technology

I'm a CS student, I have some time before I graduate and have kind of dipped my toes in various things without specializing in anything. I would like to know what would be useful for the movement, so that I can use my skills to contribute.

And before people say "everything is useful"...well yeah but it's nice and fulfilling to have specific ideas I can work on learning/building myself.

Also where can I find leftist open source projects? I know lemmy and this website for one are open source but not sure of others.

:surprised-pika:

Since the invention of Bitcoin in 2009 the global cryptocurrency market has grown from nothing to a value of around US$2 trillion. From a price of US$1 in 2011, Bitcoin rose to an all-time high of more than US$63,000 in April 2021, and now hovers around the US$42,000 mark.

Large fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices are common, which makes them a highly speculative investment. What kind of people are willing to take the risk, and what motivates them?

We conducted a survey to find out. In particular, we wanted to know about the relationship between the so-called “dark tetrad” personality traits and attitudes towards cryptocurrency. The dark tetrad

In psychology, the “dark tetrad” refers to a group of four personality traits. These are Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (together known as the “dark triad”), plus sadism.

They are called “dark” because of their “evil” qualities: extreme selfishness and taking advantage of others without empathy. The dark tetrad are also often related to risk-taking behaviours. The appeal of cryptocurrency

We identified two main areas of appeal. First, the high risks and high potential returns of crypto trading make it attractive to the kind of people who like gambling.

Second, cryptocurrencies are not issued or backed by governments like traditional or “fiat” currencies. This makes them attractive to people who distrust government. What are the personalities of crypto buyers?

We asked 566 people to complete online personality surveys as well as answer questions about their attitudes to crypto and whether or not they planned to invest in it. Of our participants, 26% reported they own crypto and 64% showed interest in crypto investing.

We measured their dark tetrad traits using standard psychological tests. We also measured traits that might connect the dark tetrad to judgements about crypto: fear of missing out(FOMO; the feeling that others are experiencing better things than you are), positivity (the tendency to be positive or optimistic in life), and belief in conspiracy theories. Why do people want to buy crypto? It’s not just about making money

A common reason to invest in crypto is the hope of earning high returns. Beyond the desire to build wealth, our research shows dark personality traits also drive crypto buying.

Machiavellianism is named after the Italian political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli. People who rate highly on this trait are good at deception and interpersonal manipulation.

Machiavellians take a calculated approach to achieving goals, and avoid impulsive decisions. They are less likely to engage in problem gambling.

Machiavellians also tend to believe strongly in government conspiracies. For example, they often believe politicians usually do not reveal their true motives, and that government agencies closely monitor all citizens.

We found Machiavellians like crypto primarily because they distrust politicians and government agencies. Many crypto supporters believe governments are corrupt, and crypto avoids government corruption. Overconfidence and positivity

Narcissism is a self-centred personality trait, characterised by feelings of privilege and predominance over others. Narcissists are overconfident and are more willing to do things like make risky investments in the stock market and gamble.

Narcissists tend to focus on the positive side of life. We found narcissists like crypto because of their great faith in the future, and because of their confidence their own lives will improve.

Impulsive psychopaths like crypto

Psychopathy is a callous, impulsive antisocial personality trait. Psychopathic people often find it difficult to perceive, understand, or address emotions due to a lack of emotional intelligence and empathy. Smarter faster: the Big Think newsletter Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday Fields marked with an * are required

The reckless nature of psychopaths makes them more resistant to stress and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths like stimulation-seeking and risk-taking. They are prone to gambling and gambling addiction.

We found that impulsive psychopaths like crypto, because they fear missing out on investing rewards that others are experiencing. How is sadism involved?

Everyday sadism relates to a personality enjoying another’s suffering. Sadists often display aggression and cruel behaviours. For example, sadists troll others on the Internet for enjoyment.

At first glance, buying crypto is unlikely to harm others. However, we found sadists like crypto because they do not want to miss out on investment rewards either. To them, perhaps both the pleasure from seeing another’s pain and the fear of missing out are related to selfishness.

Unlike narcissists, we found both psychopaths and sadists lack positivity about their prospects, which cancels out their liking of crypto.

