> They missed a chance to have the lady holding an iPad though.
Yeah this was a big miss. Farmers typically don't bring laptops out into the field, but tablets are extremely common. Tablets aren't nearly as susceptible to damage from dirt and dust and are easier to use on the go.
That is RealTree camo, not military camo. And it's really not a crop field? I'm guessing this is AI-generated. It's odd. It looks like a backyard garden, because you have mixed greens with kale, plentiful weeds, and marigolds (which are commonly used to keep pests at bay in small, hand-harvested gardens, but cannot be mixed into mechanically harvested fields). But the permanently-installed drip irrigation says commercial operation.
My guess is this photo was taken in a local garden co-op or small farmstead, but it looked too barren to use for advertising so they added a bunch of plants later.
Maybe off topic, but I think part of the problem is toilet paper. Sure, maybe some people are out there dropping 5 Curic logs every couple of days. But I've more commonly seen (Disclaimer: Low sample size here, I just grew up with a large family and little privacy) people take an arm's length of toilet paper, wad it up into a rather large ball, and use it for one wipe. Repeat several times until clean. Then hit the flush lever and walk away. There is no courtesy flush. There's only a naive hope, and perhaps a prayer, that it all goes away. If the toilet clogs? That's a sign there is a problem with the toilet. They do not think the problem might be them.
I think there is a subtle additional level of trust that the author didn't call out. As the author noted, the SVP trusted that everyone involved in the issue responded rationally and professionally. But they left out the part where the SVP also trusted that the author and their engineering counterpart had already analyzed what happened and how.
The SVP doesn't have time to dig into the "who did what and when" timeline of a problem. They do need to communicate that they're willing to invest resources in preventing recurrence. Was the team burned out by noisy alarms? Then the SVP needs to hear "We're spending time improving automation to reduce alarms, and tuning remaining alarms to make them less noisy. This will take engineering time away from feature work." Or maybe the system had a single point of failure that broke, and the SVP needs to hear "We're redoing X to eliminate a single point of failure, but it will increase our infrastructure budget by $Y".
The SVP is inviting a higher level discussion around what resources need to be consumed in order to be sure this doesn't happen again. And they're opening the door to defending that use of resources.
One intriguing use I encountered was a doctor who automatically transcribed the conversation during an appointment. This has HIPAA concerns, of course, and I think (hope, at least) that this was in the context of medical software that is designed to be HIPAA compliant. But it was an interesting way for a doctor to try and avoid missing something in conversation.
I agree with you that it's weird outside of professional settings.
I try to record many specialist professionals (after asking first).
Experts know what they are saying, and they often rapidly download dense technical information. I first noticed the problem after asking a friend for advice on handling a psych issue with a friend's child.
Otherwise experts talk and I listen and I understand, but I can easily forget nuance and detail.
I also learnt to record medical specialists talking to my mum, so I could replay the details to my dad.
Why would dad trust my recall? And will he trust facts if I've repeated them as a non-specialist? And perhaps dad picks up different aspects due to his own experiences.
I remember Apple products being the realm of graphics designers, videographers, and other art professionals back in the XP days. I thought they went mainstream later, as Windows Vista coincided with the iPhone release.
These stories scare me. I'm happy that you were able to enjoy glimpses of your mother's past.
Mine is showing signs that several of us believe to be dementia, but she refuses to be seen and screened. It has gotten worse over time - repeated conversations, sometimes inside the same phone call, and a shift from "can't remember things if she doesn't write them down" to "needs to ask on multiple occasions because she hasn't remembered to write it down" - but not to the point where she seems to be a danger to herself.
I love my mother, but she is difficult. She also has grown with age. While she is difficult now, she used to be abusive and manipulative. My father would never speak ill of her, but from some things she's said I believe she was worse before she was raising us. If my mother regresses to an earlier state of mind, we will both need professional help. She will need professional care, and I will need help to not internalize the way she treats me.
I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.
Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
>Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
Why is that? In his essay (that's linked above) him writing with his wife is one of the reasons he explicitly names as to why he didn't use a computer. As he says, it would have not just replaced something, but someone. He valued working his wife, and she in all likelihood did too.
There's no hypocrisy, dependence on other people was why he shunned technology. It's very telling that we now have a generation of people grown up on machines who think having to rely on another person, in other words community, is some offense to what he argued for.
Therein lies the friction, I embrace technology because it reduces my reliance on other people, and I don't value local community over global community (in fact, just the opposite). And I want to end human labor, so you can see why I have profound dislike for his philosophy.
that's a friction between your philosophy and his philosophy, not between his philosophy and his practice. He lived exactly what he preached and so I don't understand in what sense he is a "hypocritical curmudgeon". He didn't doordash his food or hate his neighbors, he spent 60 years of his life on a small homestead farming in Kentucky, as far as I know engaged with his community.
There's no reducing reliance on "other people", especially when embracing digital technology; in every realistic scenario you become tethered to the people in charge of Big Tech and all that entails, in Stallman-esque fantasy-land you're still relying on other open source maintainers.
In both cases you're reliant on other people's supply chains to get the hardware all of this stuff relies on.
As far as valuing some abstract ideal (global community) over the people actually in your life right now (local community), I guess all I can say is I can't see that working out well long-term, and hope you can find at least a few people to connect with now.
> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?
You have never heard of him before now, but feel confident in boiling down his large body of writing and laying judgment on the quality of his thought?
The point of this thread/discussion is not simply to render a snap uninformed judgement on the (made-up, reductionist) premise of "technology bad, old things good".
I think the war with Iran is not justified. It is a waste of money, a waste of human life, and a waste of our world influence. But there are many in Iran who literally wish death to the USA. The founding manifesto of Hezbollah - an organization so tightly coupled to Iran that they view the Supreme Leader of Iran as their ultimate clerical authority - lists its first objective as resistance against the US.
Yep. If you had the CPU overhead available, you could speed up your entire computer by enabling full-disk compression and then defragmenting. It's difficult to accurately describe just how slow it was to move data to and from a spinning platter over a PATA interface.
Yeah this was a big miss. Farmers typically don't bring laptops out into the field, but tablets are extremely common. Tablets aren't nearly as susceptible to damage from dirt and dust and are easier to use on the go.
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