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Sven Slootweg
joepie91@pixie.town
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Let's do a round-up of a couple!
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
The burning down of this library is often seen as one of the biggest losses of culture in history. In reality, it seems that the library mostly stored copies of works, and while big, it stored very few *unique* things - therefore, not much was actually lost.
THE BYSTANDER EFFECT
The claim is that when there are many bystanders of an incident, none will take responsibility. This is based on the murder of Kitty Genovese, where it was claimed that there were many witnesses, but none of them did anything.
That's false - in fact, the amount of witnesses was limited due to the location, and multiple people alerted the police, but the police failed to respond in a timely manner. More recently, research into the bystander effect suggests that the entire theory is wrong - people *do* consistently come to the aid of others.
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
Claimed to 'prove' that given power, people will turn malicious and start abusing others. In reality, the experiment was fraudulent, and proved no such thing - the guard in the experiment were actively *encouraged* by the researcher to be abusive.
THE BROKEN WINDOW THEORY
This is often seen as some sort of 'scientifically proven fact' about human behaviour; if you leave vandalism or other "anti-social" behaviour untreated, it will invite more of it.
In reality, this was just made up by a cop in New York, never proven, and used as a justification for violent and oppressive policing tactics. There's no evidence that this is true, or ever was.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
This theory claims that when a group of individuals are given access to a common shared resource, they will each act selfishly and collectively exhaust the resource, whereas it would've been fine if one party controlled access. Usually reference over-grazing.
In reality, this concept (in its current form) comes from a thought experiment where it was just *assumed* to be true, rather than from actual research; and instead there is a long history of shared resources being effectively collectively managed without giving any one party total control over access or distribution.
This doesn't stop authoritarians from using the tragedy of the commons as a justification for their accumulation of power; claiming that otherwise, the resources would be exhausted.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
This theory claims that victims of crime and/or abuse will develop an irrational attachment to the perpetrator, implying that they can no longer be trusted to have agency in determining how to deal with the situation.
In reality, rather than being based in rigorous research, this concept was coined by a criminologist based on a single bank robbery in (as the name implies) Stockholm.
Crucially, the victims were quite clear about the reason for their trust towards the robbers; the police were acting irresponsibly in this incident, endangering people unnecessarily, and therefore the robbers were the more rational and less dangerous party in the conflict. Not quite the 'irrational attachment' that's so often claimed...
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Kristoffer 🍄
krig@6510.nuPerhaps the most insightful part of https://davidgraeber.org/articles/punching-the-clock/:
"Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. [...] This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect."
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Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
toke
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[Moved] Polychrome
polychrome@cybre.spaceOh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.
Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.
Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".
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Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
tokeYeah, this is a tricky one! The reverse can also be an issue: for instance, I often feel bad for asking (potential) contributors to do more work when I ask them to rework stuff. I usually do so anyway, and don't write a fix myself until they've had a chance to do that (which some do and some don't).
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Kernel Recipes
KernelRecipes@fosstodon.orgUnderstand first laws of Physics
@paulmckrcu #kr2023
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Mandu 🥟
yurnidiot@mstdn.social
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Per Axbom
axbom@axbom.me« In its approach to these matters, this is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand that the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences. Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome. Writers who venture beyond the most pedestrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely "antitechnology" or "Blaming technology." All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it. If any readers want to see the present work as "antitechnology," make the most of it. That is their topic, not mine.
What does interest me, however, is identified in the book's subtitle: A Search for Limits. In an age in which the inexhaustible power of scientific technology makes all things possible, it remains to be seen where we will draw the line, where we will be able to say, here are possibilities that wisdom suggests we avoid. I am convinced that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually ask, How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we would like to build? In several contexts and variations, that is my question throughout. »
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Mario Zechner
badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.placeToday was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
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Winternet en Québec 
winter@translunar.academy
tips for being more #positive about your work!
❌ “I can’t fix this bug no matter what I try”
✔ “I am an avant-garde software artist”
❌ “my code won’t compile”
✔ “this is an abstract piece”
❌ “I never get around to implementing any of the features I want”
✔ “I consider myself a minimalist“
❌ “sorry I forget to document my code…”
✔ “my art is about the journey, not the destination”
❌ “I have never finished a project”
✔ “I prefer to leave the ending open to interpretation”
❌ “sorry, this software is not compatible with ( )”
✔ “here I have chosen to make a political statement against ( )”
❌ “this memory leak causes the program to crash”
✔ “this program symbolizes the transience of mortality and reminds us all what is important in life”
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Ada Palmer
adapalmer@wandering.shopWhen facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is:
Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?
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warthog9
warthog9@social.afront.orgWell, vger (as of right now) no longer directly attempts to deliver to gmail/google/googlemail just to get the ridiculous backlog out of the primary mail paths. Vger (1 machine) is kicking all of that queue over to 8 other machines and letting them go try to get that delivered and queue up somewhere where it's not going to cause everyone else pain.
This should, at least for now, settle out several things, but if you are seeing mail wonkiness give postmaster@ a ping and I'll take a look.
Also if you are on Gmail and doing kernel dev, might be worth looking at other email providers.
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Rob Ricci
ricci@discuss.systemsSince I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.
Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.
It'll take you 30 seconds to set up.
Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Mozilla's explanation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
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Sarah Brown
goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.orgTechbros: self driving cars are inevitable!
Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.
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Lesley Carhart 
hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange
We need to have a talk, and I’m having a really hard time having it with my awesome hacker friends, because everyone is super duper emotionally invested and is deeply hurt by it.
I hope you all aren’t - because it involves all of us and it’s important. It’s not about any of y’all individually or your hard community work.
The talk is about how to make all of our cybersecurity conferences and events and meetups more accessible and conformable for young hackers because I’mreallysosorry, we’ve somehow become Old, and the stuff that we are ingrained with as “hacker culture” like movies, music, and memes all were created before they were born - and they may or may not have any emotional attachment or enjoyment of them at all.
That’s the conversation we need to have and that we are all responsible for and I swear it’s not aimed at any conference or person because we are all in this filter bubble of watching the Matrix and listening to Prodigy and remembering the hamster dance and all of that stuff while awesome was like a quarter century ago.
Part of building a community is thinking about including everyone and their culture under a mantle of good ethics and goals. So we really, really need to start having a chat about when we lean on the 90s hacker aesthetic and memories to the exclusion of people under 30. I had a wake up call hearing some students complaining about it.
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