A psychological lens

Studying cryptocurrency through the psychological lens of the dark tetrad offers insight into why people want to buy crypto. We are not suggesting that everyone interested in crypto displays dark tetrad traits.

We studied only a subset of people interested in crypto who do have these traits. If you happen to be a Bitcoin or other crypto holder, you may or may not exhibit them.

If you want to know how you score for dark tetrad traits, you can do the Dark Triad Personality Test and Sadism Test online.

My immediate thought was Harry Harlow's wire mother/rag mother experiments with Rhesus Monkeys (CW: live animal experimentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies) which were an early exerpiment showing that it's really, really bad for primates to be socially isolated. A bunch of polar expeditions were demonstrating the same thing about a decade prior.

Recently we've had a whole bunch of movies about men failing the Turing Test regarding their digital waifus - Blade Runner, Her, Ex Machina, Archer. There are like five different TvTropes pages directly related to this question. And you can go back all the way to Hellenic Greece, with the story of Pygmalia and Galatea, to get the OG "Incel falls in love with body pillow" narrative.

The White House is facing mounting pressure from Congress to ban the widely popular TikTok app nationwide after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Congressman Ken Buck (R-CO) introduced a piece of legislation on Wednesday to curb its use. A similar bill to ban TikTok in the U.S. was filed during the last Congressional session, but it was not considered in either chamber.

So, why is this the case? The ultimate goal of online dating apps should be to function as a conduit in creating committed relationships, right? Wrong. The realm of online dating has become a multi-billion dollar industry — an industry that profits primarily off of user addiction, especially by keeping its users single. The way that the industry accomplishes this is twofold, relying on qualities of gamification and what psychologist Barry Schwartz refers to as the “paradox of choice.”

The presence of the choice paradox in online dating is perhaps best understood through the analogy of online shopping. Studies have shown that as shoppers are exposed to more options for potential purchases, they are paradoxically less likely to be satisfied with their ultimate decision. As our brains become inundated with a variety of choices, we often experience choice paralysis: An anxiety-induced state that prevents us from making a resounding decision.

On Tinder, the user’s experience of choice overload has become a frequent occurrence. In the emergence of what some are calling “serial swipers,” many users can be seen displaying strong hesitations to commit to a singular option due to fears of missing out on a potentially better one.

The infiltration of the choice paradox into the realm of relationships is especially dangerous. Unlike the case of online shopping, users aren’t choosing between products, they’re choosing between people. The resulting world of online dating has become a breeding ground for objectification, sexual harassment and insecurity, as choices are increasingly influenced by abundance and appearances rather than genuine compatibility.

The instant gratification offered by each ‘match’ causes the idea of exclusivity to appear unsettling, with many individuals remaining addicted to these apps even in committed relationships. Specifically, 30% of Tinder users are married, and another 12% are in relationships. Because of this, the online dating world has become a hotbed for cheating and noncommittal sex. Users find themselves immersed in an endless, twisted game, where matches and hookups function as points to keep score.

The Transportation Security Administration’s No-Fly List is one of the most important ledgers in the United States, containing as it does the names of people who are perceived to be of such a threat to national security that they’re not allowed on airplanes. You’d have been forgiven then for thinking that list was a tightly-guarded state secret, but lol, nope.

A Swiss hacker known as “maia arson crimew” has got hold of a copy of the list—albeit a version from a few years ago—not by getting past fortress-like layers of cybersecurity, but by...finding a regional airline that had its data lying around in unprotected servers. They announced the discovery with the photo and screenshot above, in which the Pokémon Sprigatito is looking awfully pleased with themselves.

...

On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.

"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"

"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"

"How very intuitive are these menus!"

"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"

Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.

Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.

Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?

Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.

Fucking brain worms, all of them.

Search engines are basically 90% blogspam promotion machines at this point, and the blogspam churning engine is going to become completely autonomous. The tools we're relied on for nearly three decades now are going to become a big virtual tug of war between machine-learning-guided SEO systems and machine-learning-guided ad revenue systems.

