Many people raised the alarm back then, and were shouted down by promises that these laws would only be used when appropriate. In 2002, very few would've been okay with tearing apart American families, parents, and children based on the color of their skin, letting women miscarry through malnutrition while in custody, etc.
Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back.
Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.
>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done.
It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.
1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.
Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.
If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.
Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.
But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.
Those statistics are extremely broad, hard to draw much inference from...do they account for the cleaning/maid industry? How has that changed over the same period? It could be possible that the general accumulation of wealth/tech allowed for more people to pay for someone to clean.
The dramatic improvements to quality of life brought by science and tech are undoubtable, it was not my intent to question that. More just that we as people have a hard time with the concept of a goal state. It is about balance. Let's keep creating new and great things to improve our lives, but let's also acknowledge the futility and desperation of an infinite treadmill.
It's incredibly difficult to stop a well-funded, 50-year plan to subvert a democracy. The attention spans of politicians, corporations, and the public are measured in days, months, or years, not decades.
After 9/11, the Bush administration was accused of abusing the crisis to expand executive power and the national security state. Those who raised the alarm about things like the Patriot Act were often dismissed as fringe alarmists.
Now, nearly 25 years later, we're seeing the downstream effects of that gradual degradation of democratic pillars.
On both sides, voters and politicians can be influenced by propaganda and campaign finance to accept small, incremental changes that don't seem dangerous in isolation, but can cumulate to crush an empire.
Every democracy carries these risks. Do we think our opponents haven't noticed?
I saw the same thing immediately. The robot arm could be calibrated to use a real slicing motion as well. They're misrepresenting the actual performance of this product.
>meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][9]
Failing to reproduce an effect doesn't prove it isn't real. Mythbusters would do this all the time.
On the other hand, some empires are built on publication malpractice.
One of the worst that I know is John Gottman. Marriage counselling based on 'thin slicing'/microexpressions/'Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. His studies had been exposed as fundamentally flawed, and training based on his principles performed worse than prior offerings, before he was further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.
This type of intellectual dishonesty underlies both of their careers.
I know someone who was concerned about depression, and went to get checked. The diagnosis was normal. They were having an appropriate emotional response to very challenging situations.
I was really surprised when I first got an iPhone. After all the hype about it being so intuitive and polished, it was just different. Some things better, some things worse.
But Apple devices take a bit longer to go obsolete, and seem just a tiny bit less invasive as they don't rely on an advertising model for revenue.
For the few months that I had to use an iPhone in addition to my regular Android phone, I also tried to convince myself that some things were better and some things were worse.
But the iOS keyboard was completely unusable for me as a power user, and it cannot be replaced. I was missing so many features of Gboard. I absolutely could not consider an iPhone or any other replacement phone for that matter, if it does not support Gboard.
iOS must have changed some things related to keyboards. On an iPhone many years ago it was definitely a better experience. I’m not sure if some sort of predictive text gets in the way or what. Or maybe something with the spacing. Or it also seems like some sort of thread priority issue because there are times where I can distinctly tell that there’s some sort of input lag that’s messing with it.
Gboard is crippled on iOS — why can’t we just have a damn comma on the main screen?! And why can't I just get my keyboard to be at the very bottom of my screen.
Wow, as others have said below, disabling the “Slide to Type” feature in Settings > General > Keyboard makes typing work well again on iOS. I cannot believe I put up with this awful typing experience for the past year/years. This should be broadcast more widely somehow. I’m sure many people have just assumed they got worse at typing. I am genuinely flabbergasted.
HOLY shit.
You just changed my life. You're absolutely right.
It fixed the exact problem I could never quite pin down.
I guess the keyboard was always a bit too eager to detect a swipe?
This is absolutely nuts
edit: i can type without looking again! i hate that this was the issue.
Been using iPhone for years and I swear the keyboards accuracy has turned to absolute shit. I am convinced through my experience that they have definitely changed something and made it terrible. It’s making me consider getting an android cos that’s how we use our phones - with a keyboard.
I've noticed the iOS keyboard has fundamentally different tap recognition based on whether swipe typing is enabled.
