months that really highly voted submissions tend to be product or social/political topics. Submissions with ~7-10 votes tend to more closely adhere to these guidelines.
I like the idea of upvotes for stories and comments requiring an explanation. That would balance out the downvoting system. There might be a slight decrease in the number of upvotes because of the extra step, but those that do make it through the filter will be more considered.
It is impossible to isolate technology from society in any historical context, especially today, given the current explosive rate of technological progress. We’re heading in a jobless future, most likely run by machines which we’ll have to program to make political decisions for us.
Again, technology can create these issues in a much more aggressive rate and people have already started to notice. Unfairness and inequality is not subjects to be taken lightly. I don’t think any of us or our children would appreciate technology being faceless (and most probably dystopian).
I’m up for discussing that, too. Winding down tonight but I favor constructive comments over votes. Much less to intuit that way along with greater contribution.
IMHO, it’s the nature of the internet’s million monkeys (no offense to anyone here) that sends communities to the dogs. HN was an awesome place at the beginning, so was reddit. Before checking lobste.rs daily when I quit HN because it was full of samples from the IS NOT list above, and useless opinions by the mass, I went back to slashdot that also had it’s eternal september, around 2000. Time is of the essence. Time is the essence. I’d suggest expensive voting (say you have to add a comment?), as well as length-based penalties (on the value of upvotes?) for a given comment past a certain length. This is not the place for long form. (Personally, I have little time for long form in my life, it has to be of the enlightening and positive category)
Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. Cheers. Lets keep productive, and keep together, balancing both in the daily timeline? :-)