Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I haven't been on University Avenue in like 15 years but it wasn't that bad then?
though reading about the restos in Palo Alto that have closed since I live there, dang, it's no utopia anymore

NOLA is STILL open amazingly...

I was thinking of Szechwan Café on California, where you’d tell the guy a few flavors or textures you like, and he’d “harmonize” them and select dishes for you. And Mandarin Gourmet. I know the Thai Café on campus has closed, and the Treehouse too I think. I guess the Palo Alto Creamery is still around.

what could possibly go wrong

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/A-Cryptocurrency-Millionaire-Wants-to-Build-a-13355675.php

“This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind,” Berns said. “I don’t know which one. I believe it’s the former but either way it’s going to be one hell of a ride.”

the Blockwan has found a home

buying land in the nevada desert, where summertime temperatures will soon regularly hit 120 degrees, is definitely the kind of smart long-term thinking that bodes well for the success of this project

Boring Burning Man!

You laugh now but wait til this guy makes everyone laugh

worried about climate change? have no fear, y combinator are gonna fix it by uh flooding the deserts or some shit

Imagine flooding a desert half the size of the Sahara. Using 238 trillion gallons of desalinated ocean water to do the job. Creating millions of 1-acre-square micro-reservoirs to grow enough algae to gobble up all of Earth’s climate-changing carbon dioxide. For an encore: How about spreading the water and fertilizer (the dead algae) to grow a vast new forest of oxygen-producing trees?

A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Y Combinator, unveiled the radical desert flooding plan as one of four “moonshot” scenarios that it hopes innovators will explore as potential remedies to catastrophic global warming.

But would it work? And should it even be tried?

With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas levels. But while they generally believe the climate crisis has become severe enough to push even extreme options onto the table, the experts cautioned against interventions that might create as many problems as they solve.

“We do not want to have this be purely profit driven,” said Greg Rau, a University of California, Santa Cruz climate scientist and part of the team that helped Y Combinator craft the request for proposals. “We are trying to benefit the planet, not just make money. So we need this kind of research and development first, but then oversight and governance over how any of this is deployed.”

hey it's probably not gonna work but let's at least make some cash

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna934551

why are the "smartest" people in the room always so fucking stupid

this is my favourite part:

Y Combinator called filling 1.7 million acres of arid land with 2-meter-deep pools of water “the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken.” Just to pump ocean water inland and desalinate it would require an electrical grid far greater than the one Earth now devotes to all other uses.

tackling climate change by building a mammoth power grid which will draw power from uhh something something fill this part in later

you can desalinate water using sunshine, no need for elec-trickery

not so much the pumping, though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw

how long do we have?

With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance

Ohhhhh boy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

An internal survey found just 52% of employees were optimistic about Facebook’s future, down from 84% the year earlier. https://t.co/enkm61cndi

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) November 14, 2018

remember when people thought Facebook was going to be around forever and was an indispensable part of modern living

they'll be a shell of a company in 10 years, a zombie like Yahoo

Unlike yahoo some of their acquisitions might be worth something for longer, The Facebook itself is probably already in decline

this is kind of it really:

which is easier to quit?

— one-time pad (@adrjeffries) November 14, 2018

I quit Facebook something like 9 or 10 years ago with one relapse after I graduated college and was lonely; it was easy

Amazon…I have one more video game preorder from them coming but I'm mostly done ordering stuff from there otherwise. Obviously AWS is the dominant cloud computing provider and we're all constantly using Amazon in that respect.

Of course this only means I'm going to end up ordering home goods from like Bed Bath and Beyond or Target which probably isn't "better" on any axis

I don't really get anything I need from Amazon. I pretty much only use it to purchase random books I'd like to own

we do use it for birthday/gift lists for the families, so that's a helpful thing that I couldn't easily replace

i wonder about like

facebook collapses, twitter becomes a ghost town

they were both so rapidly interwoven with us culture that their absence, at least from where i'm sitting right now, would feel like a gap

but i guess all i really mean is like 'they show tweets on the news' or 'facebook elected donald trump' and i suppose any next big thing could slot in there for 2028

A large part of my sustenance is tied to spinning up instances to AWS. I also buy a few things every couple weeks from Whole Foods.

