Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

these self-aggrandizing tech libertarian bio blurbs are irresistible to me

amazing

I tend to be skeptical of everything

Energetic, Positive, Confident, Assertive Motivator-Visionary Influencer-Driver personality.

http://i.imgur.com/P8wV1vq.png

so happy I am never in a role that requires me to write a bio

brb adapting that guy's bio to be my okcupid profile

feel like it's probably reasonably simple to write a bio that doesn't present yourself as an enormous pulsating tool

that thinks it rules from the centre of the ultraworld?

, Erotica,

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus

wait they actually thought Google now was a huge looming threat? lol

How about Facebook’s first version of Search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends, and since discontinued?

rip Facebook search I miss u

good piece

on reading old issues of Wired from the 90s

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/on-reading-issues-of-wired-from-1993-to-1995

I don't get why they killed facebook search, it wasn't some life-changing product, it just made their search engine marginally more useful

Maybe I don't remember what that was, because it seems to me like they have a search function that works ok and certainly better than the one they originally had.

i want someone to write about the change in Facebook Event visibility

at some point you could see any (public) Event anyone you were friends with was invited to. and then it switched to only events that you were personally invited to. and now i think they charge the promoter for greater visibility. i was helping run a venue space last year and now it's super fucked, you can't even invite members of a group you manage but only your personal friends. so only personal friends of promoters get explicitly invited

anyways it used to be great cause you could easily find out about stuff going on that you werent necessarily directly plugged into. and i swear to god this change had discernible effects in montreal music + party scene (and i assume elsewhere)

Huh, I can see 'Events Popular in your Network' and 'Related to your Events History' AND 'Popular Events Nearby' on the web and I occasionally get a notification "Friends of yours are going to an event nearby", which seems a Zuckertastic double-edged sword.

lol every time I get that notification I'm like "Holy shit, there is actually an event in Forest Hills?" And then I realize it just means "New York City." But it fools me every time.

i've got "friends are going to an event nearby" when it's on in brighton. or yeah, just "hey your friend also lives in london". events has been fucked for a long time for various reasons, i can't even keep track of them all since it's been so annoying for so long in so many different ways.

yeah you can see some stuff but i know for a fact they're withholding 90% of it from you

they killed fb search because it gave an instant view to all the data you have "visible" to the public/friends/friends-of-friends

it's one thing to not mind if a random friend-of-friend knows where you work, but when some creep (*cough*) can think "hmm this girl named Sarah said she works at that local giant place" and you search "women named Sarah who work at giant place and live in this city" and she pops up it's fuckin' weird

Or, say, "women between ages of 18 and 35 with no relationship status or single relationship status who live in.." and get every person who has their gender, age, and vague location set to public

that makes sense. it would work fine if everyone had sensible privacy settings, but fb has reason to push people away from sensible privacy settings.

obviously that shit is way useful for serving targeted ads, but randos or even advertisers shouldn't get more than "12 users matched your criteria"

I'd argue their privacy settings aren't that bad as long as there's not a way to troll that shit! Even if I were to program something, I wouldn't get a list of all ppl in my area given broad criteria because that's not public

public to find manually versus public to broadly search are two pretty diff things

Miss that search.

my man

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/peter-thiel.html

he's a christian too??!? how does one person become such an intellectual trainwreck

Social maladaption + money

right obviously but i mean, i always thought the point of being a nerd and/or having money was that it freed you from kowtowing to all the myths and cant

plus what kind of christian wants to extend life indefinitely, IT'S ALREADY EXTENDED EVERLASTINGLY

maybe a la the protestant ethic the idea is to extend life indefinitely in order to obtain maximal wealth and thus maximal salvation!

yeesh http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/14/zenefits-is-laying-off-another-106-people-and-offering-others-a-buyout/

https://medium.com/thinkpiece-dot-club/techs-scapegoat-complex-38a4bfb37f22#.mcz4fwrf1

ryan, you will be so into this

!

are we to presume that Thiel took classes from Girard.

Michel Serres is at Stanford too. if he wasn't so loopy i could imagine silicon valley types getting into him.

that was what i gathered but i dunno

well this happened

http://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Self-driving-car-driver-died-after-crash-in-8334982.php

feel like self-driving car is not something i want to be beta-testing

So far, way better than human-driven cars...

I'm quite capable of driving under a truck without digital intervention

theres one for the old silicon valley resume

The deaths per miles driven stay that Tesla is citing is a little misleading - that number is going to include drunk driving accidents, people not wearing seat belts etc.

granted a drunk person is obviously a lot safer in a self driving car.

unless the car is drunk

That's at least one Herbie film, right?

Seen so many techno-utopians on reddit and elsewhere screaming that it's the driver's fault for not taking over the autopilot when they saw the truck turning, not the software's fault. a) if you are not already driving the car, your reaction time is gonna be a lot slower, and b) if the autopilot works correctly for the first two months you have a car, of course you're gonna assume it works correctly all the time. people compare it to cruise control, but cruise control is waaaay more predictable. I don't even understand why people think an autopilot you have to monitor vigilantly is even a good idea

I don't even understand why people think an autopilot you have to monitor vigilantly is even a good idea.

Bingo! We have a winner!

This is not exactly a situation like airliners, where the human pilots are highly trained, highly paid professionals, with the built-in redundancy of a co-pilot who can take over for the main pilot at any moment. Plus there aren't many other objects to hit at 30,000 feet. In that situation an autopilot is just a tool for use by professionals. Ordinary cars and their drivers do not meet any of these qualifications.

even w airline pilots in the autopilot era you get things like air france 447, where the autopilot fails and at least one of the pilots hasn't actually played microsoft flight simulator enough (and/or is sufficiently panicked+confused) to know you nose down in a stall

monitoring an autopilot vigilantly sounds like it would take more mental effort than driving

i agree that an autopilot you have to monitor in a quick response situation like driving seems lethal, but 1 death in, what, a year?, seems like it's less lethal than letting the human drive.

1 death in, what, a year?

tbf, human-piloted cars were driven a few more miles and hours last year than the self-driving ones

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-driver-killed-autopilot-self-driving-car-harry-potter

Tesla driver killed while using autopilot was watching Harry Potter, witness says