Every single anonymous interaction is going to be suspect. The next dogwhistling fucking cryptonazi groyper you run into is probably not even going to be a human being. Machine learning is probably going to elect the next US president. Eventually the medium will become so polluted that we will have to go back to doing everything in person.

Thank you for reading my doompost

https://von.gov.ng/zimbabwe-bans-all-lithium-exports/

the spectre of 1970 haunts us all

Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:

I expect more "artists are just spoiled aristocrats" radioactive takes, but I'm posting this anyway. :this-is-fine:

I work in tech. I like the work itself and my coworkers are all nice and polite people. But their views on politics, economics and the world in general is complete dogshit.

Elon Musk? The world's biggest brain genius. Demanding fees for healthcare? Very reasonable and necessary. Inheritance tax? An unspeakable injustice. Jordan Peterson? An insightful intellectual. Learning a second foreign language in school? Waste of time when you could have programming classes instead. Learning ancient history in high school? Stupid and useless when you already know you want to work in tech. STEM? The pinnacle of prestigious human knowledge. Humanities? A ridiculous and useless waste of time. Trades? Probably okay if you're too stupid to do something better. Unions? Outdated and useless. Arts? Does not compute.

All they seem to care about is learning how to code, getting a job or starting a business and succeeding at that by being a lone Randian superman. They have no sense of broader solidarity or for the existence of something of value beyond the hamster wheel of the grindset.

I think these people are a product of an educational system that is set up to produce good employees rather than good citizens. University level education will include a few token classes on broader subjects like history or philosophy but staff and students treats them like something to get over with so you can do the important stuff rather than something of importance. And you can hardly blame them, the dog eat dog world of capitalism doesn't reward an engineer for writing sonnets or knowing labour history and consequently students focus their attention on learning stuff that will make them less likely to end up on the bottom of the hierarchy.

In essence generations has been raised to be very skilled in a few practical technical fields while being completely illiterate about everything else.

How do you deal with these people in daily life? With their idiotic reactionary beliefs and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any form of culture beyond the handful of IP rights white western cishet males are expected to enjoy?

And how do we prevent STEM lord bullshit under socialism?

Pretty much every article I can remember about Huawei mentions that "experts" and "officials" are "concerned" about China backdooring Huawei's products, but has there been any cases of that? Or is it all just speculation? TikTok is the most popular app in the world and China barely has any control of it outside of its borders.

I hope he's right. I'm so tired of this shit.

TLDR: Microsoft worked with Intel and AMD to develop Pluton which is basically a TPM chip designed to prevent running non-microsoft approved software. It will likely make it impossible to boot un-approved linux distros, bsd, and likely will make it very hard to run any un-approved software in the future.

This CPU "feature" is very likely to be a requirement for Windows 12 in 2024. Meaning nearly every computer available will have this and the majority of manufactures will not allow you to unlock the bootloader.

Similar situation to running LineageOS or PostmarketOS phones. For now, it can be "disabled" in bios on most of these computers, but that's simply a choice the OEM is making and will no longer need to make once this has become prevalent without any real pushback.

Maybe it’s because I literally do not give a shit about the company or it’s products or customers. I just want money. In fact, I want the opposite kind of imposter syndrome, where I trick the people hiring me into thinking I’m much more qualified than I actually am get paid a shit ton more money. Yes I know C++, Pascal, Assembly, COBOL. Please pay me $500k.

CHINA has ordered central government agencies and state-backed corporations to replace foreign-branded personal computers with domestic alternatives within 2 years, marking one of Beijing’s most aggressive efforts so far to eradicate key overseas technology from within its most sensitive organs.

Staff were asked after the week-long May break to turn in foreign PCs for home-made alternatives that run on operating software developed domestically, people familiar with the plan said. The exercise, which was mandated by central government authorities, is likely to eventually replace at least 50 million PCs on a central-government level alone they said, asking to remain anonymous discussing a sensitive matter.

The latest central government directive is likely to cover only PC brands and software, and exclude hard-to-replace components such as processors from Intel and AMD, the people said. China will mostly encourage Linux-based operating systems to replace Microsoft’s Windows Shanghai-based Standard Software is one of the top providers of such tools, one person said.