I use the "memories" side bar feature of FB to delete content from my account every day, which is probably the most useful and enjoyable feature of FB I've ever used.

TV elected Kennedy iirc

xp

twitter is still great for real-time search, sadly

we can replace Twitter's role there with a website that's just "type here if something terrible is happening around you"

let us never forget the short rise and fall of bloopblorp

Neither Twitter nor Facebook is going anywhere imho, they have total network effect - Facebook was the first place where everyone you knew was on it, and it will serve as a way of keeping in touch with people and arranging gigs / parties for decades to come.

And Twitter is what they show on the news, and what elected the US president.

I mean, both of these are a corollary of "the vast majority of people don't give a shit about the stuff that extremely online people give a shit about"

remember when people thought Facebook was going to be around forever and was an indispensable part of modern living

they'll be a shell of a company in 10 years, a zombie like Yahoo

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 5:22 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people's memories are on there

Neither Twitter nor Facebook is going anywhere

AOL still exists. Out there. Somewhere.

It is called Verizon

This thread is good

I spoke to @ColorOfChange’s director about Facebook’s reported use of an anti-Semetic smear campaign to undermine their activism. https://t.co/omMP9hhx9f

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) November 15, 2018

There’s something about this Soros story that feels significantly different than the usual Facebook scandal. Most recent negative Facebook stories are issues relating to challenges of scale and a tendency toward passivity.

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) November 15, 2018

most of what i hear about social media is through my co-workers

my spouse finally deactivated their facebook yesterday after spending months not interacting with anybody there and just reading. i guess that's some indication of how hard it is to let go. my boss was talking to me about an unpleasant argument with one of their relatives from the midwest on facebook. i think we have all this ideal of communication and exchange of ideas but there's this creeping realization that nobody is actually listening to each other. losing the pretexts people use to justify using facebook is an important step imo. the addiction is real but the good thing is the more people who quit the easier it becomes to quit, and i don't see facebook managing to reverse the process.

a lot of the youth seem to be gravitating toward instagram, which they think of as a superior alternative to facebook. the ignorance is depressing but i have yet to see the elder generation jumping on board.

twitter is good at getting talked about but in terms of actual usage i don't think it's gotten near the market share of facebook. it seems like everybody is on facebook, whereas twitter just has the loudest people. i do have some friends who insist there are viable uses for it, and of course folks here are tremendously fond of it, but i think it could sink more easily than facebook.

i continue to get most of my information from the feed on my android phone. mostly this is because i have spent several months telling it not to give me any information that isn't today's "nancy" and there's a sunk cost there. eventually something new will come along and it will probably turn out to be as bad as or worse than what we have now, i have no doubt. probably amazon will have something to do with it.

feel like twitter is only for the extremely online and facebook will be increasingly for the olds, like my aunt who still has an aol email address

fb will still have vast reach, but capitalism tends to frown on enterprises that can no longer grow

this is always worth a look: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

hard to see FB dying anytime soon when you also include Messenger, WhatsApp, and IG

if that's accurate it's amazing to think of the inflated media importance Twitter carries over say Tik Tok

i don't even know what tik tok is

yeah it's for the youth
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/18009260/tiktok-musically-youtube-challenge-vine

not surprisingly FB wants to devour them: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/facebook-musically-competitor/

what % of Tik Tok users are in China, would be my question

good point. I should have just pointed out that Twitter has almost the same number of users as Reddit

this is the real danger for facebook imo

this sort of seems like a ... correct diagnosis, no? like a gresham's law of social networks, the less normal people trust facebook the crazier it will get? https://t.co/QCnPIuGrEb

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 15, 2018

i haven't read the referenced article because i have twitter blocked on my computer, but i'm not sure gresham's law would apply here - facebook is far more centralized than a site like for instance twitter is, and for extremism to increase there facebook would have to be okay with making extremism their overt business model. i think its particular doom is more likely to look like aol, but hell i can't predict the future

I don’t think there is any evidence at all that Facebook is not ok with making extremism their business model