Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

We thought we knew how Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/02/19/death-lonely-death/

The degree to which everyday life assumes all adults have a backup adult at the ready anytime is ridiculous.

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Dear @mozilla
Please, please, please put the RSS indicator back in Firefox.

People need to know about this technology which empowers users over greedy, controlling corporations.

"[...]RAID array[...]"

"um, 'RAID array' is redundant"

"yeah, that's what the R is for"

Google is too big to fail, and yet they seem to be failing at basic things they used to do well (like search) while removing useful features (like cache) and adding a bunch of crap nobody needs or wants.

Want to know if a given domain name shows up anywhere in search? Well screw you, we're not going to tell you that anymore, but here's 1,400 completely useless and irrelevant results that could possibly have some info (but don't). When the search engine could have done what it's done for years, and admit that it doesn't know WTF you're talking about and say "no results found." Now it just makes shit up if it doesn't know the answer.

Hey cool! My search result shows the term I was looking for is present on 7 website. Shoot! None of them are online anymore. How about showing us your cached version of the site, you know the one that was used to create this search result? Oh wait, no, you can't see that anymore. Why? Here's Danny Sullivan's dismissive and mystifying explanation: "“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

Want software? Great, Google will serve a malicious ad on top that looks a lot like an organic search result but which is paid for by scammers and installs malware.

I was having to read some "neuroscience and education" stuff for a training I'm in at work and there was this part:

"The human brain reward system in the 21st century is an evolutionary mismatch. There is a discrepancy between the conditions that the reward system evolved to serve and those that it often faces in the 21st century. The reward system evolved over millions of years to motivate humans to work hard (invest time and energy) in maintaining their survival needs (e.g., nutrition, protection, reproduction, and the learning of new skills). However, this system is not designed for the abundance and immediacy of stimulation in the digital and instant reward era, which promotes the persistent release of dopamine that leads to an increased craving for reward (seeking behavior; wanting) and a decreased sense of pleasure and satisfaction (liking) "

and I see this kind of assertion a lot: we live in an era of instant gratification, carefully designed addictive apps that hijack your dopamine release system, &c.

but is it true?

No, really, is any of it true. Like do people get stuck infinitely scrolling because silicon valley has figured out how to hijack your brain or is that just still tech sector auto-fellatio because "we can override your volition but that's bad" is still asserting their own power and importance.

Because honestly it feels more like everyone is exhausted, bored, isolated, and largely broke so you're going to gravitate to the free thing that requires almost nil activation energy, which would be the opposite of "I need constant dopamine" and more like "I am a tiger in a tiny enclosure and I am so fucking bored and trapped that I'd do anything to be distracted from it"

Its interesting that it took psychotherapy a long time to come around to the understanding that a sizable chunk of what troubles us in our minds is the direct consequence of trauma.

I'm thinking of everything from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freudian_Coverup
to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

Nowadays, it's considered a pretty reasonable belief that a significant amount of the suffering of otherwise healthy adults is the consequence of earlier trauma.

Shout out to Epistemic Injustice.

Female propensity for autoimmune diseases tied to X chromosome inactivation

A system that shuts down one of two X chromosomes is targeted by auto-antibodies.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/female-propensity-for-autoimmune-diseases-tied-to-x-chromosome-inactivation/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social