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/china-orders-government-state-firms-to-dump-foreign-pcs-sources

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-06/china-orders-government-state-firms-to-dump-foreign-pcs

wanna do some dunking? check the r/linux thread

Although Toph, an American, had friends and a relationship in Japan, he found living there for the past eight years to be oftentimes quite lonely.

When he discovered Twitch in 2016, it seemed like the perfect way to meet others with mutual interests while he spent time gaming. So Toph, who was working as a teacher abroad, started to build a community on the platform.

He prided himself on the “soft, comfy vibe” of his streams, during which he played games like Animal Crossing and Kirby and the Forgotten Land in front of a virtual audience. Twitch served as a respite for him when things in the real world were getting tough. So last week, shortly after returning to live in his home state of New York, he was looking forward to streaming. He’d broken up with his partner and uprooted his entire life, and it would be nice to forget about that for a while.

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way. “In that moment, someone came in and trauma dumped about a breakup from an abusive partner who’d cheated on them. And of course, my community is very sweet, so they started responding, and it just kept going and going,” says Toph, who has 33,800 followers on Twitch. (Toph does not disclose his full name or age to his audience.)

The emotional purge, which took place in the text chat of his stream, went on for 11 minutes and put Toph into a sour mood — the very state of mind he’d been hoping to escape. He’d been in a similar relationship to the one described, and although he says the conversation didn’t “trigger” him, he felt defeated and canceled his stream for the day.

“So much is going on in my life,” he says. “Twitch and streaming are some of the only things that take my mind off it. And now it's getting taken away from me. Why can’t these be my safe space, too?”

Toph is one of many Twitch streamers worried about the issue of trauma dumping, the act of offloading emotional problems without invitation. According to content creators on the platform, viewers are increasingly bombarding stream chats and their accompanying Discords with their IRL problems, which streamers are often not equipped to deal with.

The issue has become so prevalent that some streamers have started speaking out on Twitter. One influencer even put out a guide to dissuade people from trauma dumping on her streams.

Trauma dumping is a problem that affects streamers at all levels. Rob Logan is a variety streamer and podcaster from Massachusetts who has been broadcasting on Twitch for the last seven years under the name @theRobLogan. He has under 800 followers, but still deals with the issue.

“I had one viewer who just vented every time they were in chat,” Logan says. “They never really contributed to the conversation that was going on. They just derailed whatever was happening to talk about their problems.”

Logan recently went viral on Twitter after he tweeted a message to viewers — “PLEASE stop dropping your insanely depressing news into chat” it began — motivated by Toph’s trauma-dumping experience. “Even this morning, I was watching someone raise money for Ukraine in a charity stream, and somebody came in and said, ‘I’m pregnant. I just found out, now I’m sad,’” Logan says. “Everyone else had to stop the conversation and deal with it.”

Toph echoes Logan’s sentiments, saying that the issue often impacts the entire community. “There was a member of the community who kept talking about their dead pet. I asked them kindly to stop and take the conversation private instead, and after one of the streams, they posted a graphic picture of their sickly pet in the Discord,” he recounts. While Toph sympathized with his viewer, having previously lost a pet himself, he didn’t want other followers to feel triggered or upset, and he deleted the picture.

“I was trying to be there for them while making sure everyone else was comfortable and safe, but they immediately got angry at me,” Toph says. “They told me that I was in the wrong for deleting it and that I was heartless. They left the community after that.” Power dynamics

Twitch insiders believe the growing problem of trauma dumping stems from the combination of viewers’ access to and power over streamers.

“It’s a problem for bigger Twitch streamers because people will pay to have their messages read out, and they’ll share the minutiae of their problems,” says Terrence Wiggins, a 34-year-old part-time streamer, podcaster, and coin photographer from Virginia who streams as @TheBlackNerd on Twitch, where he has just over 800 followers.

“It’s the whole parasocial relationship thing, where people view the streamer as their friend, when really they’re not. [The streamer is] being paid to listen to whatever you have to say. It’s extremely unhealthy.”

Mental health Twitch streamers are struggling with 'trauma dumping'

Viewers are derailing chats with their personal problems, and streamers feel ill-equipped to deal with their issues.

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