Pinned
Pretty fucked up how, starting in the 13th century, Big Tech enclosed the commons, deeding the land to feudal lords and forcing smallholders to rent the land they worked.
Chris Beiser
31.5K posts
Chris Beiser
@ctbeiser
how things became how they are, and how they could stop being that way
- hot parenting tip: if your kid talks about wanting some big piece of professional software—Logic, After Effects, Photoshop—the returns on it are probably 100x what you’d get from piano lessons or whatever.
- imagine getting out of a coma or jail and realizing that your entire life is in shambles because Google decided to delete your account because you hadn't logged in for two years
- Replying to @ctbeiserfor anyone saying "Google never promised to store things forever," here's the 2004 gmail announcement: "you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the messages you want." "don't throw anything away" "you'll never have to delete another message"
- Replying to @ctbeisera kid with a weird obsession can invest more free time into something than an adult might have in a decade a nontrivial number of people I know are living off returns on human capital they accidentally created as 14 year olds
- san francisco attracts opinionated people because there are so many hills to die on
- Replying to @ctbeisercan't get into your bank account... can't access your old tax documents… can't contact people… all your photos are deleted… communication with your lawyer... your gchats from middle school… your ability to sign into government websites…
- do you ever read an internet comments section and think about how before 1990, it wasn't possible to consume this much human interiority anywhere. you literally could not experience this much of other people's lives, nobody anywhere could see the world through 10,000 eyes at once
- thinking about how sqlite is written by a team of like three people who have been working on the same thing for 20 years, refuse outside contributions, and release all their code as public domain it's like if there were a tiny monastery producing all the world's steel
- Replying to @vgrNot my find, but—the entire country of Sweden woke up to the app being in “swedish chef english.” Turned out that loc used this script to test that the strings were localizable, and it had accidentally overwritten the Swedish translation.
- harpers gooning piece ignores the straightforward Zižekian read: gooning is when you pretend to have a crippling pornography addiction so the reasons your life is bad can seem inherent to you, and therefore within your control
- fascinated with how Apple made a $1Bn investment into the Softbank Vision Fund, lost a hundred million or so of it due to WeWork, and then spent a similar amount dramatizing it as a TV show
- Replying to @ctbeiseri hope someone gets a promotion for saving a lot on storage
- in like three years kids are gonna be texting like hey, hows it going? | quizical look | friendly person | leica artstation HDR | extremely detailed | seed=da47c18ff ok, bored here | clouds overhead | thumb-twiddling | chibi anime boy, 1997 | subdued palette | dim=v