It looks the same but behaves differently enough that I have a hard time believing it shares code. When I turn off swipe, my tap accuracy goes MASSIVELY up, and a lot of the autocorrect screwiness seems to abate considerably. I can go back to blind thumb typing.
That said, swipe is so useful, I’ve left it on, and I deal with the degraded tap behavior. But maybe that’s a trade-off for you to consider.
I can't believe this is it. But this is it.
Too bad there's no quick toggle to turn it back on?
It's possible to create a shortcut for it maybe. I currently have a back tap bring up a menu of different shortcuts I use. Shortcuts is another aspect that's really under utilized because the UX just sucks so much.
I just tried to use Heliboard. It has many rough edges, I'll file issues to see it they can be improved.
For one thing, the voice typing is useless. It respects neither the language of the full keyboard nor the language shown in its interface. And that separate interface needs to be brought up separately, thus requiring many taps - exactly what I'm avoiding by using voice typing in the first place.
Selecting text then pressing the Delete key does not delete that selection in Hebrew or Arabic. It does work in English.
The swiping in English works fine - probably because that library is lifted directly from Gboard. So the idea is independence from propriety Gboard is not reality anyway. Swiping does not work in Hebrew or Arabic - which together with the lack of voice typing means that I can not use this keyboard at all.
I do like the arrow keys and selection buttons in the toolbar. Gboard has that in a seperate pane, but in the toolbar is much more convenient.
today I was texting and Google Messages began to lag.
Why DOES everything seem to get worse? I can hear the Doctorow fans coming out of the woodwork to tell me it's "enshittification" but that's a cute conspiracy theory that doesn't explain at all why Google would allow Messages to have a memory leak after working fine for years.
There's no profit motive to making a core application shittier.
We have to dig deeper, because this kind of thing is everywhere and hand waving at capitalism like Doctorow does is a cop out and an unsatisfying explanation IMHO
Why do you need to dig deeper? If you were the PM would you prioritise the fixing of the bug instead of other work that’s more important? How many customers will you actually lose?
> But the iOS keyboard was completely unusable for me as a power user, and it cannot be replaced.
If you're still on Android, try FUTO keyboard. I found the voice-to-text feature to actually be on par with Google's, but without the delay of a phone-home.
Just checked with the iOS keyboard development guide and app store review and see no rules against it. Why are you pretty sure it is limited due to the OS?
It's pretty terrible but it's still the best of what I've tried. Given the progress in LLMs the autocomplete/autocorrect choices and word suggestions are laughably bad. Swype and the MS one though still managed to be worse
in the very beginning, there was a lot of animation stutters on android. The UI was much less consistent, and the design language of different programs varied pretty wildly. This gave me at the time, a feeling of a distinct lack of polish..
I would say, though that in the year of our Lord 2025, largely hardware is good enough that the animations never stutter on android anymore, an android applications have largely converged on similar UI paradigms.
So I think the issue with criticism is that people hold in the heads for a very long time, I mean a clear example is how people think Linux is extremely user hostile, despite most metrics of what makes something user hostile being significantly superior on most widely available in the next distributions except of course the power user focused ones. Whereas Windows 11 and macOS clearly do not give a shit about breaking muscle memory or having UI inconsistency.
Criticisms live longer in our minds than they do in reality.
In my experience, this was true also with Google’s version. The first few iterations were great, then went shit. I need only one thing: add diacritics, and fix basic misspellings. Now all of them try to be “smart” even when they should just add a diacritic to an “a”, they suggest me something completely different even when the word which I need is in their dictionary.
Maybe most people need more, but it annoys me greatly that it tries to be more than simple misspell fixer.
We run into human-perceptible relativistic limits in latency. Light takes 56ms to travel half the earth's circumference, and our signals are often worse off. They don't travel in an idealized straight path, get converted to electrons and radio waves, and have to hop through more and more hoops like load balancers and DDOS protections.
In many cases latency is worse than it used to be.
as you point out so vividly, the speed of light is actually not a problem given you can ping across an ocean in sub 100ms (not a laser beam, actual packets through underwater pipes). 56ms is acceptable latency for realtime video
I came up with this idea, too, but was beaten to it by at least 100 years.
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